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About

Faculty

Our faculty members are drawn from the Five College Consortium, a collaborative nonprofit educational body made up of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, Amherst College, and Hampshire College. The Consortium was established in 1965 in order to share educational and cultural resources and to create and support a strong collaborative network across schools, departments, and programs. Below is a list of our participating faculty and their research interests.
 

University of Massachusetts Amherst

 

Bookbinding and Printing

James Kelly, Research Librarian
History of the book in early modern England

 

Codicology

Kathleen ScottUniversity of Massachusetts Modern Language Association Prize Winner for Distinguished Bibliography
Later Gothic manuscripts, codicology, illuminated manuscripts in the British Isles

 

Classics

Melissa Mueller, Associate Professor & Undergraduate Program Director
Greek epic, lyric, and tragedy, with special attention to how Greek literary texts, envisioning certain performance parameters for themselves, engage with their material environments

 

English

Jenny Adams, Associate Professor of English
Chaucer and late medieval period, with a current research focus on academic debt and university life in late medieval England

Joseph Black, Professor of English
Early modern literature with a broad focus on book history

Jane Hwang Degenhardt, Associate Professor of English & Associate Director of Graduate Studies
Shakespeare, non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama, gender and race studies, Asian American literature, and African American literature

Stephen Harris, Professor of English
Old English, medieval Latin poetry, early medieval Christianity, and historical linguistics

​​​​​​Marjorie Rubright, Director of the Renaissance Center & Associate Professor of English
English literature and culture, early modern race and ethnicity studies, feminist criticism, Renaissance lexical culture, and critical approaches to the study of the global Renaissance

Adam Zucker, Associate Professor of English
Sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature, with a special focus on the plays of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and their contemporaries

 

History

Anne F. BroadbridgeAssociate Professor of History
The Mamluk Sultanate, the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire and Temür (Tamerlane), ideology, legitimacy, diplomacy, and women in history

Barry LevyProfessor of History
Early American history and social history

Brian W. OgilvieProfessor of History & Chair
Renaissance and early modern Europe, history of science, history of scholarship, witchcraft belief and persecution, and the history of religion

Heidi Scott, Associate Professor of History
Historical geography and anthropology in the Andes during the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries 

 

History of Art & Architecture

Sonja DrimmerAssistant Professor of Medieval Art History
The material production and illumination of English literature between 1350 and 1500 and the visual and material culture of politics at the end of the Middle Ages

Ximena Gómez, Assistant Professor of American Art
The art and visual culture of colonial Latin America and the early modern transatlantic world.

Monika Schmitter, Associate Professor of Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art
Italian art of the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth-century with an emphasis on the material culture and built environment of Venice

 

Italian Studies 

Arturo Figliola, Senior Lecturer
Socio-spatial aspects of Italian literature and the role of Italy (especially Venezia and Sicilia) as a “cultural mediator” between ‘East’ and ‘West’

 

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures 

Philippe Baillargeon, Senior Lecturer & Director for the Program in French & Francophone Studies
Literature and culture of the Renaissance and the early seventeenth century, in particular, Erasmus, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Pierre de L’Estoile, Béroalde de Verville, la Pléiade, l’école de Lyon, rhetoric, poetics, the history of ideas and Bakhtinian dialogism

Jessica BarrAssociate Professor & Undergraduate Program Director
Medieval mystical, devotional, and visionary literature, hagiography/saints’ lives, and medieval women’s writing.

Frank HugusProfessor of German & Scandinavian Studies
Old Icelandic language and literature, Scandinavian mythology

Albert Lloret, Associate Professor of Spanish and Catalan & Graduate Program Director
Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, textual scholarship, cultural history, translation studies, and the digital humanities

Stephen D. Miller, Associate Professor of Japanese & Undergraduate Advisor
Classical and medieval Japanese literature, Japanese Buddhism, translation studies, Japanese queer literature and culture

Michael PapioProfessor of Italian & Director of Graduate Program
Thirteenth to fifteenth century Italy, including Boccaccio, Dante, philology, and geocriticism

Robert G. SullivanAssociate Professor of German
Medieval Literature, early German culture, economics and culture of Germany, Crusades and Islam

 

Theater

Milan DragicevichUndergraduate Program Director & Associate Professor of Acting
Actor and playwright, a member of the Northern New England Repertory Theatre Company in New London, NH, performing leading roles in Anna Christie, Much Ado About Nothing, Hedda Gabler, and Arms and the Man

Harley Erdman, Professor of Theater & Dramaturgy
A dramaturg, playwright, and scholar whose work focuses on adaptation and translation, early modern women playwrights, Spanish Golden Age drama, rebels and outsiders in local history

 

Music

Evan MacCarthy, Visiting Assistant Professor, Music History 
Late medieval and early modern music and music theory, Renaissance and early modern humanism and history of ideas, reception of classical antiquity, liturgy, chant, and processions, music manuscripts, music and diplomacy, soundscapes, performances of Greek drama in 19th-century America

Emiliano RicciardiAssistant Professor, Music History
Early music, late Italian madrigal, with an emphasis on the settings of Torquato Tasso’s poetry. A secondary interest is music in fascist Italy and the reception and practice of the twelve-tone technique and the reception of Bach’s music

 

Smith College

 

Art

Brigitte BuettnerLouise Ines Doyle 1934 Professor of Art
Illuminated manuscripts, late medieval court culture, mineralogy and the history of science.

 

English Language & Literature

Jessica BeckmanVisiting Assistant Professor in English Language and Literature
Literary history, early modern drama and poetry, including Milton, and the history of the book from William Shakespeare to Gertrude Stein

Craig Davis, Professor of English Language & Literature and of Comparative Literature
Old and Middle English language and literature, Beowulf, the Arthurian legend and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Old Norse, Medieval Welsh, Old Irish, Gothic, Old High German, Old Saxon language and literature, epics from around the world in translation, Milton and Tolkien

Douglas Lane PateySophia Smith Professor of English
Eighth-century literature, history of the English language, history of the book

 

French

Eglal Doss-QuinbyProfessor of French Studies
Old French lyric poetry. Working alone or in collaboration with philologists and musicologists, she has published seven books 

 

History

Joshua C. BirkAssociate Professor of History
Political history and cultural history across religious boundaries in the medieval Mediterranean world

 

Political Science

John Patrick CobyEsther Booth Wiley 1934 Professor of Government
Reformation Parliament, America's Founding & the Constitutional Convention, Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, Machiavelli,  Livy, Socrates, Plato

 

Rare Books

Shannon SuppleCurator of Rare Books
Archival imaginaries, book history, the history of science, and their intersections

 

Religion

Suleiman Ali Mourad, Professor of Religion
The symbolism of Jerusalem in Islam, Qur'an and Qur'anic exegesis, the Islamic Near East during the Crusader period, Jihad ideology, the employment of history in Modern thought and national identity

 

Mount Holyoke College

 

Art History

Michael T. Davis, Chair of Architectural Studies, Professor of Art History
French Gothic architecture of the thirteenth and fourteenth-centuries, the history of modern architecture, the arts of Islam

 

English 

Amy Rodgers, Associate Professor of English
Early Modern literature and culture, film studies, performance studies, dance studies, and literary theory

Sally Sutherland, Chair of Theatre Arts; Senior Lecturer in English
Shakespeare and other early modern playwrights; Shakespeare in performance (stage and film); the court masque; sixteenth and seventeenth-century poetry and prose

Katherine Walker, Visiting Lecturer in English
Early modern drama, science and magic

Wesley Chihyung Yu, Associate Professor of English
Literature of the Middle Ages with emphases in medieval rhetoric, logic, and early poetics

 

Spanish

Nieves Romero-DíazChair of Spanish, Latina/o and Latin American Studies; Chair of Romance Languages and Cultures; Professor of Spanish
Spanish Renaissance and Baroque prose literature, the relation between literature, history and politics, women writers, and cultural practices by and about women

 

Theater Arts

Noah Tuleja, Assistant Professor, Director of the Rooke Theater 
Acting, directing, fight choreography, and physical theater.  Director of The Players Project.

Robert EisensteinEarly Music Coordinator, Director of Early Music Program, Mt. Holyoke College
Specialization: Conductor, Collegium, Euridice Ensembles. Medieval Ensemble, seventeenth-century Song Seminar, Music History, viola da gamba, baroque violin, medieval fiddle.

 

Hampshire College

 

History

Jutta SperlingProfessor of History
Her teaching interests focus on the social and cultural history of early modern Europe, with a special emphasis on Renaissance Visual Culture, Body History, Catholicism, and Comparative Legal Studies of the Mediterranean

James Wald, Associate Professor of History
Modern European history with an emphasis on cultural history from the Eighteenth through the twentieth-centuries, the French Revolution, Central Europe, fascism and Nazism, and early modern Europe. Particular research interests involve the history of intellectuals and literary life

 

Amherst College

 

Architectural Studies & Art History

Nicola M. CourtrightWilliam McCall Vickery 1957 Professor of the History of Art; Chair of Architectural Studies
Sixteenth and seventeenth-century European art history, including the art and architecture of the Vatican, Bernini sculpture, Rembrandt drawings, and most recently the art and architecture of French royal residences

Yael R. RiceAssistant Professor of Art & the History of Art and of Asian Languages and Civilizations
Art and architecture of South Asia and Greater Iran, with a particular focus on manuscripts and other portable arts of the fifteenth to eighteenth-centuries

 

English

Anston L. BosmanAssociate Professor of English & Chair of English
Early modern literature, transnational Shakespeares, magic and belief in Renaissance literature

 

French

Sanam Nader-EsfahaniAssistant Professor of French
The literature of sixteenth-century France and Italy, and the relationship between literature, science, and technology.

 

Theater and Dance

Ron BashfordAssociate Professor of Theater and Dance; Chair of Theater and Dance
Theater Directing and Shakespeare in Production