Michael Letts was the 1984 Outstanding Graduating Senior of the NMU Department of Art and Design, with a BFA in Painting. He received an MFA in Painting in 1986 from The Ohio State University. His paintings have won numerous awards in competitive exhibits throughout the Midwest. In 1994, he received a Teaching Certificate in Art and English from NMU. Michael has taught at North Star Academy and Gwinn Schools, and has continued in the NMU Department of Art & Design as an Adjunct Professor. He also has extensive experience in the construction industry, and was employed by NMU Engineering and Planning as Project Academic Coordinator for the construction of the Seaborg Science Center/New Science Building. He was a founding member of the Oasis Gallery in Marquette, and served as a Curator of Exhibitions for the Cielo Gallery in Ishpeming. He is committed to promoting the arts in the UP, and remains professionally active as an artist and a musician
Melissa Matuscak received her BFA in Graphic Communications from Northern Michigan University and an MA in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her graduate work focused on how contemporary art institutions facilitate the production of site-specific installations in post-industrial cities. In 2006, she co-organized a symposium in Chicago about the use of the arts to revitalize economies and communities. Melissa was co-founder of Two Thirty One: House of Muses (Marquette, MI) and has held positions at Walsh Gallery (Chicago, IL), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (North Adams, MA), The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation (Chicago, IL), and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. When not speaking out, writing about or talking about art, she enjoys sewing, photography, blogging and nature.
Assistant Professor Mitsutoshi Oba received his Ph.D. in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2004 with his dissertation “Eclectic Symbolism: The Interplay of Japonisme and Classicism in the Folding Screens by Thomas Wilmer Dewing, 1896-1900.” Dr. Oba has taught a variety of courses on art history and visual culture at the University of the South (Sewanee, TN), Hunter College (New York City), and state universities in New York and Connecticut. He researches primarily on American art, Japanese art, and cross-cultural modernism with interdisciplinary and multimedia approaches. His current research topics include synaesthesia and American Symbolism, visual perception of folding screens, correlation between Ruskinism and japonisme in Victorian America, Japanese artists in New York between the World Wars, and Orientalism in postmodern visual culture. Recently, he has organized the exhibition of a Japanese master-printmaker and authored its catalogue.
James Phegan will be joining the School of Art and Design at NMU as the Illustration professor. He grew up in the California Bay Area, and has been working professionally in a variety of illustration and design firms, as well as doing private commissions since high school. He earned a BFA in art from Sonoma State University and an MFA in painting from the University of Iowa. He’s excited to be a part of the art program at NMU and, yes, he’s been warned about the weather, claiming not to mind it. He describes teaching illustration as a balancing act between giving students practical skills and information they will need to be successful in their field, and fostering what is unique and special about each student’s art and career ambitions. “Fortunately, most illustration majors come in with a real passion for what they do, so they’re a lot of fun to work with,” he says. “They’re thrilled that they can actually do what they love for a living. I feel the same way.”
Jane Shellenbarger was born in Detroit, Michigan. She received her B.F.A. degree from the Kansas City Art Institute, and her M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Following graduate school, she was a resident artist at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, Helena, Montana. Her studio pottery, Mill Station Pottery, was established in rural Hale, Michigan in 1997. She has been an Assistant Professor at the Kansas City Art Institute since 2002. She has also taught at the University of Northern Iowa, Penland School of Crafts, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and Arrowmont School of Crafts. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, and The University Museum, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
Adriana Greci Green earned her doctorate in Anthropology with a specialization in Native American Studies from Rutgers University (2001). Her fields of interest include art and material culture; cultural performance; the representation of Native Americans in museums and popular culture; issues of repatriation; ethnohistory; museum and heritage studies; and the cultural and material expressions of sovereignty and treaties. Her areas of specialization are the Plains and Great Lakes regions, and she has expertise in museum and exhibition practices. Adriana’s doctoral work focused on Lakota cultural performances at Rosebud and Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and innovatively used ethnographic, collections and archival research on art and clothing to examine how dances and celebrations in the early reservation period offered Lakota people an opportunity to resist the colonial system and maintain a sense of their own identity. More recently, she has been working with Odawa and Ojibwa artists in Michigan and Ontario documenting Anishinaabe quill work on birchbark, both historically and today. She is collecting oral histories of artists and developing a formal analysis of this art form. Adriana has served as Executive Director of the Nokomis Native American Learning Center in Okemos, Michigan, where she organized educational programs and exhibitions on Michigan Native arts and traditions and led a project developing a standards-based curriculum to help middle school teachers and students understand the concept of sovereignty and the history of treaty negotiations in Michigan. Previously, she has taught at Michigan State University, Seton Hall University and Rutgers University.
Kenn Pitawanakwat is from Wikwemikong (Wiky) Unceded Reserve on Manitoulin Island Ontario Canada and is fluent in the Odawa-Ottawa dialect of the Three Fires Confederacy. Kenn is educated with an Honors B.A. from York University and in Radio and Television Arts from Ryerson University. He has also completed the first intake of the Native Language Instructors Program at Lakehead University. From his education at York University Kenn is versed in Native American Religions, the Goddess and Women’s studies, the Hebrew Bible, Early Christianity, Anthropology, and Liberation Theology. From his Ryerson University education, Kenn operated a successful video production business and has continued to write as a business and community reporter. From his education in early Canadian and American Literature, Kenn is confidant of the gifts he brings to the table. Kenn serves as a consultant to select health professions and academics. Kenn Pitawanakwat is a Naturalist at home deep in the forest or as an educator in the classroom.
Assistant Professor Se Li (“Lisa”) hails from Beijing, China. Lisa earned her B.S. and M.S. degrees in China before coming to the U.S. In 2000 she earned her Ph.D. in computational chemistry at the University of Georgia under the direction of Professor Henry Schaefer. She comes to NMU following several years of postdoctoral research with Professor Steven Bachrach at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Lisa says working in computational chemistry is a lot of fun and she likes to be able to visualize the molecular three-dimensional structures on the computer. Her current research is about the solvent effect on the organic reactions, in particular she studies the dramatic molecular changes between the gas and solution phases of reactions. She also loves teaching and spending time with students. Lisa will be primarily teaching in the organic and general chemistry courses for the department. In her spare time Lisa enjoys hiking, traveling, and cooking.
Jennifer Gilkins joins the CAPS Department as an Instructor, replacing Tom Isaacson who left to pursue a Ph.D. at Michigan State University. Jen brings a background in Sports Management and Communication to the department from the University of Delaware where she earned both her B.S. and her M.A. degrees. While at Delaware, she was a member, and 2004-2005 captain, of the Fightin’ Blue Hens Division I softball team, coached youth softball, and interned in the athletic ticket office. With this academic and co-curricular background, the department looks forward to the contribution Jen will make in teaching courses in our expanding program in Entertainment and Sports Promotion as well as teaching basic speech communication courses.
Sara Poggi fills an enhancement position focused on speech communication as an Instructor in the CAPS Department. Sara has a B.A. in Communication Education from Monmouth College and an M.S. in Instructional and Interpersonal Communication from Illinois State University. While at Illinois State, she had the opportunity to implement political engagement through the American Democracy Project, a form of Academic Service Learning, in the sections of the basic communication course she taught. Besides service learning, Sara is also interested in media literacy and assessment, and a paper she submitted to the National Communication Association in 2006 on Assessing Informational Literacy Instruction received the top paper award from the Basic Course Division.
Mark Shevy fills a vacant Assistant Professorship in the CAPS Department created by a late resignation two years ago. Mark holds a B.A. from Michigan State in Telecommunications, and M.S. from Colorado State in Journalism, and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in Mass Communication. He was bitten by the media bug as a student disc jockey at Michigan Tech, and along with an academic background brings industry experience in both television news, KGWN in Cheyenne, WY, and satellite broadcasting, Echostar Corporation, to the department where he’ll teach both media production and theory courses. Mark is interested in cognitive and emotional responses to media, how audio and visual elements in media interact, and the effects of narrative structure. His work on Affective Dimension of News Content, and Effect After September 11th have been published in the Journal of Broadcasting.
April Bertucci joined the Economics Department in August of 2006 as Senior Secretary. She also provides secretarial support for the History, Philosophy, and Political Science Departments. April received an Associates Degree in General Business from NMU in 1986. Employed by NMU for 10 years, April started in 1986 and resumed her career in 2004 after taking time off to raise her children. April lives in Ishpeming with her husband and three daughters. Her favorite activities include; walking, baking, and spending time with her family.
Dr. Julie Urban is an Associate Professor at UW – Marinette. Her degree is from the University of New Mexico and her major field is Natural Economics. Her graduate work focused on water allocation issues in the southwestern United Stated. She has also taught for the University of New Mexico and the Chinese Agriculture University in Beijing. Before teaching full-time Dr. Urban was a senior gas supply planner for the Public Service Company of New Mexico. Her most recent work published in the Journal of Energy and Development focused on the increasing price of natural gas. She was active in developing the Environmental Studies Certificate and developed the principles of micro and macro online courses for the UW Colleges. Besides economics, she enjoys bicycling, cross-country skiing, and kayaking.
Anthony Adah, Instructor of English, is replacing Jaspal Singh this year while she is on sabbatical. He is completing his Ph.D. at the Graduate Drama Centre, University of Toronto. His dissertation concentrates on body and identity in Aboriginal cinemas from Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. His teaching and research interests are comparative post-colonial cinemas and literatures. He has taught world literatures and media arts at College level in Nigeria, South Africa, Papua New Guinea and Canada. An accomplished actor/director for the stage, Anthony has also published articles on post-colonial drama and film.
Assistant Professor Rebecca Johns’ first novel, Icebergs, was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Hemmingway Award. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and her undergraduate degrees from the University of Missouri. She has been an editor at Highlights for Children and Women’s Day magazines and a copywriter at Penguin Putnam. Her writing has been widely published in such magazines as Brides, Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan, Fitness, LIFE, Mademoiselle, Self and Seventeen and she is currently at work on a second novel and a book of short stories.
Jamie Logsdon Kuehnl, Instructor of English, earned her Bachelor’s Degree in English/Native American Studies from Northern Michigan University in 2002, and her Master’s Degree in Literature from N.M.U. in 2004. Her main areas of emphasis throughout her graduate studies have been in post-colonial and Native American Literatures. Currently, Jamie is a doctoral student of Women’s Literature and Spirituality from the California Institute of Integral Studies (C.I.I.S.) in San Francisco, where her focus is the sacred dimensions of ancient oral and written traditions. She has presented research at several national academic conferences and is set to be published this year. Jamie’s personal interests revolve around her two children: Jessee David and Jasmine Victoria, and her academic interests include archetypal mythology, eco-feminism, and comparative literature.
Bronwyn Mills, Assistant Professor of English, received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from New York University in New York City, and comes to NMU from an academic appointment in Istanbul, Turkey. At NYU, she specialized in Caribbean and African Diasporic Literatures and Performance and wrote her dissertation, Maps, Cosmograms, And The Caribbean Imagination, under the direction of Kamau Brathwaite and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Bronwyn’s Master of Fine Arts degree was awarded in poetry under James Tate; and she is currently revising a novel, Beastly, for publication in London. Her chapter on Simone de Beauvoir, “Second Sex; ‘Third World’ Female; Simone de Beauvoir and the Postcolonial Woman,” has been translated into Turkish and will appear in the forthcoming book about Beauvoir edited by Dr. Gonul Bakay. Bronwyn writes regularly for Talisman, A Journal Of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics in New York City. Her latest article, a review article of Guthrie’s Race Music, will be in The Journal of American Studies in Turkey’s forthcoming issue. She has been Senior Editor for Frigate, an online literary journal coming out of New York City and she has also published work on the work of Eduardo Galeano, on the Mexican American war (La Guerra Defensa), and writers in exile. For many years she was a dance and drama critic for a New England arts weekly.
Elizabeth A. Monske, Assistant Professor of English, holds a Ph.D. in English with a specialization in Rhetoric and Writing and cognate in Technical Communication from Bowling Green State University. For three years she taught technical writing courses for Louisiana Tech University and acted as Technical Writing Coordinator. With research interests in on-line education and faculty training, she has published in Computers and Composition and the Journal of Educational Technology and Society. Dr. Monske has also presented and given workshops on various aspects of computers and composition and technical communication, i.e. digital identity, eportfolios, and pedagogy, at conferences and faculty seminars.
Lori Rintala is the new Principal Secretary in the English Department. She has been with the university for 12 years and with the department as Senior Secretary for five. Lori lives in Marquette with her husband and two teenage boys. She enjoys being outdoors and gardening when she is not at the office.
David Wood, Assistant Professor of English, is a specialist in English Renaissance Literature, with particular emphasis on the sixteenth century. He completed his Ph.D. in 2004 at Purdue University, and earned his M.A. and B.A. degrees from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and Skidmore College, respectively. His book manuscript, derived from his dissertation, is tentatively entitled “Very Now: Timing the Subject in English Renaissance Literature,” and he has published related essays on Shakespeare, Sidney, and the Italian baroque painter, Caravaggio. He comes to Northern after three years at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, where the English Department Honor Society granted him its Most Enthusiastic Professor and Best Open Door Policy awards. David and his wife Vicki, along with children Madeleine and Henry, are happily settling into life in Marquette with their dog, Shep.
Angela Zorza is the new Senior Secretary in the English Department. She is originally from Canton, Minnesota, and moved to the UP to attend NMU, from which she graduated in 2001. She started working at NMU in June of 2006 and has been in the English Department since July 2007. She lives in Marquette with her three-year old son and one-year old daughter and enjoys spending her free time with them. She is also a fashion director for Jewels by Park Lane and often holds home jewelry parties in the area.
Carol J. Bell has been appointed to the position of Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. She received a Master of Science degree in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1988 and a Ph.D. degree in Mathematics Education from the University of Texas at Austin in 2001. Before arriving at NMU, Dr. Bell taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in Mathematics Education for six years at the State University of New York College at Cortland. In addition to carrying out her teaching and advising responsibilities, Dr. Bell served at various times during her stay at SUNY Cortland, as Coordinator of Adolescence Mathematics Education, Mathematics Graduate Coordinator, and Assistant Director of Graduate Studies. Dr. Bell is interested in international education, and has traveled to the Czech Republic, Australia, and China.
Akhtar A. Khan, a native of India, joins the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science as an Assistant Professor. He received his Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from the Michigan Technological University in 2005. He has an M.S. in Industrial Mathematics from the University of Kaiserslautern (2000) and an M.S. in Mathematics from Meerut University (1990). Dr. Khan taught for two years at the University of Wisconsin-Barron County prior to coming to NMU. Last year, he was one of the recipients of the Excellence in Teaching Award. Dr. Khan’s areas of research interest include Inverse Problems, Set-Valued Optimization, Variational Inequalities, and Nonsmooth Analysis. He has published more than twenty significant articles in several flagship mathematics journals.
Mary T. Hartson has accepted a one-year appointment in Modern Languages and Literatures to teach Spanish. She is in the final stages of her Ph.D. at Michigan State University. Her area of specialization for her dissertation is Spanish Cinema and Literature. She has several masters' degrees, including one in Information and Library Studies from the University of Michigan and one in Spanish from Middlebury College. She has taught and studied in Spain and lived in Botswana as a Peace Corps volunteer teacher.
David Haynes taught in the Fall and Winter 2006 semester in the Political Science and Public Administration Department. He has accepted a three year term position as an Associate Professor in the Department. He will be teaching in the undergraduate and graduate program. He has previously taught at other universities. This Fall he will be teaching PS 105, American Government; PS 309, State and Local Government and PS 507, Principles of Public Administration. He has also served as a special assistant to a Governor and as a State Ombudsman. He has also worked in the state legislature. Haynes has also worked in the non profit sector and has served on many national and state non profit boards. In addition, David has been a partner in a public policy and crisis management firm that represented some of the nation’s premier non profit and for profit corporations—including Northern Michigan University. Haynes has served on several university committees and task forces. David holds a Juris Doctor degree and is an alumnus of Northern Michigan University where he received his bachelor’s degree and was a political science major. He is married to Martha Haynes, NMU’s Executive Director of Advancement and has two daughters.
