Faculty in the Honors College are scholars that represent the broad range of disciplines on the UAlbany campus. Rather than a few instructors teaching many of the honors courses, at UAlbany a professor chooses to teach an honors course every few years. This provides a wide range of courses for our students.
Actively Involved
All faculty teaching Honors College courses have a history of strong undergraduate teaching and active involvement with undergraduates. Many have won awards for their teaching and for their service to the university. All are active researchers and scholars who create knowledge as well as impart it to their studies.
Following is a list of the faculty members who taught Honors College courses in academic year 2007-2008. Click on a faculty member's name to visit their website.
Victor Asal
Assistant Professor, Political Science
Professor Asal's research interest is the interaction of international relations and domestic politics, particularly how this interaction influences ethnic conflict and ethnic terrorism.
Judith Barlow
Professor, English Department
Professor Barlow's areas of interest include American drama, women playwrights, and expository writing.
Thomas Bass
Professor, English Department
Professor Bass' areas of interests include creative nonfiction writing.
Ronald Berger
Professor, History Department
Professor Berger's areas of interest include early modern Britain, economics, and gender in history.
Joel Berkowitz
Associate Professor; Chair of the Judaic Studies Department
Professor Berkowitz teaches courses on modern Jewish literature, theatre, history, and film.
Brett Bowles
Associate Professor, French Studies
Professor Bowels' areas of expertise include: Politics, society, and mass media; contemporary France; European Union; French and European film; documentary film.
Arthur Brenner
Adjunct instructor, Judaic Studies
Dr. Brenner's primary area of interest is European Jewish history
Ariel Caticha
Professor, Physics Department
Professor Caticha's research interests include: Entropy and Probability as tools for Inductive Reasoning; Information Geometry.
Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Statistical Mechanics and General Relativity. X-Ray Optics: Theories of the diffraction, scattering and emission of x rays.
Seth Chaiken
Associate Professor, Computer Science
Professor Chaiken's research interests are in combinatorial theory and linear algebra and their applications to electronic circuits, computer architecture, algorithms, and computational geometry.
Thomas Church
Professor, Political Science
Professor Church's research interests include environmental law and policy, the general relationship of law and public policy, judicial administration, and court reform.
Rachel Cohon
Associate Professor, Philosophy Department
Professor Cohen teaches graduate courses in moral theory, including such topics as consequentialism vs. deontology vs. virtue ethics, moral realism, the normativity of ethics, and eighteenth century moral philosophy.
John Delano
Distinguished Teaching Professor, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Professor Delano is investigating (a) the impact history of the Earth/Moon system for its implications on the sustainability of earliest life on Earth, (b) the oxidation state of the mantle-derived volatiles that would have contributed to the composition of the Earth's early atmosphere, and (c) in collaboration with Professor James Ferris at RPI, the possible role of montmorillonites for oligomerization of RNA monomers on the early Earth.
J. Kevin Doolen
Associate Professor and Department Chair, Theatre Department
Mr. Doolen’s directing and teaching awards include the Commitment to Education Award presented by Alpha Psi Omega, the National Honors Dramatic Fraternity, in which he is a lifetime member, and three Kennedy Center directing awards (Lonely Planet, The Boys Next Door, Mr.Bundy). His productions of Lonely Planet, Interview/Applicant and A False Sense of Superiority (student-written) were all invited to region 7 of KC/ACTF; Fool for Love, and Act III of Quartermaine’s Terms were invited to region 1 of KC/ACTF.
Jesse Ernst
Ingrid Fisher
Assistant Professor and Chair, Accounting
Professor Fisher's research interests include information systems, financial accounting standards drafting, and digital representation of financial accounting standards.
David Griggs-Janower
Professor, Music Department
Professor Janower's primary area of interest is choral music. He is a frequent contributor to The Choral Journal, writing on a diverse group of composers, including Bach, Bruckner, Mendelssohn, and American composers William Grant Still and George F. Bristow.
Charles Hartman
Professor, East Asian Studies
Professor Hartman's research interests include: Literary Inquisitions during the Sung dynasty (960-1279); the relationship between state power and literature; Iconology and Meaning in the Chinese Literary Visual Arts; the meaning of visual imagery common to both poetry and painting in traditional China.
Martin Hildebrand
Professor, Mathematics and Statistics
Professor Hildebrand's interests include probability on finite groups, combinatorics, hyperbolic 3-manifolds
Janell Hobson
Assistant Professor, Women's Studies
Professor Hobson's areas of research include women of the African Diaspora, interdisciplinary approaches to literature, film, visual and popular culture, and theoretical frameworks for global critical race feminism.
John Justeson
Professor, Anthropology Department
Professor Justeson's research focuses theoretically on evolution and adaptation in the organization of symbolic systems, chiefly on writing systems and spoken languages, and culturally on ancient Mesoamerica.
Brenda Kirkwood
Public Health
William Lanford
Professor, Physics Department
Professor Lanford's research interests include archaeometry, nuclear physics, and the physics of materials.
Gail Landsman
Associate Professor, Anthropology Department
Professor Landsman's research interests include cultural anthropology, gender, reproduction, feminist theory, disability studies, social movements, American culture, and the Iroquois.
Deborah May
Professor, Educational Psychology and Methodology
Professor May's current research interests include school readiness issues, the use of technology with students with severe disabilities, issues related to the education of students with special needs, and the preparation of special education teachers.
David McCaffrey
Distinguished Teaching Professor and Collins Fellow, Public Administration and Policy
Professor McCaffrey's research interests are the design and behavior of regulatory and self regulatory systems, especially in the financial markets, and processes of cooperation and collaboration.
Bruce Miroff
Professor, Political Science
Professor Miroff's academic and teaching areas include the presidency, political leadership, American political theory, and American political development.
Nancy Newman
Assistant Professor, Music Department
Professor Newman's areas of interest include European and American musical practices since 1800, film music, and gender studies.
Vivien Ng
Associate Professor, Women's Studies and History
Professor Ng's primary area of research interest is Asian American studies.
Steven Plotnick
Professor, Mathematics and Statistics
Professor Plotnick's areas of interest include low-dimensional topology and geometry, knot theory, transformation groups, combinatorial group theory.
R. Michael Range
Professor, Mathematics and Statistics
Professor Range’s research interests include multidimensional complex analysis, integral representations, boundary regularity of the Cauchy-Riemann equations, spaces of holomorphic functions in several variables, and function algebras.
Robert Rosellini
Distinguished Teaching Professor, Psychology Department
Professor Rosellini's research interests include associative learning processes in invertebrates (Drosophila Melanogaster), animal learning and behavior, controllability and predictability of stress, and animal models of psychopathology and addiction
David Rousseau
Professor, Political Science
Professor Rousseau’s research interests focus on military conflict, shared identity, political development, and foreign policy.
Martha Rozett
Professor, English Department
Professor Rozett's areas of interest include Renaissance literature and Shakespeare studies.
Christopher Smith
Professor, Geography and Planning
Professor Smith's areas of interest include urban social geography and East Asian (especially Chinese) cities.
Lawrence Snyder
Professor, Chemistry Department
Professor Synder's areas of interest include quantum chemical studies of the chemistry and physics of crystalline silicon and its defects, particularly those containing hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur; related research is conducted on other wide-gap semiconductors.
Scott Tenenbaum
Assistant Professor, Biomedical Sciences, School of Public Health
Professor Tenenbaum's interests include using genomic array technologies to study RNA binding proteins and their role in regulating in posttranscriptional gene expression in cancer and viral replication.
Michael Werner
Associate Professor, Art Department
Professor Werner's research focuses on the Balkan provinces of the Roman empire.
Laura Wilder
Assistant Professor, English Department
Professor Wilder current research interest is in refining the methodologies she applies to literary studies in investigations of hierarchical discourse communities outside of academia, such as transitory ones that develop around a controversial issue in our media-rich but not always interactive "public sphere." She also plans to examine the writing processes and motivations of contemporary poets and novelists.
Alissa Pollitz Worden
Associate Professor, Criminal Justice
Professor Worden's research interests include the study of decision making in criminal courts, particularly decision making under conditions of high discretion; exploration of the attitudes and values of criminal court actors; and modeling the links between public opinion on crime and justice issues, on the one hand, and formal policy and local criminal justice practices, on the other.
please call (518) 442-9067 or send email to honors@uamail.albany.edu.
