Welcome Aboard!

New faculty for 2004-05 are coming in:

• Francis Ryan, assistant professor of history. B.A., LaSalle University; M.A., Villanova University; Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, where he is currently a lecturer. Also a faculty member of the Comey Institute of Industrial Relations, Philadelphia. Another historian named Francis Ryan, on the faculty at LaSalle Univerity, is his father. Fran says: “We worked out a deal that I would be the labor historian in the family, provided that I cut the lawn.” His dissertation is a history of the Philadelphia Municipal Workers Union, the largest and most powerful labor organization in the city.

• John Black, instructor of English. B.A. (biology), M.A. (English), finishing Ph.D. in medieval English literature/medieval studies at the University of North Carolina. His dissertation is on the medieval English saints Mary of Egypt, Cuthbert, and Guthlac. In addition to college-level teaching, he has taught in Shijiazhuang, China, and on the Hopi reservation in Arizona. He and his wife, Heather Darden Black, are native North Carolinians.

• Shalahudin Kafrawi, instructor of Islamic studies (split appointment between philosophy and religion). A native of Indonesia, Shalahudin is a scholar of the Qur’an and Islamic thought. He is currently a graduate research assistant with the Institute for Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University (formerly SUNY-Binghamton) as he works on his Ph.D. He is the author of Fakhr Al-Din Al-Razi’s Methodology in Interpreting the Qur’an (2002), a reworking of his master’s thesis at McGill University. His undergraduate degree is in Arabic from the State Institute for Islamic Studies in Bandung, Indonesia.

• Lisa Cave, instructor of economics, is a native of Barbados. She has a B.S. from Florida Southern College and is finishing a doctorate at the University of Kentucky. Her field is environmental economics, including work in such current topics as the effect of economic development on greenhouse gas production. As an undergraduate, she was the two-time NCAA Division II national champion in golf.

Sticking Around

• Dan Jasper, visiting professor of sociology, takes “visiting” off his title next year. B.A., Macalester College; M.A., Ph.D., New School University.

• Hilde Binford, visiting assistant professor of music, ditto. B.A., M.Mus., Shepherd School of Music, Rice University; Ph.D., Stanford University.

• Neil Wetzel, director of jazz studies, becomes full-time. B.A., M.A.T., University of the Arts. Neil is working on a doctorate in education at Columbia University.