Honors First Year Inquiry Series Faculty

Spring 2013

Nicholas Daniloff
School of Journalism

A 30-year veteran in national media, Professor Daniloff joined Northeastern University in 1989. He was director of the journalism program from 1992-1999. He has written several books. These include two earlier works, The Kremlin and the Cosmos (1972), and Two Lives One Russia (1988), and the recent Of Spies and Spokesmen: My Life as a Cold War Correspondent (University of Missouri Press, 2008).

Professor Daniloff served as a foreign correspondent for United Press International and U.S. News & World Report in London, Paris, Moscow and Washington D.C. In addition to his books, he also has written numerous popular and academic articles. He teaches ethics, and graduate and undergraduate print journalism courses. He graduated from Harvard College in 1956 with an AB degree cum laude. He has both BA and MA degrees from Oxford University.

In appraising Of Spies and Spokesmen, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former National Security Advisor to President Carter, noted Professor Daniloff’s special knowledge as a correspondent of Russian affairs “both in Soviet and post-Soviet incarnations; (he) is familiar with the language and intimately so with the history…”

This spring, Professor Daniloff will teach HONR 1205-02 – Securing Peace in Times of Terror.

 

Malcolm Hill
Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences

Malcolm Hill is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences.  Professor Hill’s teaching interests include mineralogy, optical crystallography, igneous and metamorphic petrology, geochemistry, groundwater geochemistry, GIS, economic geology, field geology, physical geology, marine geology, and environmental geology.

This spring, Professor Hill will teach HONR 1206-01 – The Impact of Environmental Cycles: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.

 

Allen Feinstein
Music Department

Allen Feinstein is a composer and conductor of film music, classical music, and musical theater. He has been Director of Bands at Northeastern University since 1990.

In October 2011 two of Prof. Feinstein’s compositions were performed at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, including a new work, I Was a Teenage Clarinetist, commissioned and premiered by Marguerite Levin.

Feinstein composed and conducted his scores accompanying silent films on the National Film Preservation Foundation’s DVD compilation Treasures 3, which looked at how early filmmakers addressed social issues. The DVD set was on many ‘best of’ lists for 2007, including those of The New York Times, Time Magazine, and The New Yorker. He is completing a new musical about the early silent film era entitled Dramatic Agitato No. 37, which will receive a staged reading in April, 2013. He is writing the play as well as the music and lyrics for this show.

His classical compositions include a recent work for piano, oboe, and bassoon, Three Dances, which was a featured work at the International Double Reed Society conference in June, 2010 in Norman, Oklahoma. Performed with original choreography, the work was reprised with dance in July, 2010 in Salt Lake City.

As a conductor Feinstein has led many ensembles in accompanying silent films, and has served as music director for numerous musical theater productions. As Music Director of the NU Band program he has led multi-media concerts, children’s concerts, themed musical events, hosted numerous guest composers and soloists, coached many student conductors, and collaborated with dozens of student soloists.

Feinstein’s compositions have been performed by the New Zealand Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic, Milwaukee Symphony, Banda Municipal de Jaen (Spain), Virginia Symphony, US Army Orchestra, Akron Symphony, Peoria Symphony, and many other professional orchestras. The Northeastern Wind Ensemble, Concert Band and Orchestra, Harvard Wind Ensemble, University of Connecticut Wind Ensemble, Brown University Wind Symphony, and many other college ensembles have also performed his works.

This spring, Professor Feinstein will teach HONR 1208-02 – Making a Musical: Analysis, Craft, and Creation.

 

Serena Parekh McGushin
Department of Philosophy and Religion

Serena Parekh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion. Before joining the faculty at Northeastern University, Professor Parekh taught at the University of Connecticut where she was jointly appointed in the Department of Philosophy and Human Rights Institute. Her primary philosophical interests are in social and political philosophy, feminist theory, continental philosophy, and the philosophy of human rights. Her book, Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: A Phenomenology of Human Rights, was published by Routledge in 2008.

This spring, Professor Parekh McGushin will teach HONR 1209-01 – Human Rights: Ideas, Institutions, and Laws.

 

Lori Lefkovitz
Department of English

Lori Hope Lefkovitz holds the Ruderman Chair in Jewish Studies at Northeastern University, where she is a Professor of English and Director of the Jewish Studies Program. A graduate of Brandeis University with a PhD in English from Brown University, Lori has been a Fulbright Professor and a Golda Meir fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an associate fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and a post-doctoral fellow at the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis. Lori held the Gottesman Chair at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where she was the founding director of Kolot, the Center for Jewish Women’s and Gender Studies and executive editor of the remarkable Web resource, ritualwell.org; formerly, she was an associate professor at Kenyon College. She has published four books, the most recent of which, In Scripture: The First Stories of Jewish Sexual Identities, was a finalist for the 2010 National Jewish Book Award in the category of women’s studies.

This spring, Professor Lefkovitz will teach HONR 1209-02 – Bedrooms and Battlefields: Sex, Gender, and Ethnicity in the Old Testament.

 

Fall 2012

Maureen Kelleher, Honors Program Director
Department of Sociology

Maureen Kelleher is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Honors Program. Her teaching areas include social deviance, drugs, social policy and child welfare. She has worked closely with the American Sociological Association on a number of teaching related projects including ones on juvenile delinquency and graduate education. Publications include Drugs and Society: A Critical Perspective and articles on child welfare. Her current research interest focuses on risk-taking among older adolescents and young adults. She became Director of the Honors Program in 2004. Over the past years she has worked closely with students on a variety of new honors initiatives including First Pages and Honors Welcome Week in addition to starting the award-winning newsletter the Honors Perspective.

This fall, Professor Kelleher will teach HONR 1102 – Enhancing Honors (required for all first year students) with a group of upper class honors mentors.

 

Jeffrey Burds
Department of History

Jeffrey Burds is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, and a member of the core faculty in International Affairs. Prof. Burds completed his Ph.D. in 1990 in Russian and Soviet history. He taught at the University of Rochester for five years, and joined the NU faculty in 1998. The recipient of numerous grants and awards–and a finalist for the Excellence in Teaching Award in both 2004 and 2007–Professor Burds has published widely on the history of the Soviet secret police and Soviet espionage during the early Cold War. In 2007, he published a study tracking Soviet infiltration of foreign espionage networks in the 1930s. Currently, he is finishing a book manuscript on espionage and nationalism in Soviet Ukraine, 1944-1950.

This fall, Professor Burds will teach HONR1205- Spy Wars: History of Covert Operations in World War II.

 

Jung Lee
Department of Philosophy & Religion

Professor Lee teaches in the areas of Chinese Religions, particularly early Daoism and Confucianism, East Asian Buddhism, the philosophy of religion, and comparative religious ethics. He has published articles in The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Asian Philosophy, The Journal of Chinese Philosophy, The Journal of Religion, Philosophy East and West, Religious Studies, Religious Studies Review, and is currently finishing a book on inner cultivation and the virtues in early Daoism. In addition to research projects on early Daoism, he plans to engage in work on the Mengzi and the role of ritual in early Confucianism. He is a member of the American Academy of Religion, the Association for Asian Studies, and the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy.

 

Michael Patrick MacDonald:
Honors Program, Writer in Residence

The Northeastern University Honors Program is pleased to announce Michael Patrick MacDonald will return as the 2011-2012 Honors Writer in Residence. Michael has taught the honors seminar HNRU304, Social Justice: The Role of Reading, Writing and Understanding Non-Fiction.

Michael Patrick MacDonald is the author of national bestseller “All Souls: A Family Story From Southie” (Ballantine, October 2000). He is the recipient of the American Book Award, New England Literary Lights Award (2000), and The Myers Outstanding Book Award administered by the Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. He is currently writing the screenplay of All Souls for director Ron Shelton. MacDonald was also awarded an Anne Cox Chambers Fellowship at the The MacDowell Colony, a Bellagio Center Fellowship through the Rockefeller Foundation, residencies at Blue Mountain Center and Djerassi Artist Residency Program. Currently he lives in Brooklyn.

This fall, Michael will be teaching HONR 1205-01 – The North of Ireland: Conflict, Reconciliation, and the Ongoing Quest for Peace.

 

Lee Makowski
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Lee Makowski is an interdisciplinary professor with appointments in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Chemistry and Chemical Biology. He is deeply committed to development of cross-disciplinary approaches to fundamental scientific problems with the potential for contributing to societal needs. His current research is focused on new methods for analysis of the molecular basis of biological systems. He is collaborating with other scientists to use these methods to address questions that range from the challenges of treating human disease, to the efficient utilization of renewable energy resources. After three years as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation and ten years as a Division Director and Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, he returned to academia, joining the Northeastern faculty in fall 2010.

This fall Professor Makowski will be teaching HONR 1206- Inquiries in Science and Technology: New Strategies in the Fight Against Cancer.

 

Dennis Miller
Department of Music

Dennis Miller received his Doctorate in Music Composition in 1981 from Columbia University and, since that time, has been on the Music faculty of Northeastern University where he is now a Full Professor. Miller initially developed both the Music Department’s Music Industry and Music Technology programs, as well as creating and writing the text for its required course, Principles of Music Literature.

Dennis Miller’s professional interests involve the application of processes drawn from music composition into the visual realm (animation, for example), a genre known as Visual Music. He was the founder and artistic director of the 2007 and 2009 Visual Music Marathons, which featured over 100 abstract video works from some 34 countries. His own mixed-media compositions are regularly performed throughout the world most recently at Design Indaba Africa (Cape Town, South Africa), the New York Digital Salon Traveling Exhibit, Abstract International Abstract Cinema Exhibition (Cairo, Egypt), Images du Nouveau Monde, CYNet Art Festival (Dresden, GR), Videoex Festival (Zurich SWZ), the Cuban International Festival of Music, the  Magmart International Festival of Video Art (Naples, IT) and the Gijon International Festival of Video Art (Gijon, Spain). and can be found at his web site, www.dennismiler.neu.edu. He is also an avid photographer.

This fall Professor Miller will be teaching HONR 1204-Inquiries in Arts & Humanities: What Makes Music Work.

 

Stephen Nathanson
Department of Philosophy & Religion

Stephen Nathanson received a B.A. with Honors in Philosophy at Swathmore College and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the esteemed Johns Hopkins University. He now is a Professor of Philosophy for the Department of Philosophy & Religion at Northeastern University.

Professor Nathanson teaches courses in ethics and political philosophy. His special areas of interest include issues about the ethics of war, economic justice, and patriotism. He is the author of widely reprinted works on the death penalty. Cambridge University Press has recently published his book, Terrorism and the Ethics of War. His most recent article is “Patriotism, War, and Limits of Permissible Partiality” in the Journal of Ethics (2009).

This fall Professor Nathanson will be teaching HONR 1204-Inquireis in Arts & Humanities: Markets, Governments and Economic Justice.

 

Dennis Shaughnessy
Department of Entrepreneurship & Innovation

Dennis Shaughnessy is an Executive Professor of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group. His teaching interests include business planning, small business management, innovation and entrepreneurship, intellectual property, law and ethics, and social enterprise. He also teaches executive education in enterprise growth and acquisitions, and management of life sciences/biotechnology enterprises.

Professor Shaughnessy was a senior executive for many years in a local life sciences technology company, where he was a principal in numerous acquisitions, financings and other strategic transactions, including a leveraged buy-out and initial public offering. He also has extensive experience in strategic planning, international business development, corporate governance, technology licensing, and management of technology-driven operations. Professor Shaughnessy was chief legal officer of a New York Stock Exchange company, responsible for global legal affairs. He was also in private legal practice representing venture capitalists and technology entrepreneurs, and prior to that, in public service.

This fall Professor Shaughnessy will teach HONR 1205 – Inquiries in Social Science: Voices of Development: How One Person Changed the World for the Poorest of the Poor.

 

Louise E. Walker
Department of History

Louise E. Walker is an Assistant Professor of History. Her research focuses on modern Mexico and Latin America.  Her first book “Waking from the Dream: Mexico’s Middle Classes after 1968″ (forthcoming with Stanford University Press) tells the story of neo-liberalism and democracy in Mexico.  She is also co-editor of a forthcoming collection of essays on Latin America’s Middle Class.  Her current research interests include Mexico’s recently declassified secret police archives and the history of conspiracy theories.  She teaches courses on colonial and modern Latin American history, social movements, natural disasters, and the history of capitalism. This Fall Professor Walker will be teaching HONR 1209: Inquiries in Humanities: Struggles for Social Justice in Latin America.