FACULTY

John Bushnell (Ph.D. Indiana, 1977; Professor of History) is a Russian historian with many specialties, including peasant culture and contemporary Russian society. He has won awards from the NEH and has been an IREX fellow. His first book was Mutiny amid Repression: Russian Soldiers in the Revolution of 1905-1906, and his Moscow Graffiti: Language and Subculture was published in 1990. He is currently working on a study of Russian peasant marriage from the 1690s to the 1960s, and projects on Russian popular culture, and popular sedition in post-Stalin society.

S. Hollis Clayson (Ph.D. UCLA, 1984; Professor of Art History) is a historian of modern art who specializes in 19th-century Europe, especially France. Her first book, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era, appeared in 1991; reprint 2003. A co-edited thematic study of painting in the Western tradition, Understanding Paintings: Themes in Art Explored and Explained, came out in 2000, and Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life Under Siege (1870-71) was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2002. Two recent articles, "Henri Regnault and Wartime Orientalism," and "Maternity as Alibi in Mary Cassatt's Paintings of Women and Children," and a projected book on Cassatt and/or Cosmopolitanism signal her burgeoning interest in the study of expatriation as a condition of work for Paris-centered artists. She is Chair of the Editorial Board of The Art Bulletin, and has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Kaplan Center for the Humanities, and the Getty Center. She won a WCAS Teaching Award (1987), was the first and only recipient of the College Art Association's Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award to a Junior Professor (1990), held a Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence (1993-96), and was an Associate Dean of the Graduate School (1995-1998). She chaired the Art History Department 2000-03. In 2003-04, she will be a residential Fellow/Scholar at the Clark Art Institute and the Getty Research Institute.

Benjamin Frommer (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1999; Associate Professor of History) specializes in the history of East-Central Europe, with a focus on the periods of Nazi and Communist rule. He is primarily interested in collaboration and resistance under repressive regimes, the use of courts for political ends, the consequences of ethnic cleansing, and the development of modern nationalism. Frommer is the author of National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). During the academic year 2004-2005 he is on leave in Vienna at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen.

Robert E. Lerner (Ph.D. Princeton, 1964; Professor of History), Peter B. Ritzma Professor in the Humanities, is a medieval historian working on millenarian movements, heresy, and religious, intellectual, and cultural history. He has written or co-authored nine books, including The Age of Adversity, The Heresy of the Free Spirit, The Powers of Prophecy, The Feast of Saint Abraham, and Western Civilizations (now in its thirteenth edition). A Fellow of the Medieval Academy and the American Academy in Rome, he has been a member of the Institute of Advanced Study and has won awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, and the Max Planck Society of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Elisa Martí-López (Ph.D. New York University; Associate Professor of Spanish). Elisa Martí-López’s field of specialization is Catalan and Spanish literature and culture, with emphasis on the literature and culture of the nineteenth century, literary history and the novel. Her recent research addresses an apparent paradox that underlies the processes of cultural production and consumption in mid-nineteenth-century Europe--nations at different narrative stages became contiguous literary markets. She has challenged prevailing views of the development of the novel in nineteenth-century Spain by demonstrating how translations and imitations of foreign literary models became the foundation for the development of the bourgeois novel in Spain. Her book Borrowed Words: Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Bucknell UP, 2002) shows how the Spanish novel originated in those foreign texts, how the Spanish writers appropriated and borrowed from the original works to create the beginnings of the novel in Spain. She is currently working on a book that questions the metaphorical value assigned to the capital (of a state) and, specifically, to the literature written about and from the capital as privileged referent for the nation. In this study she is also analyzing literary representations of the city in nineteenth-century Spain, especially in the narrative of Narcís Oller. Some of her scholarly work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bulletin Hispanique, Catalan Review, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, Siglo diecinueve, and The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel from 1880 to the Present.

Sara Monoson (Ph.D. Princeton; Associate Professor of Classics and Political Science, Chairperson, Department of Classics) is the author of Plato's Democratic Entanglements: Athenian Politics and the Practice of Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2000), which was awarded the 2001 Foundations Book Prize for best first book in political theory. She has also written articles on Athenian democratic thought, Thucydides, and international relations theory. She is affiliated with the Department of Classics, the interdisciplinary PhD Program in Theater and Drama, and the Classical Traditions Initiative at Northwestern and with the Chicago-area interschool Graduate Program in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy.

Barbara Newman (Ph.D. Yale; Professor of Classics, English and Religion; John Evans Professor of Latin) is known for her work on medieval religious culture and women's spirituality. Her most recent book, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press), was published in 2002. She is also the author of From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (1995) and three works on Hildegard of Bingen: an edited volume, Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World (1998); an edition and translation of Hildegard's collected songs, Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum (1988, rev. 1998); and Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard's Theology of the Feminine (1987). Professor Newman has been a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern. Her courses in 2003 will be "Medieval Fictions and Modern Novelists," "Women in Contemporary World Religions," "Arthurian Literature," and "Allegory and Gender." Professor Newman is serving as Chair of the Religion Department in 2003-04.

William Paden (Ph.D. Yale; Professor of French). A specialist in the Middle Ages, he is the author of An Introduction to Old Occitan (MLA, 1998) and the editor of essay collections on The Future of the Middle Ages: Medieval Literature in the 1990s (UP of Florida, 1994), and Medieval Lyric: Genres in Historical Context (Illinois UP, 2000). His research and teaching interests include the troubadours and medieval poetry of France and other countries, particularly Spain. Current projects include a history of American interest in the troubadours and a study of the shepherdess as a figure in the history of gender. Professor Paden's recent publications include: "The System of Genres in Troubadour Lyric," in Medieval Lyric: Genres in Historical Context (2000); "The Troubadour's Lady As Seen Through Thick History," in Exemplaria (1999); "Christine de Pizan and the Transformation of Late Medieval Lyric Genres," in The Poetry of Christine de Pizan (1998); "The Figure of the Shepherdess in the Medieval Pastourelle," in Medievalia et Humanistica (1998); "Contrafacture Between Occitan and Galician-Portuguese," in La Corónica (1997); "Manuscripts," in A Handbook of the Troubadours (U of California Press, 1995); "The Troubadours and the Albigensian Crusade: A Long View," in Romance Philology (1995). He has delivered lectures at the Medieval Academy of America, the International Congress on Medieval Studies, the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, the Southeastern Medieval Conference, and the Association Internationale d'Etudes Occitanes (Vienna, 1999) and was invited to the University of Bristol (UK) Colston Symposium, 2003. Professor Paden has twice received Fellowships from the NEH, and directed an NEH Institute on medieval lyric poetry in 1995. He serves on the advisory council of Tenso, published by the Société Guilhem IX (the American society for troubadour studies), of which he has served as President (1985-92) and as Vice-President (1994-99). He is currently serving on the PMLA Advisory Council (1999-2002).

Claudia Swan (Ph.D. Columbia, 1997; Associate Professor of Art History) studies the relations between early modern science and art, with a special emphasis on Netherlandish visual culture 1550-1700. She teaches courses on northern European visual culture, 1400-1700, and art criticism and theory. Her Mimesis and Imagination in 17th-Century Dutch art. Jacques de Gheyn II (1565-1629) is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She has also published The Clutius Botanical Watercolors (1998), a collection of late 16th-century watercolors used in the instruction of medicine at Leiden University; her research was the basis of a 1999 BBC documentary ("The Winter Garden"). She has been a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1998-1999) and a fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin (2002). She is currently working on a book on "The Aesthetics of Possession. Art, Science, and Collecting in the Netherlands 1600-1650;" a co-edited volume (with Londa Schiebinger) on Colonial Botany is in production with the University of Pennsylvania Press. She has published several articles on Dutch visual culture, and is a founding Director of Northwestern's Program in the Study of Imagination (www.psi.northwestern.edu).

Kathleen Thelen (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley; Associate Professor of Political Science) is Norman Dwight Harris Professor in International Relations and and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. Thelen's interests include comparative politics, Western European politics, and political economy of labor in developed democracies. She is the author of Union of Parts: Labor Politics in Postwar Germany (Cornell University Press, 1992) and coeditor of Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 1992). Her articles on labor politics have appeared in World Politics, Politics and Society, Comparative Politics, and Journal of Japanese Politics, among others. She has also published a number of articles on historical institutionalism, including "Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics" (Annual Review of Political Science, 1999). Thelen is currently working on a comparative examination of the historical evolution of cross-national differences in institutions for skill formation. She is an elected officer of the American Political Science Association's organized section on politics and society in Western Europe and Chair of the executive board of the Council for European Studies (national organization of Europeanists).

Robert Wallace (Ph.D. Harvard, 1984; Associate Professor of Classics). Main publications: Poet, Public and Performance in Ancient Greece, ed. with L. Edmunds (Hopkins, 1997); Transitions to Empire. Studies in Greco-Roman History 360-146 B.C. in Honor of Ernst Badian, ed. with E. Harris (Oklahoma, 1996); Harmonia Mundi: Music and Philosophy in the Ancient World ed. with Bonnie MacLachlan (Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica, 1991); and The Areopagos Council, to 307 B.C. (Hopkins, 1989).

Irwin Weil (Professor of Slavics). Research interests: Russian literature and cultural history; Jewish literature and cultural history; Relations between poetry and music, literature and music; and USSR/Russia-USA cultural relations and exchange - extensive teaching, research, and work in the USSR and Russia - periodic lecturing and teaching in Russia, for forty years.