Annette Allen

Annette Allen is Professor of Humanities and Director of the Humanities Ph.D. with Beijing Foreign Language Studies in China.  Allen earned a Masters in English from Southern Methodist University and a Humanities Ph.D. from the University of Texas. Her dissertation, entitled: A Phenomenological Exploration of Time, Self, and Narrative in Novels of Virginia Woolf, led to essays on Virginia Woolf, and on poets, Molly Peacock, Sylvia Plath, and Mary Oliver. She is the recipient of the Witte Award for her poetry collection, Country of Light (1996) and the Guy Award for the collection, What Vanishes (2006). Her poetry has been published widely in anthologies and magazines, such as Southern Poetry Review, Boulevard, and Poetry East. She has received three state arts council poetry awards, and two NEH summer fellowships, one at Yale and one at Columbia. A MacDowell Colony Fellow, Allen was awarded an International Residency in Germany from the Virginia Center on the Arts and more recently a Kentucky Arts Council Poetry Fellowship. Her research and teaching interests are poetry, Modernism, Virginia Woolf and phenomenology, creativity, and the literary imagination of the American South. Her new scholarship in illness narrative culminated in a co-edited book with Osborne Wiggins entitles Clinical Ethics and the Necessity of Stories, Kluwer, 2010.  

Mark E. Blum
Mark E. Blum is Professor of History in the Department of History. He received his B.A. in Government at Franklin and Marshall College in 1959, his M.A. and Ph.D. in Modern European History at the University of Pennsylvania in 1970. He was a Swiss-American Fellow at the University of Zurich in 1959-1960, and a lay-analytical candidate at the Carl Gustav Jung Institute in the same years. He was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Vienna n l965. He was a Fellow at Carl Rogers* Center for Studies of the Person in La Jolla, California in 1970-71. His teaching career began at the Moore College of Art in the Department of Humanities in 1962. His publications include: The Austro-Marxists, 1890-1918: A Psychobiographical Study which employs stylistic, phenomenological, and psychodynamic perspectives. His current work focuses upon the historical logics of individuals and the historical-logical narrative norms in Western nations. In 2006, he published Continuity, Quantum, Continuum, and Dialectic: The Foundational Logics of Western Historical Thinking (Peter Lang), and wrote three chapters on national historical logics and generational change in historical logics in the volume Political Economy, Linguistics and Culture, edited by Jürgen Georg Backhaus (Springer, 2008). His latest book, Kafka's Social Discourse: An Aesthetic Search for Community, was published by Lehigh University Press in 2011.       Visit Dr. Blum's website.

Thomas B. Byers

Thomas B. Byers (Tom) is Professor of English, Director of the Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society and Acting Director of Film and Media Studies. He earned the Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Brown University in 1971, and the Ph. D. from the University of Iowa in 1979. He joined the faculty of the University of Louisville in 1980. His book, What I Cannot Say: Self, Word, and World in Whitman, Stevens, and Merwin, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1989. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and has been a Fulbright Senior Lecturer/Researcher in Denmark, a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Ukraine, and a visiting professor at Sao Paulo State University in Brazil. In the spring of 2010, he was a Visiting Professor (Chaire Dupront) at the University of Paris IV (Sorbonne). He is the recipient of the Margaret Church Award from Modern Fiction Studies , and of the University's Distinguished Teaching Award and the Red Apple Award from the Alumni Association. His current research interests are contemporary U.S. literature and contemporary film.

John Gibson
John Gibson (Ph.D. University of Toronto, 2001) is Associate Professor of Philosophy. He is the author of Fiction and the Weave of Life (Oxford, 2007) and coeditor of A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative and Knowledge (2007) and The Literary Wittgenstein (2004; German translation in 2006 with Suhrkamp), both with Routledge. He is currently working on a book on poetry, metaphor, and meaning. Visit Dr. Gibson's Website

 Linda Gigante
Professor Linda Maria Gigante, Professor Emerita, teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Greek and Roman art and architecture in the Art History Program of the Department of Fine Arts, as well as courses in Greek and Roman culture in the Humanities Division (including Humanistic Studies I for the Ph.D. program).  Her primary research is on the collection of Roman funerary objects in the Speed Art Museum, and she has presented several papers on this material at national archaeology and art history conferences.  The funerary inscriptions have been published by the US Epigraphy Project (Website of WS Epigraphy ) at Brown University, and an article on the inscriptions in the Speed Museum was published in the 2008 issue of the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome.   She is currently working on a publication of the marble ash chests in the Speed Museum and discusses these objects within the context of Roman funerary beliefs and mortuary practices. Professor Gigante is President of the Kentucky Society of the Archaeological Institute of America (Kentucky Chapter AIS Website) and participated in the AIA's national lecture program as the Bader Endowed Lecturer; the topic of her lectures was the funerary customs of Rome's slaves and freedmen. Visit Dr. Gigante's Website.

Aaron Jaffe

Aaron Jaffe is an associate professor of English at the University of Louisville. He is the author of Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity and the co-editor of two forthcoming essay collections Modernist Star Maps (Ashgate, 2009) and "The Years Work" in Lebowski Studies (Indiana, 2009).

Alan Leidner

Alan Leidner teaches in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and the Humanities Division, where he has offered courses on Early Modern Culture, The Age of Goethe, Franz Kafka, Modern Culture, German Intellectual History, and the European Fairy Tale. He is the editor of volume 14 (Sturm und Drang) of The German Library  (Continuum, 1992) and the author of The Impatient Muse: Germany and the Sturm und Drang  (UNC Press, 1994), and co-author (with Karin Wurst) of Unpopular Virtues: The Scholarly Reception of J. M. R. Lenz  (Camden House, 1999).  He is preparing a study of the literary fairy tale, and just completed five years as review editor of Colloquia Germanica.

Mary Makris 
Mary Makris earned her PhD from Rutgers, The State University, in  Spanish. She holds the rank of Associate Professor in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses. In addition, she teaches in the Humanities Division. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and have consistently focused on the interrelations between literature and the arts. She has published articles on 20th Century Spanish poetry and painting, theater, film and children's literature. Her current projects focus on the re-presentations of Guernica / Guernica (the 1937 bombing / Picasso's mural) and on Rafael Alberti's "lyricographies," renderings of his poems as drawings with the verse incorporated as part of the design.

D. A. Masolo

D. A. Masolo is a native of Kenya and teaches philosophy at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky, U. S. A. Previously he has taught philosophy at the University of Nairobi, Kenya and at other several American Universities and Colleges. He has published widely on African philosophy and philosophy and cultures. His latest work includes African Philosophy in Search of Identity (Indiana University Press, 1994) and African Philosophy as Cultural Inquiry, (Indiana University Press 2000), a collection of essays co-edited with Ivan Karp of Emory University in Atlanta, U.S.A., and numerous essays in journals and book chapters. He is the current President of the Society for African Philosophy in North America (SAPINA).

Patrick Pranke

Patrick Pranke is an assistant professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Humanities where he teaches Asian religions with a focus on Theravada Buddhism and Burma. Pranke received his doctorate in Buddhist Studies from the University of Michigan in 2004. He has conducted research and worked in Burma and northern India for a number of years and is affiliated with the Buddhist academy, Thitagu Kaba Buddha Takkathol, in Sagaing, Burma, where he has served as an instructor and translator. His research interests include Burmese Buddhist monastic history and historiography, sangha-state relations, Buddhist scholasticism, and Burmese popular religion. His interests in north India include village Hinduism, pilgrimage and the geography of sacred sites. In the United States he examines immigrant Buddhism and the dynamics of integration. Pranke’s articles have appeared in Buddhism in Practice, the Encyclopedia of Buddhism, and the Journal of Burma Studies.

Robert N. St. Clair
Robert N. St. Clair is a professor of linguistics in the Department of Communication and in the Humanities Division. He received his doctorate in theoretical linguistics at the University of Kansas. He is the Executive Director of the International Association for Intercultural Communication Studies (IAICS), and the editor of Intercultural Communication Studies (ICS). He is also the Director of the Institute for Intercultural Communication at the University of Louisville. He has published over 60 refereed books and over 400 scholarly articles.  He teaches courses on Cultural Metaphors, Theories of Culture , and visual culture. Visit Dr. St. Clair's website.

Mary Ann Stenger

Professor of Humanities, earned her B.A. in Religion from Lawrence University in 1969 and received a Teaching Research Fellowship from the School of Religion at the University of Iowa. Following completion of her Ph.D. in Religion from the University of Iowa in 1977, she began teaching in Religious Studies at the University of Louisville. She is co-author of Dialogues of Paul Tillich (Mercer University Press, 2002) and of over 25 journal articles and book chapters on the theology of Paul Tillich, religious pluralism and feminist theology. She participates in international meetings of Tillich scholars and has co-chaired a program unit on Tillich's thought for the American Academy of Religion. Other current research focuses on integrating feminist and pluralist philosophies of religion. She was a Distinguished Honors Faculty Fellow (2001 - 2007) and received the Red Apple Award for Teaching from the University of Louisville Alumni Association (2003). She also received a Distinguished Service Award from the College of Arts and Sciences in 2002 and the Caiear of Service Award in 2012.  

Osborne P. Wiggins
Osborne Wiggins is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy. He is also Associate Faculty in School of Epidemiology and Clinical Investigation Science as well as Associate Faculty in the Institute for Bioethics, Health Policy, and Law. He received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the New School for Social Research. In 1998 he received the Margrit Egner award for his contributions to phenomenological psychiatry. With his regular co-author, Michael Alan Schwartz, M.D., he publishes in the area of philosophy and psychiatry. His areas of interest are phenomenology and philosophical anthropology (especially as they apply to psychiatry), the history of ideas, and the philosophy of medicine. He regularly teaches, with Dr. Annette Allen, the core Ph.D. course, Humanities II, HUM 662.

Elaine Wise

Elaine O. Wise, Phi Beta Kappa at Agnes Scott College and Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Indiana University, is Chair of the Division of Humanities and teaches courses in both the Division of Humanities and the Department of English. Her areas of specialization are Chaucer, Shakespeare, Medieval Culture, and Interdisciplinary Theory in the Arts and Humanities. Her current research is focused on models of female friendship in medieval literature.