New faculty join the Emerson roster

An NPR music critic, a two-time documentary film Oscar winner, a scientist studying the effects of climate change on Chinook salmon, a former Canadian bureau chief for The Washington Post, and a 2005 finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award are just a few of the credentials and accomplishments that new full–time faculty bring to Emerson College this year.

"Every year since I've been here I have seen terrific, quality faculty apply to Emerson and we are fortunate to have them here," says Vice President of Academic Affairs Linda Moore.

This year, 20 new faculty join Emerson. They are as follows:
The Visual and Media Arts Department gains three new members, Assistant Professor Harlan Bosmajian, Assistant Professor Hassan Ildari, and Jane and Terry Semel Chair in Screenwriting Sarah Kernochan.

Harlan Bosmajian has been director of photography on 30 feature films and several TV series. He was nominated for Best Cinematography at the Independent Spirit Awards and won Best Cinematography at the Santa Barbara Film Festival for his work on the film La Ciudad. He shot one of the first high-definition TV series, Strangers with Candy. Bosmajian recently shot the romantic comedy The Other End of the Line in Mumbai, India, and did additional photography on the second season of the TV series Mad Men.

With eight feature screenplays to his credit, writer/director Hassan Ildari has directed films such as Face of the Enemy, winner of the Critics Award at the Florence Film Festival; and Sharkskin, currently in post-production. His screenplay Confessor is in development with Belladonna Productions (Funny Games, Transamerica), and his newest screenplay, The Seamstress, has Academy Award-winner Mercedes Ruehl attached to play the lead. He has also written, produced, and directed reality and nonfiction television for multiple TV channels.

Sarah Kernochan won her first Academy Award in 1972 for her feature film Marjoe, and her second 30 years later for her short, Thoth. She is credited on such films as 9 and ½ Weeks, Sommersby, Impromptu (directed by husband James Lapine), What Lies Beneath, and All I Wanna Do, which she also directed. In addition to film work, she has made detours into songwriting, recording two albums for RCA; theater, composing a musical, Sleeparound Town, which was produced at Playwrights Horizons in New York; and fiction, publishing her novel Dry Hustle in 1977. Recently she completed her second novel, Jane Again.

Joining the Writing, Literature and Publishing faculty this year are authors Pablo Medina and Stephen Yarbrough, and Electronic Publisher John Rodzvilla.

Pablo Medina is author of 11 books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translation, among them the poetry collection Points of Balance/Puntos de Apoyo and the 2005 Book Sense Notable novel The Cigar Roller. In 2008, Medina and fellow poet Mark Statman published a new English version of García Lorca's Poet in New York, which John Ashbery called "the definitive version of Lorca's masterpiece." Medina's work has appeared in various languages all over the world. Medina was on the board of AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) from 2002 to 2007, serving as president in 2005–06.

Stephen Yarbrough is the author of eight books, including the forthcoming novel Safe from the Neighbors (Knopf). Winner of the 1999 California Book Award and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 2000, he was a finalist for the 2005 PEN/Faulkner Award and has been named winner of the 2010 Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence. Yarbrough's work has frequently been anthologized. He comes to Emerson from California State University, Fresno, where he was the James and Coke Hallowell Professor of Creative Writing and the director of the MFA program.

John Rodzvilla has worked in editorial, production, subsidiary rights, and operations for the past decade. While at the Perseus Books Group he helped to negotiate e-book licenses with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Sony and developed a print-on-demand program for backlist titles. He has worked with a variety of technology writers and edited the first collection of weblog writings, We've Got Blog, in 2002.

The Communication Studies Department is also gaining two new faculty members, Visiting Assistant Professor Angela Cooke-Jackson and Lecturer William Huddy.

Angela Cooke-Jackson holds a PhD in health communication with an emphasis in behavioral science. A recently co-authored article (Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 2008) and book chapter focus on Appalachian culture, reality television, and hillbilly stereotypes in entertainment media. She has presented at regional, national, and international conferences. Cooke-Jackson is also interested in Type II diabetes and the transmission of health information among mother-daughter dyads. She recently completed a project that included survey research on cervical cancer and HPV knowledge and behavior among rural college-aged females in Eastern Kentucky.

At 17, Lecturer William Huddy was a reporter/photographer at ABC affiliate KEYT in Santa Barbara, California. During the two-decade-long broadcast career that followed, he anchored television news desks all across the United States. He has been director of the Center for Excellence in Oral Communication at UCCS, and guest lecturer at the University of Siena (Italy) and the University of Vienna (Austria), and the 2007 president of the Rocky Mountain Communication Association.

Joining the Communication Sciences and Disorders Department (CSD) are Assistant Professor Belinda Fusté-Herrmann, Assistant Professor Ruth Grossman, Scientist-in-Residence Jon Honea, Faculty-in-Residence Alisa Morgan, Assistant Professor
Amy Vashlishan Murray, and Instructor Julie Volkman.

Belinda Fusté-Herrmann's areas of expertise are child language development and disorders, literacy, and bilingualism. Her research interests include investigating idiom comprehension and lexical depth as they relate to reading comprehension in bilingual adolescents, as well as studying oral and literate language development in bilingual children. Fusté-Herrmann has published in the area of mental states, lexical depth, and bilingualism in Learning Disabilities Research and Practice and has presented research at state and national conferences.

Ruth Grossman holds an MS in speech-language pathology and a PhD in neuro-linguistics. Her research interests are in the field of autism spectrum disorders, specifically the integration and production of verbal and nonverbal communication. She has published articles in Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, and other journals.

Jon Honea is an ecologist interested in the response of communities, populations, and individual species to environmental change. He has recently published papers on the influence of salmon spawning on aquatic insect communities. He is working on a population dynamics model to understand the negative influences on wild salmon of their interbreeding with hatchery salmon as well as to explore potential effects of climate change on the population status of endangered wild salmon.

Alisa Morgan studies neurological processes as they relate to communication. Her post-doctoral fellowship in acquired neurogenic speech and language disorders was divided between clinical and research responsibilities. She has published in the journals Brain and Language, Aphasiology, and Neurology and presented scholarly papers on areas ranging from an auditory Stroop effect to clinical language intervention protocols for aphasia at conferences such as the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, and the Clinical Aphasiology Conference.

Amy Vashlishan Murray is a molecular biologist with research and teaching interests at the intersection of genetics, neurobiology, and public understanding of science. Her current laboratory work utilizes genetic approaches to explore how neurons can adjust their activity in response to changes in the environment, leading to alterations in behavior. She has worked in exhibit development at the Museum of Science, Boston and was a former director of the nonprofit public science education program and seminar series Science in the News at Harvard Medical School.

Julie Volkman's research focuses on the use of narrative evidence in health messages to promote osteoporosis prevention behaviors for young women ages 18–25. In addition to her academic research, her experiences also include working at the federal level with the National Cancer Institute and the Department of Health and Human Services. She has published in multiple journals on health communication.

In the Journalism Department, Professor Ted Gup will take on the role of chair of the department. Associate Chair and Journalist-in-Residence Doug Struck will join him along with Assistant Professor Suzy Kim and Journalist-in-Residence Tim Riley.

Professor Ted Gup has been a staff writer for The Washington Post and Time and has written for National Geographic, Smithsonian, Sports Illustrated, GQ, NPR, Slate, Salon, Newsweek, The New York Times, and others. Gup is the author of three books, Nation of Secrets and The Book of Honor from Doubleday, and the forthcoming Mr. B. Virdot's Gift: Secret Letters from the Great Depression, from Penguin. He has been a Fulbright Scholar to China, a MacArthur Grantee, a Guggenheim Fellow, and winner of the Shorenstein Center Book Prize from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He has also been a Pulitzer finalist and winner of the George Polk Award and Gerald Loeb Award. His interests include investigative reporting, literary journalism, magazine writing, environmental reporting, and journalistic ethics.

Working alongside Gup will be Associate Chair and Journalist-in-Residence Doug Struck. Struck has been a journalist for more than 30 years, primarily as a foreign and national reporter for The Washington Post and Baltimore Sun. He was a bureau chief in the Middle East, Asia, and in Toronto. Struck reported from Iraq for more than 14 years, covering both Gulf wars. He now writes on environmental issues for a variety of publications. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2003–04, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002, and a fellow in Asian Studies at George Washington University in 1998–99.

Before joining academia, Assistant Professor Suzy Kim worked at MINKAHYUP Human Rights Group as the international secretary in Seoul, South Korea. She previously taught at Oberlin College and Boston College after receiving her PhD in Korean history at the University of Chicago. She also works as the Korea country specialist for Amnesty International USA. Her current focus of research is North Korean social history, particularly looking at mass mobilization in everyday village life from 1945 to 1950.

Journalist-in-Residence Tim Riley is a widely published NPR music critic and author best known for his books on the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Madonna, and rock gender. The New York Times hailed his first book, Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary (Knopf/Vintage 1988), for bringing "new insight to the act we've known for all these years..." His current projects include the music metaportal the Riley Rock Index.com, the Norton Rock Reader, and a major new biography of John Lennon, which W.W. Norton will publish in 2010.

In the Marketing Communication Department, newly appointed Chair and Professor John Davis joins the staff as well as Assistant Professor Nejem Raheem.

Professor John Davis's career spans both the academic and business worlds.
Davis is the author of several acclaimed marketing books including: The Olympic Games Effect: How Sports Marketing Builds Strong Brands (2008), among others.
 His current projects include two textbooks: Competitive Success: How Branding Adds Value (est. 2010), and Sports Marketing: Creating Long Term Value (est. 2011). He was professor of marketing and director of the Center for Marketing Excellence at Singapore Management University. He founded with private investor groups, including Brand New View (brandnewview.com), where he remains as chairman.

Also joining the faculty is Assistant Professor Nejem Raheem. Raheem brings 10 years of experience as an environmental economist to Emerson. His expertise is in teaching and economic analysis of natural resource and environmental issues. He is currently working on several ecosystem service valuation projects in California and Labrador, Canada.
 
"The new faculty at Emerson complement well the curriculum and the faculty we already have," Vice President of Academic Affairs Moore says. "It's wonderful that we draw such amazing faculty."