Master of Liberal Arts Faculty

David Archer is a Professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences. His research interests span a range of topics pertaining to the global carbon cycle and its relation to global climate, with special focus on ocean sedimentary processes and their impact on the evolution of atmospheric CO2. He regularly teaches classes on global warming, environmental chemistry, and global geochemical cycles.

Fred W. Beuttler received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago and then went on to become the Deputy Historian of the U.S. House of Representatives and, later, an Associate Dean at the University of Chicago.

Alida Bouris is an Associate Professor in the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration (SSA). Her primary research focuses on the relationship between social context and adolescent health, with a particular emphasis on understanding how parents and families can help prevent HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and unplanned pregnancies among marginalized youth aged 10-24 years old. The overall goal of Dr. Bouris’s research agenda is to develop effective interventions that capitalize on the strengths of families and other supportive persons in the lives of young people. In addition, she studies the social-contextual factors associated with poor mental health among LGBT youth of color, and how structural inequalities and co-occurring psychosocial problems are linked to health.

At SSA, Professor Bouris teaches courses on social work practice and cognitive-behavioral therapy. In 2013, she was the recipient of the William Pollak Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2015, she received the Award for Excellence in Doctoral Student Mentoring.

Jason Bridges is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. His primary research and teaching areas are the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. He also has interests in metaphysics and epistemology, the philosophy of action, the later work of Wittgenstein, and political philosophy. His main current projects are about reasons and rationality, and epistemic and semantic contextualism.

Professor Ebeling studies both modern and premodern South Asian and Southeast Asian literary traditions and cultural history, and some of the less commonly studied European literatures. He is particularly interested in entangled histories of literary practices in Europe and Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, including the emergence of the novel in Asia and the global history of modernist poetry.

Marco Garrido is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago. His primary research interest focuses on the relationship between the urban poor and middle class in Manila. More broadly, his research examines the relationship between urban structures and political dissensus, as well as the role that class plays in shaping urban spaces, social life, and politics.

I specialize in the history of modern Russia and the Soviet Union, with particular interest in Soviet culture, society, and their international context. Currently, I am completing my first book, a comprehensive history of the Soviet opening to the West during the 1950s and 1960s. This project brings together the ideas that justified cultural exchange and the diplomatic negotiations that made it possible, the secrets of museum storage rooms and the publicity of radio broadcasts, lavish international film festivals and backwater countryside screenings, enormous print runs and home-made books, state-sponsored travel and emigration. I analyze the reception of Western texts, paintings, cinema, and melodies, following them as they spread to the remotest corners of the Soviet Union. Interpreting the significance that these imports acquired, I highlight translation – as a mechanism of transfer, a process of habituation, and a metaphor for cultural interaction. The book examines what happened in this encounter to entrenched ideas of class morality and cultural supremacy, familiar ways of looking at paintings, as well as the established languages of literature and cinema.

Future projects include Stalinist culture through the prism of the tango and Russia’s port cities, littoral subsystems, and maritime engagements over the past three hundred years.

Before coming to the University of Chicago, I taught at New York University.

Andreas Glaeser is is a professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Sociology. He is a sociologist of culture with a particular interest in the construction of identities and knowledges. His work interlaces substantive interests with efforts to build social theory. He is currently finishing a book aiming at the development of a political epistemology which asks how people come to understand the world of politics from within their particular biographical trajectories and social milieus. He also has begun work on a new project which studies the emergence of dominant understandings about Muslim immigrants in the interaction between contingent historical events, the cycles of electoral politics, everyday experiences and mass-mediated discourses in Germany, France and Britain.

Faith Hillis is an historian of modern Russia, with a special interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century politics, culture, and ideas. Her work explores how Russia’s peculiar political institutions—and its status as a multiethnic empire—shaped public opinion and political cultures. It also interrogates Russia’s relationship with the outside world, asking where the Russian experience belongs in the broader context of European and global history. In addition, she is interested in the theory and practice of the digital humanities.

Her most recent book, Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Exiles and the Quest for Freedom, 1830–1930, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. The book provides the first synthetic account of Europe’s “Russian colonies”—boisterous and politically fractious communities formed by exiles from the Russian empire that emerged across the continent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book treats the “Russian colonies” as utopian communities in which radical activists worked to transform social relations and individual behavior, and it explores how these unique spaces influenced Russian political imaginaries as well as the culture of their host societies. Ultimately, the project offers a bold reassessment of Russia’s relationship with Europe, the origins of the Russian revolution, and the creation of the Bolshevik regime.

Her first book, Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation, was published by Cornell University Press in 2013 and released in paperback in 2017. Children of Rus’ argues that it was on the extreme periphery of the tsarist empire—a region that today is located at the very center of the independent nation of Ukraine—that Russian nationalism first took shape and assumed its most potent form. The book reconstructs how nineteenth-century provincial intellectuals came to see local folk customs as the purest manifestation of an ancient nation that unified all the Orthodox East Slavs, and how they successfully propagated their ideas across the empire through lobbying and mass political mobilization. In addition, it reconceptualizes state-society relations under tsarism, showing how residents of a diverse and contested peripheral region managed to shape political ideas and identities across Russia—and even beyond its borders. Children of Rus’ was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013.

Her current research is enriched by technology, and she is interested in thinking through how historians can use digital tools to open new avenues for exploration and to communicate their findings to other scholars and the general public. She is particularly interested in using geo-spatial analysis to analyze flows of people, ideas, and commodities over time and across space. For examples of her (ongoing) work in digital cartography, see her Utopia’s Discontents website in development and her study of émigré publications.

She has held research fellowships at Columbia, Harvard, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Her research has been funded by ACLS, IREX, Fulbright-Hays, and the NEH.

Edward W. Kolb is a professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. He was the founding head of the NASA/Fermilab Astrophysics Group at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. In addition to more than 200 scientific papers, he is a coauthor of The Early Universe, the standard textbook on particle physics and cosmology. His book for the general public, Blind Watchers of the Sky (winner of the 1996 Emme Award from the AAS), is the story of the people and ideas that shaped our view of the universe. Kolb was awarded the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the Oersted Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers.

Rochona Majumdar is a historian of modern India with a focus on Bengal. Her writings span histories of gender and sexuality, Indian cinema, especially art cinema and film music, and modern Indian intellectual history. Majumdar also writes on postcolonial history and theory.

Majumdar started out as a historian of gender and arranged marriage in colonial and postcolonial Bengal that resulted in her book Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal. Her interest in postcoloniality as an intellectual standpoint led to her second work, Writing Postcolonial History, where she analyzed the impact of postcolonial theory on a variety of historical fields. Her interests in the culture and aesthetics of mass democracy led Majumdar to study cinema, in particular Indian cinema. Currently, she is finishing a monograph entitled Art Cinema in India: Aesthetic and Political Histories and The Indian New Cinemas Reader: Texts, Debates, Histories (co-edited) with Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Moinak Biswas.

For several years, Majumdar has been interested in the question of whether certain key concepts can be translated across cultures. She has published a few essays on concepts such as “samaj” (society) and “sabhyata” (civility/civilization). This is a long-term project that will map the emergence of these and other concepts over the long nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in order to write a global history of Indian social thought.

Majumdar’s work has been supported by the American Institute for Indian Studies and the Harry Frank Guggenheim foundation. She has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Emotions, Berlin and IWM, Vienna.

Majumdar also writes for The Indian Express, Outlook and Anandabazar Patrika (in Bengali).

Robert Martin is an emeritus curator at the Field Museum of Natural History, where he served as Provost for five years. He is also an adjunct professor at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and the University of Chicago, where he has taught in the College and is a member of the Committee of Evolutionary Biology. His research interests span the fields of anthropology, evolutionary biology and human reproductive biology. He has authored 300 publications, including peer-reviewed papers, books, book chapters, and book translations, and regularly maintains a blog on human evolution for Psychology Today.

Peggy Mason is a professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago. After twenty-five years of researching the cellular mechanisms of pain modulation, her research interests have shifted to the biological basis of empathy and helping. A self-described “neuroevangelist,” she is thrilled for opportunities to teach neurobiology to interested audiences of non-specialists. Her efforts in this realm include reaching tens of thousands of people through her Twitter (@NeuroMOOC), her blog, and open online courses through Coursera.

Omar M. McRoberts is currently an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and the College. McRoberts’ scholarly and teaching interests include the sociology of religion, urban sociology, urban poverty, race, and collective action. His first book, Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood is based on an ethnographic study of religious life in Four Corners: a poor, predominantly black neighborhood in Boston containing twenty-nine congregations. It explains the high concentration, wide variety, and ambiguous social impact of religious activity in the neighborhood. It won the 2005 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. McRoberts currently is conducting a study of black religious responses to and influences on social welfare policy since the New Deal, culminating with George W. Bush’s Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives. He is also initiating an ethnographic project on cultures of death and dying among black congregations in low-income urban contexts. Read an interview with Omar McRoberts on the enriching experience of ethnography.

Mark Miller is an associate professor in the English department at the University of Chicago. He is in the early stages of a book project called The Drive of Psychoanalytic Theory: A Reintroduction to Freud and Lacan. He also teaches and writes about medieval literature and culture, especially Chaucer and other fourteenth century English writers. In 2004, he received the Mark B. Ashin Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Eugene Raikhel is a cultural and medical anthropologist with interests encompassing the anthropology of science, biomedicine, and psychiatry; addiction and its treatment; suggestion and healing; and post-socialist transformations in Eurasia.

Michael Rossi is Associate Professor of the History of Medicine, the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College at the University of Chicago. A historian of medicine and science in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present, his work focuses on the historical and cultural metaphysics of the body: how different people at different times understood questions of beauty, truth, falsehood, pain, pleasure, goodness, and reality vis-à-vis their corporeal selves and those of others.

His first book manuscript traces the origins of color science—the physiology, psychology, and physics of color—in the late-nineteenth-century United States to a series of questions about what modern America ought to be: about the scope of medical, scientific, and political authority over the sensing body; about the nature of aesthetic, physiological, and cultural development between individual and civilization; about the relationship between aesthetic harmony, physiological balance, and social order.

His second project looks at how linguists, anatomists, and speech pathologists moved, over the course of the twentieth century, from viewing language as a function of sound-producing organs (tongue, lips, palate, larynx, etc.) to searching for a notional “language organ” within the brains of all human beings. Such interpretative shifts in understanding human anatomy are neither an ancient phenomenon nor one limited to extreme medical specialization, but rather are ongoing issues, providing a window on the social, political, and philosophical understanding of modern bodies, medicine, and science.

Prior to Chicago, Michael was a postdoctoral fellow in the Groupe Histoire des sciences de l’homme at the Ecole Normale Superieur de Cachan in France. He received a PhD in the history and anthropology of science, technology, and society from MIT and an AB from Columbia University.

Larry Rothfield is an associate professor in the Department of English, Department of Comparative Literature, and is a research affiliate in the Cultural Policy Center. His research focuses on the way in which literature, criticism, and other cultural activities are caught up within epistemic and political struggles.

Amy Dru Stanley is an associate professor in UChicago’s history department. Her research and teaching focus on US history, from the early Republic through the Progressive Era. She is especially interested in the history of capitalism, slavery, and emancipation, and the historical experience of moral problems. Methodologically, she works at the intersections of intellectual, social, and legal history. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, from institutions including the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Museum of American History, the American Bar Foundation, and the New York University Law School. She has also been awarded the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2009 and a Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring in 2005.

Michael S. Turner is the theoretical cosmologist who coined the term dark energy. He helped establish the interdisciplinary field that combines together cosmology and elementary particle physics to understand the origin and evolution of the universe. His research focuses on the earliest moments of creation, and he has made contributions to inflationary cosmology, particle dark matter and structure formation, the theory of big bang nucleosynthesis, and the nature of dark energy.

William Veeder is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College. He has taught courses on American and British Gothic literature of the nineteenth century, contemporary fiction, and on specific figures such as Henry James and Ambrose Bierce. He is the author or coauthor of various books such as Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: the Fate of Androgyny; Henry James, the Lessons of the Master: Popular Fiction and Personal Style in the Nineteenth Century; The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837-1883; and Henry James: Lessons of the Master, as well as essays on nineteenth and twentieth-century Anglo-American gothic texts, psychoanalysis, gender issues, and popular culture.

David Wray is is an associate professor in the Department of Classics, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the College. He is the author of Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood (Cambridge 2001), a coeditor of Seneca and the Self (Cambridge 2009), and is currently writing Ovid at the Tragic Core of Modernity. His research and teaching interests include Hellenistic and Roman poetry (especially Apollonius Rhodius, Catullus, Lucretius, Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, and Statius); Greek epic and tragedy; Roman philosophy; ancient and modern relations between literature and philosophy; gender; theory and practice of literary translation; and the reception of Greco-Roman thought and literature, from Shakespeare and Corneille to Pound and Zukofsky. He is a member of the Poetry and Poetics program.

Prof. Laurie Zoloth is a leader in the field of religious studies with particular scholarly interest in bioethics and Jewish studies and her research explores religion and ethics, drawing from sources ranging from Biblical and Talmudic texts to postmodern Jewish philosophy. Her scholarship spans the ethics of genetic engineering, stem cell research, synthetic biology, social justice in health care, and how science and medicine are taught. She also researches the practices of interreligious dialogue, exploring how religion plays a role in public discussion and policy.

Prof. Zoloth is author of Health Care and the Ethics of Encounter: A Jewish Discussion of Social Justice and co-editor of five books and her work on bioethics and health care led her to serve on the NASA Advisory Council, the space agency’s highest civilian advisory board.

Tim Murphy serves as Director of the Master Liberal Arts program and has been with the Graham School since 2015. A lifelong Chicagoan, Tim completed his undergraduate studies at UChicago studying American history and later earned his MA here focused on twentieth-century American political history. You can contact Tim at timmurphy@uchicago.edu.

In his spare time, he enjoys taking advantage of the tremendous resources available through UChicago’s library, pursuing a hodgepodge of historical interests.

Caleigh Bell-Rosof (they/them) is the Program Advisor for the Master of Liberal Arts (MLA) program at the Graham School. In this role, they help manage outreach and advising for the Graham School’s educational programming, specifically serving as the lead advisor to and recruiter of prospective students considering enrollment in the MLA at the Graham School. You can contact Caleigh at cbellrosof@uchicago.edu.

Originally from New York, Caleigh graduated from Northwestern University with a B.A. in American Studies and a minor in Legal Studies. While at Northwestern, they worked in the admissions office as a tour guide, and they completed an interdisciplinary honors thesis examining radical imagination, queer politics, and prison abolition through a media studies lens.

Caleigh was also a member of the Northwestern University Sailing Team, and in their free time, weather permitting (which it hardly does), they try to spend as much time as they can outside and around Lake Michigan.

Millie Rey guides students through the process of conceiving of and executing their academic and professional projects through the medium of writing instruction and by collaborating with other instructional partners at the University. She designs and implements instruction that aims to remove obstacles that adult learners face, helps them develop critical thinking skills and leads them to gain a better understanding of what they aim to achieve. Contact Millie: merey@uchicago.edu

Millie is committed to using writing instruction to empower others to confidently pursue their mission. She created a non-profit organization that supported teachers in becoming leaders and better instructors by coaching them on reflective practice. As a consultant, she supports various organizations in helping their professionals and students think more critically and write more incisively. Millie earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in history with a minor in French from Bates College, and a master’s degree in TESOL/applied linguistics from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is currently ABD in sociology at The University of Chicago.

Seth Green was appointed Dean of the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies on July 1, 2021. You can contact Seth at sethgreen@uchicago.edu.

Before joining Graham, Seth served as Founding Director of the Baumhart Center for Social Enterprise and Responsibility at Loyola University Chicago. During his tenure, the Center launched a top-ranked specialty MBA program, a globally significant award for social innovation in business, and an array of educational programs that annually engage more than 4,000 learners. Seth also served as an Executive Lecturer in Loyola’s Quinlan School of Business, teaching classes on social entrepreneurship and receiving recognition as the Mission-Driven Faculty Member of the Year in 2021.

Prior to Loyola, Seth led Youth & Opportunity United (Y.O.U.), a nonprofit organization that prepares low- income youth for post-secondary and life success. At Y.O.U., Seth oversaw the fourfold expansion of programs and a $16.4 million fundraising campaign to build a state-of-the-art youth center. He also spearheaded two strategic planning processes, resulting in an enhanced program model and deepened impact. Alongside Y.O.U., Seth taught courses on nonprofit management as an adjunct lecturer at Northwestern University.

Earlier in his career, Seth worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, guiding private sector clients through strategy development and change management. A recipient of McKinsey’s Community Fellowship, he spent one year of his time at the firm supporting nonprofit clients, including the Gates Foundation and United Way.

Seth speaks and writes on social innovation. His commentaries and research have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Fortune Magazine, the Journal of Business Research, and the Social Innovations Journal, and he serves on the Editorial Review Board of the Business and Society Review. Seth has been a featured guest on Slate Podcasts, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, MSNBC, and CNN, and his efforts have been covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2008, Utne Reader named him one of 50 “Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.”

Seth is civically engaged in Chicago, serving on the Campaign Cabinet of the United Way of Metro Chicago, the Impact Investing Advisory Council of the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago, the Advisory Board of Concordia Place, the Reception Committee of the Economic Club of Chicago, and the Advisory Board of the Executives’ Club of Chicago.

A Marshall Scholar, Seth holds a JD from Yale University, a master’s in women’s studies from Oxford University, a master’s in development studies from the London School of Economics, and a bachelor’s degree in politics from Princeton University.

Carey Dempsey serves as Director of Marketing and Recruitment for the Graham School. She oversees the development and execution of the marketing strategy to help connect learners with Graham’s programs and course offerings.

Carey has decades of experience in brand marketing in the higher education and healthcare sectors. Prior to joining Graham, Carey served in marketing leadership roles at Wiley and AllCampus. She has a demonstrated history in developing marketing campaigns that resonate with learners, enabling universities to both attract and retain students throughout their educational journey.

Carey completed her undergraduate studies with a BA in public relations and a minor in marketing from Marquette University.