Directors and Staff

	Georges Van Den Abbeele, Interim Director Founding Dean, College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University Born in Antwerpen, Belgium, Georges Van Den Abbeele earned his BA at Reed College (1976) and Ph.D. from Cornell University in Romance Languages (1981). Trained as a scholar of French literature and philosophy, he subsequently developed a wide expertise in public humanities programs and administration—with a particular interest in the literature of travel and tourism as well as film and media studies. He taught at UC-Santa Cruz, UC-Berkeley, UC Davis, Harvard and Miami Universities before coming to Northeastern University in 2010 as founding dean of the new College of Social Sciences and Humanities, where he has fostered new initiatives in digital humanities and computational social sciences, global and international affairs, urban ecology and sustainability, and transnational American studies while revitalizing the mission of the traditional liberal arts departments within a growing research environment. A scholar in the history of travel, Van Den Abbeele is also a noted expert in cultural and historical tourism. He is author of Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau and the forthcoming Retreat of the French Intellectual. With Brenda Schildgen, he published A World of Fables, the first critical anthology of traditional fables spanning the globe. He is also co-editor (with Tyler Stovall) of French Civilization and its Discontents, hailed as a “provocative” and “brilliant” book that at long last “challenges the myth of French universalism.” In addition to over 40 scholarly articles (a number have also appeared in French, German, Italian, and Chinese), he guest-edited several special issues of scholarly journals with public policy and humanities education significance--three on tourism and travel and one on censorship. He is also well known for his translations into English of the postmodernist French philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard. He has also organized a number of public symposia and large-scale conferences on such issues as censorship, immigration, animal husbandry and public health, “civility” in an uncivil world, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and the social impact of digital technology. A former NEH and Mellon Fellow, he has lectured extensively throughout North America, Europe and Asia. He serves as a consultant and reviewer for a range of colleges and universities, publishers, professional organizations and government agencies. In 2008, he was awarded the Blaise Pascal Medal for outstanding achievement in social and human sciences by the European Academy of Sciences, to which body he was subsequently elected as a full member.
	Assistant to the Center Born and raised in Boston, Nakeisha Cody received her undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia and is currently pursuing her PhD in Sociology at Northeastern University. She has taught university courses within the disciplines of Sociology, Anthropology, African American Studies, and Gender Studies and is primarily interested in addressing socioeconomic disparities, as it relates to race, class, and gender.
	Assistant to the Artists and Practitioners in Residence Program Allison Maria Rodriguez is an emerging filmmaker, multi-media artist, and writer. She recently completed her graduate thesis, a 16mm experimental-narrative film entitled In Between, and received her MFA in studio art from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work has been exhibited throughout the New England area.