Faculty

Patricia Ahearne-Kroll
Religion
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Dr. Ahearne-Kroll received her Ph.D. from The University of Chicago Divinity School. She teaches courses on the Hebrew Bible and other topics in the field of Jewish studies. Her primary expertise is in Judaism during the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, and she is currently working on several projects relating to the ancient novel, “Joseph and Aseneth.” Her research interests also include religion in Ptolemaic Egypt and the articulation of group identity in the Greco-Roman world.

Julian Arribas
Modern Foreign Languages
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Born in Valladolid, Spain, Dr. Arribas came to the US in 1986. He is a graduate of the Universidad Pontíficia de Salamanca and the Universidad de Salamanca where he earned an MA degree in Social Psychology. Dr. Arribas completed his Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. He teaches introductory courses in Spanish and upper level culture and literature courses. A specialist in 16th century Spanish literature, he is the author of a book on the pastoral romance, Los siete libros de la Diana, published by Tamesis (London, 1996), and co-author of another on the history of rhetoric, Temas de retórica hispana del siglo XVI, published by UNAM (México, 2000). He has also published articles on Spanish poetry in several scholarly journals.

Scott Calef
Philosophy
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Dr. Calef’s areas of specialization are in ancient philosophy and applied ethics. He also has expertise in modern and analytic philosophy, having written his dissertation on the philosophy of mind. Dr. Calef teaches courses in introductory philosophy, logic and critical thinking, the history of modern and contemporary philosophy, philosophy of religion, history of ancient philosophy, Plato and bioethics. He has published widely, particularly in the fields of ancient philosophy and applied ethics. Among his articles are “Piety and the Unity of Virtue in the Euthyphro”, “What Good Is Human Wisdom?”, “Further Reflections on Socratic Piety”, “Angels and Evil”, “The Replaceability Argument and Abortion”, “Replacing Fetuses Through Fetal Tissue Transplantation”, “Fetal Experimentation”, and “Fetal Tissue Donation”. Dr. Calef was an undergraduate initiate into Phi Beta Kappa.

Patricia DeMarco
English
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Dr. DeMarco earned her Ph.D. from Duke University. Her area of specialization is medieval literature and language. Her research interests and published writings focus upon late medieval romance, feminist theory, and linguistic-based approaches to the study of gender and performative speech. In addition to offering a variety of courses on medieval literature, she teaches linguistics, the history of the English language, literary theory and criticism, and freshman writing.

Lee Fratantuono
Humanities-Classics
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Professor Fratantuono is a classics professor with special interest in Roman epic, lyric, and elegiac poetry, as well as imperial Roman history. He finished degrees in classics at Holy Cross, Boston College, and Fordham, besides completing graduate work at New York University, and studied with the late Robert Carrubba and Seth Benardete. He is the author of the recently published Madness Unchained: A Reading of Virgil’s Aeneid, and the recently submitted A Commentary on Virgil: Aeneid XI. At present he is working on a monograph on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and (with a colleague in Dallas) a critical edition (with translation and commentary) of the twelfth century Latin sermons of Peter the Lombard. He has published some dozen articles on Latin literature. Named the William Francis Whitlock Professor of Latin in 2006, Professor Fratantuono teaches regular courses in Latin, Roman literature, Roman history, notably his two-semester sequence in the Republic and the Empire, and advanced Latin courses in Virgil’s Aeneid, Tacitus’ Annals, Horace’s Odes, and Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura.

Rollin Kearns
Religion
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Dr. Kearns has published several works in the area of early Christian christology and teaches courses in New Testament theology, the life and teachings of Jesus, Hellenistic-Roman religions and the history of religion in Western culture.

Conrad Kent
Modern Foreign Languages, Humanities-Classics
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After pursuing his undergraduate education in Mexico City, Dr. Kent received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in Romance Languages and Literature. He has taught at Harvard and Amherst College. At Ohio Wesleyan he has taught Golden Age and Twentieth-Century Spanish literature as well as interdisciplinary courses on European Modernism. In 1988 Professor Kent founded the Ohio Wesleyan Spanish study program at the University of Salamanca, and has been its director during the decade since the inception of the program. In 1993 he received the President Herbert Welch Meritorious Teaching Award.

Donald Lateiner
Humanities-Classics
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Professor Lateiner joined Ohio Wesleyan’s faculty in 1979 and is the John R. Wright Professor of Humanities-Classics. He earned his B.A. from the University of Chicago, his M.A. from Cornell, and his Ph.D. in Classics from Stanford. Study for a year in Athens led to publications on Athenian law and politics, and on Greek historians, especially Herodotus and Thucydides. Dr. Lateiner teaches Greek and Latin language and literature courses. He also teaches courses on folklore, archaeology, and love and sexuality. He has written two books: The Historical Method of Herodotus and Sardonic Smile: Nonverbal Behavior in Homeric Epic.

Ülle Lewes
English
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Professor Lewes is the Director of the Writing Resource Center. Professor Lewes is a leader nationally among Writing Center Directors, and also serves as a consultant to high school writing programs. She combines her expertise in writing pedagogy with unusually wide literary interests, including medieval and Renaissance literature. She publishes both literary criticism and essays on the teaching of writing, and teaches advanced writing as well as courses on drama, perspectives on women in literature, and Shakespeare.

Alison Baird Lovell
Humanities & Classics
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Dr. Lovell earned a PhD in French in 2005 from the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, with a Certificate in Renaissance Studies. She teaches courses on French and Italian literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as tragedy, comedy, myth and poetry. Her scholarly interests include Scève; Dante and Petrarch; humanism; evolving views of women; literary imitation; mysticism; intersections of literature and religion, literature and philosophy. Prior to joining the faculty at Ohio Wesleyan, Dr. Lovell taught humanities courses as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. She holds a BA in Religion from Barnard College of Columbia University.

Stephanie Merkel
Humanities-Classics
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Professor Merkel joined Ohio Wesleyan’s faculty in 1998. She earned her B.A. in Government/Soviet Studies and Russian language from the University of Notre Dame, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Slavic Studies from Cornell University. In addition, she studied one year at Leningrad State University in the former USSR and has traveled extensively in Russia. Before coming to Ohio Wesleyan she taught Russian language and literature at Cornell, Syracuse, and Lehigh universities. Her research on Russian Romanticism explores the intersection of poetry and fashion. She writes on Vladimir Nabokov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Anna Akhmatova. In addition to Russian literature, Professor Merkel is also trained in Middle High German.

Carol Neuman de Vegvar
Fine Arts
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Carol Neuman de Vegvar, B.A. Bryn Mawr College, Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania. The primary art historian of the department, Ms. Neuman de Vegvar joined the faculty in 1988. She taught previously at Skidmore College and Union College in New York. A medievalist, she also teaches Classical, Renaissance, Baroque, and Islamic art. She has lectured and published internationally on early western medieval art.

Dennis Prindle
English
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Professor Prindle specializes in medieval and Renaissance literature, particularly drama. He teaches courses in the English Renaissance, Shakespeare and drama, as well as Freshman Writing and Writing for the Workplace. Professor Prindle has worked with students on performance projects in the early drama, writing apprenticeships, and electronic publishing. His studies of gardens, expos and other culturally idealized landscapes of the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries resulted in a book on Antoni Gaudí’s Park Güell, co-authored with Ohio Wesleyan Prof. Conrad Kent. From 1993 to 2000 he directed or co-directed Ohio Wesleyan’s public affairs series, the National Colloquium.

Timothy Roden
Music
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Dr. Roden teaches music history, world music, survey of music literature, and music appreciation. He received grants from Northwestern University and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (D.A.A.D.) that allowed him to complete research in Berlin, Germany, concerning German orchestral lieder. He has contributed an article on Schumann’s lieder to the NATS Journal, is currently contributing to the development of a music history text published by W. C. Brown, preparing an edition of orchestral lieder for scholarly press, and recently completed an ancillary study guide for a music appreciation text.

Richard Spall, Jr.
History
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A specialist in Victorian Britain, Dr. Spall, the Cornelia Cole Fairbanks Professor of History, is an expert on 19th-century political, economic, and social reform and has published several articles on the free-trade movement and the founders of Liberalism. In addition to courses on British History, Dr. Spall teaches classes on economic history and on the Reformation. Since 1993, Dr. Spall has served as book review editor of The Historian, one of the largest scholarly history journals in the United States.

Rowena Hernandez-Muzquiz
History
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Dr. Hernández-Múzquiz is a specialist in Iberian history (Spain, Portugal) and the Mediterranean world. She has several publications already in print, in press, or in preparation. Among her honors are: Fulbright Fellowship, Beca de Investigación en España para Hispanistas Extranjeros, and a grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain's Ministry of Culture and U.S. Universities. She is a faculty member of the Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies program as well, and has directed or been on the committee for numerous senior capstone projects in all three areas of the program.