Emerson welcomes new 2012 faculty
Several academic departments have welcomed new full-time faculty members for the 2012–2013 academic year.
“The new faculty are a great group,” said Vice President for Academic Affairs Linda Moore. “They bring with them a wealth of knowledge and experience that will complement the good work of the faculty they are joining.”
Meet Emerson’s 14 new full-time faculty:
Jessica Baldwin-Philippi
Visiting Faculty in Civic Media
Visual and Media Arts
Jessica Baldwin-Philippi’s work focuses on citizenship, civic engagement, and digital media and is rooted in the fields of political communication, rhetoric, and science and technology studies. Her research is fundamentally concerned with how engagement with new technologies can restructure forms of political participation and ideas about citizenship, and has covered a variety of topics from political campaigns to video games. In addition to teaching at Emerson, she is currently a researcher in the Engagement Game Lab. She holds an MA and PhD in communication studies from Northwestern University.
Sharmishtha Roy Chowdhury
Historian-in-Residence
Journalism
Sharmishtha Roy Chowdhury is a historian of modern Europe with a special interest in modern world history. She comes to Emerson College after 11 years of teaching at the University of Connecticut, Stamford. She received her PhD from Northwestern University in modern French history with a sub-specialization in the Modern Middle East. With a master’s degree in Modern Indian history from Jawahar lal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, Chowdhury has had extensive experience researching and teaching a wide range of courses in both Western and non-Western history. She is particularly interested in cultural and intellectual history in the politics of culture and ideology during the modern age.
Chowdhury has presented her scholarly work at conferences and is completing a scholarly work on the cultural politics of the French officer corps between the First and Second World Wars. Her forthcoming historical novel, The Communist Cookbook (Penguin Books, India) is set in India during the Second World War and explores the political turbulence and the ideological transitions of the mid-20th century.
Marianna Edmunds
Journalist-in-Residence
Journalism
Marianna (Mimi) Edmunds has been a broadcast journalist and documentary filmmaker for the last 28 years with CBS News, 60 Minutes, PBS, and Discovery.
She has taught broadcast journalism at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School; most recently, she served as director of the Film Program at Maine Media College and Workshops, where she serves on the MFA Committee in Film.
Paul Hackett
Executive-in-Residence
Marketing Communication
Paul Hackett has taught and conducted research on research methods, design, and statistics for 25 years at such institutions as Tufts University and Texas A&M in the U.S., and at Worcester University and Cardiff University in the U.K. While at Birmingham Business School, Hackett became interested in consumer research theory and psychological/behavioral explanations of consumer behavior. His research interests also include facet theoretical approaches to research, consumers’ environmental concern and its measurement, along with consumer behavior and measurement of that behavior in a variety of settings.
Hackett has published numerous books, chapters, and journal articles in the area of quantitative methodology. His research has appeared in Psychometrika, International Review of Retail, Distribution, and Consumer Research; Environment and Behavior; the British Journal of Management; and other prestigious journals.
A practicing artist, Hackett has a doctorate in fine arts. His mixed media paintings, which draw heavily on neuroscience to depict the physiological and psychological basis of visual perception, have been exhibited in Scotland, Iceland, and New York State. Also a Chartered Psychologist and Chartered Scientist in the U.K., Hackett is an associate fellow of the British Psychological Society, a fellow of the British Statistical Society, and a member of the American Statistical Association, the Facet Theory Association, and the Massachusetts Psychological Association.
Spencer Kimball
Scholar-in-Residence
Communication Studies
Spencer Kimball’s research focuses on the use of the Internet and social marketing in 21st-century political campaigns. He has experience in local, state, and national races.
Kimball teaches the Political Communication Capstone course for graduating seniors and is the advisor for the Emerson Pre-Law Society. He specializes in public opinion polling, and his use of automated polling has transformed political campaign communication message strategies.
Kimball is also a small business owner, serving as the founder and CEO of Kimball Political Consulting, LLC. KPC provides survey research, message strategy, and organization to political campaigns around the country. Its client list includes presidential candidates, U.S. Senators, members of Congress, governors, and state legislators from more than 30 states since 2002.
Walter Klenhard
Visiting Screenwriter-in-Residence
Visual and Media Arts
Walter Klenhard is a filmmaker with varied and extensive credits. He began writing professionally in 1988 with the two-hour pilot for the ABC movie series B.L Stryker, starring Burt Reynolds. Since then he has written more than 20 produced films. Based at Universal Studios, he had a development deal for more than a decade.
In 1993, he received an Edgar Award nomination by the Mystery Writers of America for The Last Hit. More recently, he wrote the screenplay for Bringing Ashley Home (Lifetime Television Network, 2012). This true story was nominated for two Prism Awards (Best Drama and Best Performance, winning for the latter).
Klenhard directed his first film, The Haunting of Seacliff Inn in 1994, starring Ally Sheedy. He has directed six other movies, shooting in locations as far reaching as Nova Scotia, Vancouver Island, and the Australian Outback. His most recent directing credit was Lies Between Friends (Hallmark Channel, 2010), starring Gabrielle Anwar.
As a producer, his credits include both movies and network television series. He was supervising producer on the ABC series Extreme, starring James Brolin. Klenhard began his career as an actor. As a teenager, he studied theater in England and later continued at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1977, he turned professional and for the next decade appeared in numerous films and television shows. His credits include Midway, Tom Horn and, on TV, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He is a member of the Writers Guild of America, the Directors Guild, and the Screen Actors Guild.
Joanne Lasker
Associate Professor
Communication Sciences and Disorders
Joanne Lasker’s teaching and research focus is on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), specifically for adults living with acquired neurogenic disorders. She has published numerous papers and chapters related to assessment and treatment of adults with acquired communication disorders who may benefit from augmentative and alternative communication techniques, in particular people living with aphasia.
Her work has been published in several refereed journals, including Augmentative and Alternative Communication, Journal of Medical Speech-Language Pathology, and Clinical Aphasiology. In collaboration with Kathryn L. Garrett, Lasker created an online assessment tool titled the Multimodal Communication Screening Test for People with Aphasia (MCST-A). The tool is designed for people with aphasia who may be suitable for AAC intervention. She has received funding to systematically investigate a treatment technique combining speech-generating devices and speech practice for adults with apraxia of speech.
Lasker participated as a member of the Medicare Implementation Team panel, a group of professionals who advocated successfully for Medicare funding of AAC speech-generating devices for adults with acquired communication disorders. In addition, she served for three years on the Steering Committee for the Division on AAC as part of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. In 2009, Lasker and Garrett won the ASHA Leader Outstanding Contribution Award for Speech-Language Pathology, for their article titled, “Aphasia and AAC: Enhancing Communication Across Health Care Settings.”
De-nin Lee
Assistant Professor
Visual and Media Arts
De-nin Lee is an art historian and specializes in the history of art in China. She is author of The Night Banquet: A Chinese Scroll in Time (University of Washington, 2010), which examines the long cultural life a Chinese handscroll painting from legends of its 10th-century origins in imperial visual desire and surveillance to textual interventions made by viewers through the centuries. She has contributed to anthologies and museum catalogues, including The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (Chinese University, 2010), A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture (Blackwell, 2011), and China’s Imperial Modern: The Painter’s Craft (University of Alberta, 2012). Her work has also been published in Word & Image, Journal of the American Oriental Society, and Journal of Song-Yuan Studies. She has been the recipient of an NEH summer stipend and Fulbright Grant. Her current research examines how women as viewers and colophon writers participated in the culture of Chinese painting. She has also taught at Bowdoin College and Deep Springs College.
Anthony Lowrie
Associate Professor
Marketing Communication
Anthony Lowrie was a professor of marketing at Minnesota State University and, earlier, an Economic and Social Research Council research fellow at the Judge School of Business, Cambridge University. He also earned his PhD in marketing higher education from Cambridge. He has published on branding higher education, the promotion of relevance in higher education, accreditation of business schools, research networks, service encounters in the classroom, and the influence of professor characteristics on student satisfaction and dissatisfaction. He’s also co-editor of the Journal of Marketing for Higher Education and founding chair of the American Marketing Association special interest group on Marketing for Higher Education. Lowrie delivered a keynote address at the International Conference on Higher Education Marketing, Cyprus 2012 and is track chair for the Marketing for Higher Education competitive track at the AMA Winter Educators’ Conference in Las Vegas, 2013. He is also a visiting reader at the University of Surrey, Guildford, England.
Rhiannon Luyster
Assistant Professor
Communication Sciences and Disorders
Luyster is a developmental psychologist who studies social communication in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). She is interested in identifying early features of ASD using standardized behavioral measures as well as exploratory methods like infrared eye tracking and electrophysiology. Her research has focused on diagnostic assessment, language and nonverbal communication in toddlers with ASD, and patterns of early development. She is a lead author on a gold-standard diagnostic instrument for infants and toddlers referred for ASD. Luyster has received research funding from the NIH, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation and the Organization for Autism Research, and she has published her work in several peer-reviewed journals, including Developmental Psychology, Journal of Child Language, Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, and Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
Lu Ann Reeb
Executive-in-Residence
Marketing Communication
Lu Ann Reeb has been teaching in the Department of Marketing Communication since 2009, teaching courses in Public Relations in the graduate and undergraduate programs, and is now joining the College full time. She received her MBA from Sawyer Business School at Suffolk University. Twice an Emmy Award-winning television executive producer, she is also founder of two companies in metro Boston, Boston Media Group and Legal Talk Network, creating content marketing strategies with the style and quality of television and radio in order to reach target audiences in various industry sectors.
Prior to her experience developing unique marketing and public relations strategies for the corporate world, Reeb was a television journalist for 20 years as a reporter, producer, news director, and executive producer of WBZ-TV News in Boston. She produced documentaries and major market TV news programs, covering the people and events making news, including U.S. Presidents, major court cases, the world’s first artificial heart implant, a deadly Air Canada plane crash, John Glenn’s second space flight, and the Boston Marathon.
Reeb has received Associated Press awards and community advocacy awards in four television markets. In 2008, she was named a lifetime member of the International Honor Society of Beta Gamma Sigma, and honored with a postgraduate Academic Leadership Award from Suffolk University in 2010. Reeb is a frequent speaker and moderator in marketing industry seminars, business conferences, and academia, on such topics as “The Media Shift,” “Marketing Strategies that Work,” and “Marketing is a 24/7 Job!”
Jane Pierce Saulnier
Lecturer
Communication Studies
Jane Pierce Saulnier is a communication and marketing consultant, specializing in writing for print and web. In addition to teaching at Emerson, she teaches writing and English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) and is active in curriculum development at other area schools. She is also pursuing further education in instructional technology.
Keri Thompson
Lecturer
Communication Studies
Keri Thompson specializes in political communication, rhetoric, and language. Specifically, her interests are in media and politics, presidential rhetoric, and campaign communication. Thompson has extensive public speaking experience and has taught, coached, and lectured on the subject at various schools across the country. She is completing her PhD in communication studies from The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to Texas, she received her MA in communication from Pepperdine University and her BS in speech communication from Bradley University. Thompson is active in both local and national politics and served as an elected member of the Massachusetts Delegation at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. She grew up in a suburb of Boston.
David Magee
Jane and Terry Semel Chair in Screenwriting
Visual and Media Arts
David Magee wrote the screenplay for director Ang Lee’s latest film, Life of Pi, based on the award-winning novel by Yann Martel, which will be released nationwide in November 2012.
Magee’s first script, Finding Neverland, directed by Marc Forster and starring Johnny Depp, went on to be nominated for seven Academy Awards, including one for Best Adapted Screenplay. Magee’s screenplay was also nominated for the Golden Globe, the Broadcast Film Critics Award, the BAFTA Award, and the London Film Critics Award. He also wrote Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day with Amy Adams and Frances McDormand. Current projects in development include a feature project for Dreamworks Animation, a television pilot for CBS, and a film based on the life of Jim Henson.
He has been a regular advisor at the eQuinoxe Screenwriting Conference in Germany and Project Hot House in Ireland in 2012; he taught a workshop in Mumbai in October as part of an extension program for the Mumbai Film Festival.
Magee originally studied theater directing, design, and acting. Along the way, he also did extensive voiceover work, including the narration of several audiobooks, which led to the opportunity to write the abridgements of novels for audio recording. Over the course of five years he wrote the abridgements of 85 novels, including bestsellers by notable authors from nearly every genre.
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