Ben Ho is a behavioral economist at Vassar College and fellow at the Institute for Social Sciences at Cornell. His research uses economic tools like game theory and experiments to understand social systems such as apologies, identity, and climate concerns. Previously, Ho was an assistant professor of economics at Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management, as well as lead energy economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and has worked and consulted for Morgan Stanley and several tech startups. Ho holds degrees in economics, mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, political science and education from Stanford and MIT.
Professors
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Ben Ho
Assistant Professor of Economics - Vassar College
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Brian Fagan
Retired Professor of Anthropology
I was born in England and trained in archaeology and anthropology at Pembroke College, Cambridge (BA (Honors) 1959, MA 1962, PhD 1964). From 1959 to 1965, I served as Keeper of Prehistory at the Livingstone Museum in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), where I was deeply involved in museum work and monument conservation. I also excavated a series of 1000-year-old farming villages in the southern part of the country and was also deeply involved in the development of multidisciplinary African history. This experience gave me a lasting interest in writing about archaeology for general audiences. This was an exciting time to be doing African archaeology, as we were concerned both with basic fieldwork as well as using archaeology for teaching history in schools and at the new University of Zambia. In other words, we had to take archaeology out of the ivory tower of academia and make it relevant to a newly independent African nation.
After six years, I was offered a post as the Director of a three-year Bantu Studies project based on the British Institute in Eastern Africa in Nairobi. My involvement in the project lasted just a year: I was tired of the stresses of fieldwork and was ready for another challenge. By chance, I was offered a year as Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana for 1966-7. This gave me a chance to think about the future. From this year emerged an opportunity to work in California. From 1967 to 2003, I served as Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I retired from teaching in 2003 and am now a full-time writer.
There was a point in 1966 when I almost gave up archaeology. It was clear that I would not return to Africa, so I decided to change directions completely. Instead of being a specialist in African archaeology, I decided to become an expert in communicating archaeology to students and general audiences.
Since 1967, my career as a generalist in archaeology, and as an archaeological writer, has taken me in two directions - textbook writing and more general books. When I arrived in Santa Barbara, I was handed the assignment of teaching a large introductory archaeology course for 300 students. I found there were no good textbooks for beginning students, but a chance meeting with a textbook editor provided me with the opportunity to write such a book on basic archaeological methods and theoretical approaches. It took 5 painful years to write, but In the Beginning appeared in 1972, and has been in print through 11 editions, the latest coming out in 2004. Subsequently, I wrote People of the Earth, a world prehistory, which was published in 1975 and is now in its 13th edition (2009). I have written, or co-authored, eight textbooks of different types, all of which are still in print. The writing and especially revision, of these books consumes a great deal of my time.
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Dr. Jeff Cornwall
Professor of Entrepreneurship and Jack C. Massey Chair at Belmont University
Dr. Jeff Cornwall is the inaugural recipient of the Jack C. Massey Chair in Entrepreneurship at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. He also serves as the Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship. He has a Doctorate in Business Administration and an MBA from the University of Kentucky. In the late 1980’s, Dr. Cornwall left academics for nine years to become the co-founder and President/CEO of Atlantic Behavioral Health Systems, headquartered in Raleigh, NC. He has received national awards for his work in curriculum development and teaching. Dr. Cornwall is a Fellow of the United States Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship. He has published six books and numerous articles on entrepreneurship. His blog, The Entrepreneurial Mind, is among the most popular with a focus on small business and entrepreneurship. The Entrepreneurial Mind is part of the Forbes blog network and was named by that magazine as Best of the Web.” It is also syndicated by The Christian Science Monitor and Business Insider.
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Jeb Barnes
Associate Professor of Political Science - University of Southern California
After receiving his law degree from the University of Chicago Law School, Jeb clerked for a federal bankruptcy judge and then practiced as a commercial litigator in Boston and San Francisco. In 1994, he left the practice of law to pursue a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. His research centers on the intersection between law and politics and how policy emanates from interactions among the various levels and branches of government.
His research has been published peer-reviewed articles in a variety of journals, including Political Research Quarterly, Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, and Annual Review of Political Science, and three books: Dust-Up: Asbestos Litigation and the Failure of Commonsense Policy Reform (2011), Overruled? Legislative Overrides, Pluralism, and Contemporary Court-Congress Relations (2004), and a co-edited volume, Making Policy, Making Law: An Interbranch Perspective (2004). He has been invited to present his work in a wide range of academic and professional settings, including Oxford University, Northwestern University, the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley, the Goldman School of Public Policy, the Aspen Institute, and the Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C.
At USC, he is a Distinguished Dornsife Faculty Fellow and has won numerous awards, including a departmental teaching award, a general education teaching award, the Gamma Sigma Alpha Professor of the Year Award, and the Raubenheimer Award for outstanding junior faculty.
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Margaret Soltan
Associate Professor of English - George Washington University
Margaret Soltan is an English professor at George Washington University in Washington DC. Her interest in twentieth century poetry and fiction is reflected in the title of her co-authored 2008 book, Teaching Beauty in DeLillo, Woolf, and Merrill (Palgrave Macmillan). She also authors a blog, University Diaries, which critiques the modern American university.
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Marshall C. Eakin
Professor of History - Vanderbilt University
Marshall C. Eakin is Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. A native Texan, he received his B.A. in history and anthropology from the University of Kansas in 1975, and his M.A. in Latin American history in 1977. He did his doctoral work in Latin American history at UCLA completing his Ph.D. in 1981. Eakin taught at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles for two years before coming to Vanderbilt in 1983. He served as Executive Director of the Brazilian Studies Association from 2004-2011.
A historian of Latin America, Eakin specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazilian history. His major publications have concentrated on economic and business history, industrialization, and the processes of nationalism and nation-building—primarily in the twentieth century.
He has co-edited four books and is the author of four more: British Enterprise in Brazil: The St. John d’el Rey Mining Company and the Morro Velho Gold Mine, 1830-1960 (Duke, 1989), Brazil: The Once and Future Country (St. Martin’s, 1997), Tropical Capitalism: The Industrialization of Belo Horizonte, Brazil (Palgrave, 2001), and The History of Latin America: Collision of Cultures (Palgrave, 2007). Eakin has also created two video courses with the Teaching Company: Conquest of the Americas and The Americas in a Revolutionary Era. He has been awarded grants from Fulbright-Hays, the Tinker Foundation, the American Historical Association, the Corporation for National Service, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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Michael Lenox
Slover Professor of Business - University of Virginia
Professor Lenox teaches at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business where he coordinates and teaches the core MBA strategy course. He also serves as Associate Dean and Executive Director of Darden's Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. In 2009, he was recognized as a Faculty Pioneer by the Aspen Institute and as the top strategy professor under 40 by the Strategic Management Society. In 2011, he was named one of the top 40 business professors under 40 by Poets & Quants.
Prior to joining Darden in 2008, Professor Lenox was a professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business where he served as the area coordinator for Fuqua’s Strategy Area and coordinated and taught the core MBA strategy course and was runner-up for the Chrysler faculty teaching award on multiple occasions. He received his Ph.D. in Technology Management and Policy from MIT and the degrees of Bachelor and Master of Science in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia. Professor Lenox has also served as an assistant professor at New York University's Stern School of Business and as a visiting professor at Harvard University, Oxford University, and IMD.
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Pamela Crossley
Professor of History - Dartmouth College
Pamela Crossley is author of the influential new history of modern China, The Wobbling Pivot. She has taught history at Dartmouth College since 1985. She is a specialist on the history of the Qing empire, but has also written extensively on modern China, the Liao dynasty, Mongol history and global history. Her book, Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World (Princeton, 1990), opened up new vistas on the cultural and identity dynamics of modern China. Her subsequent book, The Manchus (Blackwell, 1997) was a special selection of the History Book Club, and continues to be widely taught in undergraduate classes. In 2001 she was awarded the Joseph R. Levenson Prize by the Association for Asian Studies for her book, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (California, 1999). Her scholarly articles have appeared in Late Imperial China, The Journal of Asian Studies, The American Historical Review, and she has contributed upon invitation to three separate series of the Cambridge histories, as well as the The Oxford History of Historical Writing.
Crossley is also a scholar of global history. She was one of the original authors of the breakthrough text The Earth and its Peoples (1997 and subsequent), and continues as co-author of Global Society: The World since 1900 (now in its third edition). Her short volume, What is Global History? (Polity, 2008) has been praised as both concise and illuminating.
Apart from more scholarly works, Crossley has also contributed to The New York Times Literary Review, The New Republic, Calliope, The Royal Academy of Arts Magazine, Education about Asia, The Gale History of Modern China, The Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, The National Interest, Wall Street Journal and BBC Online.
Crossley is a software author, working to integrate texts and teaching methods through digital media. The software module used to extend teaching and communication resources for all teaching modern China, including those who use The Wobbling Pivot in their own classes, has been designed and authored by her, and is in a process of constant development (like The Wobbling Pivot itself). Users are warmly encouraged to share their criticisms and suggestions for improvement.
Dartmouth has awarded its prizes both for distinguished scholarship (in 1990) and for distinguished teaching (in 2011) to Crossley. Her scholarly research as been supported by the ACLS, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others.
Crossley lives in Norwich, Vermont. She is a graduate of Swarthmore College and Yale University.
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Professor Gad Allon
Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
Gad Allon is a professor of managerial economics and decision science at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He received his PhD in Management Science from Columbia Business School in New York and holds a Bachelor and a Master degree from the Israeli Institute of Technology.
His research interests include operations management in general, and service operations and operations strategy in particular. Recently, Professor Allon has been studying dual sourcing models. He has also been studying models of information sharing among firms and customers both in service and retail settings. Professor Allon won the 2011 “Wickham Skinner Early-Career Research Award” of the Production and Operations Management Society. Professor Allon regularly consults firms both on service strategy and operations strategy.
Professor Allon teaches the core operations management and elective on operations strategy at the Kellogg school of management. Gad also teaches executive courses on the "Science of Lean Six-Sigma Operations", Supply Chain Strategy and Leading Strategic Change. Professor Allon won the 2009 Outstanding Professor of the Year Award at Kellogg, and was recently named among the “World’s Top 40 B-School professors under the age of 40.”
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Professor Irwin Weil
Professor of Russian Literature and Music - Northwestern University
One has the impression that Professor Irwin Weil was born approximately 12 months before the launching of Noah's Ark. He was actually born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the context of a family whose members spoke only American English, peppered with a few words of Cincinnati Deutsch. He received his B.A. and M.A. at the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. at Harvard University. In the process of study, he met the work of a writer whom he had never met before, in Cincinnati. That was a man named Dostoevsky, a new name to the young student. When his friends recommended that he read more novels by this man, the young Weil decided he would read that work in its original Russian Language form.In 1947, this started his encounter with the Byzantine like corridors of the Russian Language - its complicated grammar, its powerfully adumbrated style, and its wonderful musical tonalities. In 1948, the young fellow had the opportunity to live in Paris for several months, and he promptly entered the Soviet Consulate to ask for permission to visit a large city where Russian was spoken. The Soviet Diplomats laughed in his face and asked him what world he thought he inhabited.It was only 12 years later,after Kennedy and Khrushchev signed an agreement for cultural exchange, that the 32 year old Weil was able to enter the country then known as the USSR.That was the beginning of over 100 visits to the USSR/Russia, where he did research, taught college courses,and got to know the remarkably attractive side of literally hundreds of acquaintances, and dozens of real friends. His spoken Russian is often taken as native by many people in that fascinating and hospitable country.He has now taught courses in Russian Language and Literature for over sixty years, 46 of them at Northwestern University, where his course on Russian Culture drew 800 students annually . He has also developed unique courses in Russian Music, considered in the context of Russian History and Culture. One not unimportant result is the fact the the Northwestern University Football Team is the only such athletic group in the USA whose members sing Russian Opera in the original language. -
Professor Chris Impey
University Distinguished Professor, University of Arizona
Chris Impey is a University Distinguished Professor and Deputy Head of the Department at the University of Arizona, in charge of academic programs. His research is on observational cosmology, gravitational lensing, and the evolution and structure of galaxies. He has over 170 refereed publications and 60 conference proceedings, and his work has been supported by $20 million in grants from NASA and the NSF. As a professor, he has won eleven teaching awards, and has been heavily involved in curriculum and instructional technology development. Impey is a past Vice President of the American Astronomical Society. He has also been an NSF Distinguished Teaching Scholar, a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, and the Carnegie Council on Teaching’s Arizona Professor of the Year. Impey has written over thirty popular articles on cosmology and astrobiology and authored two introductory textbooks. His has published three popular science books: The Living Cosmos (2007, Random House), How It Ends (2010, Norton) and How It Began (2012, Norton), and has three more in preparation, including one on his work in India with Buddhist monks from Tibet. He was co-chair of the Education and Public Outreach Study Group for the Astronomy Decadal Survey of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Robert Garland
Professor of the Classics - Colgate University
Robert S.J. Garland is the Roy D. and Margaret B. Wooster Professor of the Classics at Colgate University, where he served 13 years as Chair of the Department of the Classics. He was also Director of the Division of the Humanities. He earned his B.A. in Classics from Manchester University, his M.A. in Classics from McMaster University, and his Ph.D. in Ancient History from University College London.
A former Fulbright Scholar and recipient of the George Grote Ancient History Prize, he has educated students and audiences at a variety of levels. In addition to his 25 years teaching Classics at Colgate University, he has taught English and Drama to secondary school students and lectured at universities throughout Britain as well as at the British School of Archaeology in Athens.
He is the author of numerous articles in both academic and popular journals and eleven books capturing details of all aspects of ancient Greek and Roman life, including The Greek Way of Life: From Conception to Old Age; Introducing New Gods: The Politics of Athenian Religion; Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks, and Hannibal. His expertise has been featured in The History Channel's "The True Story of Troy," and he has repeatedly served as a consultant for educational film companies. He has also produced two courses for The Great Courses (formerly The Teaching Company), 'An Integrated History of the Ancient Mediterranean' and 'The Other Side of History' (forthcoming 2012). He is currently writing a book entitled Greek Refugees: An Untold Story.
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Robert J. Allison
Professor and Chair of the History Department - Suffolk University
Robert J. Allison is Professor and Chair of the History Department at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts. He also teaches at the Harvard Extension School and in 1997 received the Petra T. Shattuck Excellence in Teaching Award.
He is the author of The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World 1776-1815; Stephen Decatur: American Naval Hero 1779-1820; A Short History of Boston; and The Boston Massacre. His most recent work is The American Revolution: A Concise History.
Mr. Allison is the president of the South Boston Historical Society, a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and vice president of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.
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Tim Chartier
Associate Professor of Mathematics - Davidson College
Tim Chartier is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Davidson College. He is a recipient of a national teaching award from the Mathematical Association of America. Published by Princeton University Press, Tim coauthored Numerical Methods: Design, Analysis, and Computer Implementation of Algorithms with Anne Greenbaum. As a researcher, Tim has worked with both Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories on the development and analysis of computational methods targeted to increase efficiency and robustness of numerical simulation on the lab’s supercomputers, which are among the fastest in the world. Tim’s research with and beyond the labs was recognized with an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.
Tim serves on the Editorial Board for Math Horizons, a mathematics magazine of the Mathematical Association of America. He also on the Advisory Board of YourMusicOn (YMO), a mobile music startup company and the Advisory Council for the Museum of Mathematics, which will be the first museum of mathematics in the United States and opens in December 2012. Tim has been a resource for a variety of media inquiries which includes fielding mathematical questions for the Sports Science program on ESPN. He also writes for the Science blog of the Huffington Post.
As an artist, Tim has trained at Le Centre du Silence mime school and Dell’Arte School of International Physical Theater. He also studied in master classes with Marcel Marceau. Tim has taught and performed mime throughout the United States and in national and international settings.
In his time apart from academia, Tim enjoys the performing arts, mountain biking, nature walks and hikes, and spending time with his family.
Learn more about Prof. Chartier's teaching, research and presentations with mime and math on his blog.
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Tim Chartier
Associate Professor of Mathematics - Davidson College
Tim Chartier is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Davidson College. He is a recipient of a national teaching award from the Mathematical Association of America. Published by Princeton University Press, Tim coauthored Numerical Methods: Design, Analysis, and Computer Implementation of Algorithms with Anne Greenbaum. As a researcher, Tim has worked with both Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories on the development and analysis of computational methods targeted to increase efficiency and robustness of numerical simulation on the lab’s supercomputers, which are among the fastest in the world. Tim’s research with and beyond the labs was recognized with an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.
Tim serves on the Editorial Board for Math Horizons, a mathematics magazine of the Mathematical Association of America. He also on the Advisory Board of YourMusicOn (YMO), a mobile music startup company and the Advisory Council for the Museum of Mathematics, which will be the first museum of mathematics in the United States and opens in December 2012. Tim has been a resource for a variety of media inquiries which includes fielding mathematical questions for the Sports Science program on ESPN. He also writes for the Science blog of the Huffington Post.
As an artist, Tim has trained at Le Centre du Silence mime school and Dell’Arte School of International Physical Theater. He also studied in master classes with Marcel Marceau. Tim has taught and performed mime throughout the United States and in national and international settings.
In his time apart from academia, Tim enjoys the performing arts, mountain biking, nature walks and hikes, and spending time with his family.
Learn more about Prof. Chartier's teaching, research and presentations with mime and math on his blog.
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Victor Strandberg
Professor of English - Duke University
Born in New Hampshire (1935), raised in Central Massachusetts; A.B. Clark University, 1957; PhD in English and American Literature, Brown University, 1962; Taught at University of Vermont, 1962-1966; at Duke University, 1966-present.
Published books on Robert Penn Warren, William James, William Faulkner, and Cynthia Ozick; essays on many 19th and 20th century American writers. Most of these writings are freely available (or soon will be) at Duke University website, tap "dukespace," then "faculty scholarship." Fulbright Senior Lecturer in American Literature in Sweden (Uppsala, 1973), Belgium (Louvain, 1980), Germany (Mannheim, 1987), and the Czech Republic (Olomouc, 2001). Also taught in Japan (Kobe College, 1994) and Morocco (Marrakech, 1987). Married 1961 to Penelope Hamilton; two daughters, Anne and Susan.