College welcomes 10 full-time faculty members

Emerson College welcomes 10 new full-time faculty members and one visiting scholar for the 2015–2016 academic year as the College continues its commitment to academic excellence in communication and the arts.

School of Communication

Yuri Cataldo, executive-in-residence in the Marketing Communication Department and director of Business and Creative Enterprises, brings years of experience in the arts, design, entrepreneurship, marketing, and publicity to his teaching of creative enterprises. Cataldo will lead curricular planning and programming development for the College’s new major in Business of Creative Enterprises, which plans to launch in the Fall 2016. Cataldo is a classically trained set and costume designer with credits on Broadway, feature and independent films, theater, and opera. He received a BA from Indiana University, conducted independent study at the Julliard School, and earned his MFA at the Yale School of Drama. In 2012, he founded IndigoH20, the only award-winning bottled alkaline water in the world judged in 2015 as the best-tasting water in the world. Named one of the “40 Under 40” entrepreneurs in Indiana, Cataldo is a frequent speaker on the subject of art and entrepreneurship.

Agaptus Anaele, assistant professor in the Marketing Communication Department, recently completed a PhD in communication from Purdue University. He has a master’s degree in international affairs from Ohio University and a bachelor’s degree in English education from University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. His research interests are in digital media and strategic health communication campaigns, engagement and social change, and technology and peace-building. His public work has appeared in Journal of Communication and Journal of Health Communication. He was a print journalist for three leading English national daily newspapers in Nigeria, received several awards for outstanding media coverage on health issues in Nigeria, and earned a Ford Foundation International Fellowship in 2007. He has been a project manager and research assistant on large grants, including Heart Health Indiana and the Purdue Peace Project that seeks to reduce the likelihood of violence in Africa. Anaele will teach graduate and undergraduate courses in digital culture, advertising, and e-commerce.

Hong Li, visiting scholar in the School of Communication, is a professor and chair of the English Department at the School of International Studies at Communication University of China in Beijing. Li received her Ph.D. in 2008 and has previous degrees in English, literature, advertising, and journalism. She was previously a visiting scholar at the Centre of Comparative Media Study and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. Her academic interests include global media, language learning, debate, and interpersonal communication. 

School of the Arts

Susanne Althoff, assistant professor in the Writing, Literature and Publishing Department, earned an MS in journalism from Columbia University and a BA in writing and media from Loyola University. Before joining Emerson this fall, Althoff was editor-in-chief of The Boston Globe Magazine, a post she held for six years. Althoff worked at the Globe for a dozen years, during which she re-launched the Sunday magazine, oversaw the creation of digital content, and helped pursue new revenue streams, such as apps and e-books. Althoff worked as a magazine editor for 22 years and has written for various publications, including the Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun. She previously taught women’s media courses at Tufts University.

Maria Agui Carter, artist-in-residence in the Visual and Media Arts Department, is an award-winning filmmaker and a former in-house producer for WGBH-TV. She founded Iguana Films in 2000, and writes, produces, and directs both dramatic and documentary works that are broadcast and screened internationally. She recently worked on the PBS features No Job for a Woman as a producer and Rebel as a writer, director, and producer. Her new play, 14 Freight Trains, is about the first American soldier to die in Iraq, an undocumented Latino, which premiered at Arena Stage in the fall of 2014. Agui Carter is a trustee of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers and a member of the Writer’s Guild of America. She has been a winner of Warren, CPB, George Peabody Gardner, and Rockefeller fellowships, and has been a visiting scholar at Harvard, Tulane, and Brandeis universities.

Karim Bavand, assistant professor in the Visual and Media Arts Department, will teach media production with an emphasis on studio television. Bavand makes documentary films and TV programs through his production company, Be Positive Pictures. His documentary Nation of Exiles, chronicling the emergence of Iran’s Green Movement, played at festivals internationally. He worked as associate producer and cinematographer on Rachel Lyon’s Hate Crimes in the Heartland, which was screened at festivals around the country and is currently on a national tour. Bavand earned a BA in government and political science at the University of Texas-Dallas and an MFA at the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. Bavand was previously a lecturer in media production at Northern Kentucky University.

Lindsay Beamish, assistant professor in the Performing Arts Department, will teach acting. Beamish received an MFA in acting from University of California Davis and a BA in theatre arts from UC Santa Cruz. She also holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Wyoming. Beamish debuted in Miranda July’s short film Nest of Tens and went on to critical acclaim in John Cameron Mitchell’s film Shortbus, for which she was nominated for a Gotham Independent Film Award. She’s performed with Susan Sarandon and Pierce Brosnan in The Greatest and starred with Christopher Denham in Forgetting the Girl. Beamish has co-starred in a number of episodes of television series, including CSI, Six Feet Under, The Gilmore Girls, and Strong Medicine.

Calina Ciobanu, scholar-in-residence in the Writing, Literature and Publishing Department, will teach the courses Literary Foundations, British Literature, and Global Literatures. Ciobanu received both an MA and a PhD in English from Duke University, where she wrote a dissertation on disposability in the contemporary novel, focusing on works by J.M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Margaret Atwood. She is the recipient of the Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowship from Duke, where she taught literature, writing, and women’s studies. Her work has been published in The Minnesota Review and Modern Fiction Studies.

Robert Dulgarian, scholar-in-residence in the Writing, Literature and Publishing Department, will teach British Literature and Global English. Dulgarian has been a part-time faculty member at Emerson since 2000 and won the Alan Stanzler Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2009. He earned an MA in German and comparative literature from Stanford University and an AB in German literature from Harvard University, and has studied in France and Germany. He was assistant editor of Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, and he’s currently working on a book project. He has presented widely at conferences, including The Renaissance Society of America and the International Association of Neo-Latin Studies.

Jennifer Porst, scholar-in-residence in the Visual and Media Arts Department, will teach introductory level media history and criticism courses. Porst holds a Master of Education from Northwestern University and an MA and a PhD in cinema and media studies from the University of California Los Angeles, where she received both a Dissertation Year Fellowship and Hugh Downs Graduate Research Fellowship. Her recent publications include “The Preservation of Competition: Hollywood and Antitrust Law” in the anthology Hollywood and the Law and “The U.S. vs. Twentieth Century-Fox, et al., and Hollywood’s Feature Films on Early Television,” in the journal Film History. Porst has previously taught at Santa Barbara City College, California State University, and UCLA.

Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann, assistant professor in the Writing, Literature and Publishing Department, will teach Latin American literature courses. She comes to Emerson from Brown University, where she earned both a PhD and an MA in comparative literature, and where she taught Cuban literature and Spanish. She has a BA in comparative literature and society from Columbia University. Gonzalez Seligmann’s research focuses are on Caribbean, Latin American and Latina/o literatures. Her dissertation examined how Caribbean regionalism emerged in highly influential literary magazines in Spanish, English and French during the 1940s, and she received for it a Cuban Heritage Collection Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. Her work has recently been published in the CLR James Journal and INTI: Revista de literatura hispánica.