Member Bios

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Richard Maddox, Professor of Anthropology and History, and
Director, Undergraduate Programs

  
  An anthropologist, Maddox also holds advanced degrees in religious studies and humanities. He has done fieldwork in Mexico, Ecuador, and primarily in Spain. His general interests are in the relation between cultural meanings and practices and the exercise of political and economic power. He is the author of the ethnographic and historical study, El Castillo, which won the President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association and the Robert E. Park Award of the Urban and Community Studies Section of the American Sociological Association. He published a study of state and public culture, The Best of All Possible Islands: Seville's Universal Exposition, the New Spain, and the New Europe (2004). His current research interests include microhistory, processes of Europeanization, the cultural politics of education, and the transformation of the countryside in Spain and Europe.
  
     
 

Dan J. Martin, Associate Professor of Drama, Associate Dean of the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, and Director of the Institute for the Management of Creative Enterprises (IMCE)

  
  In the fall of 1996, Martin established and now directs the Carnegie Mellon Center for Arts Management and Technology, now the Institute for the Management of Creative Enterprises, a research, service and training center devoted to the implementation of computer and information technology in the arts management process. Martin also is on the faculty of the European Summer Academy for Cultural Management in Salzburg, Austria, presented by the International Center for Culture Management (ICCM) and serves on the advisory or steering committees of several professional and research institutions. He is a member of the Research Task Force for the Center for Arts and Culture, a non-partisan arts policy institute in Washington, DC, and serves on the advisory board of the Fitzcarraldo Foundation, an arts management training and consulting center in Turin, Italy. Martin is a member of the steering committee of the Arts, Technology and Intellectual Property project of the American Assembly at Columbia University. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Theatre from Western Michigan University and his Master of Fine Arts in Performing Arts Management from Brooklyn College/City University of New York.
  
     
 

Indira Nair, Professor of Engineering and Public Policy, and Vice Provost for Education

  
  Indira Nair holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Northwestern University. She has designed and teaches several interdisciplinary courses including engineering ethics; environmental science, technology and decision making; and, radiation, health and policy. Her research interests include risk assessment, green design, science education, and bioelectromagnetics. Dr. Nair is a consultant to the National Science Foundation's Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering. She is co-author of a book, Journeys of Women in Science and Engineering: No Universal Constants (1997). She was voted a Women of Distinction in 1999 by the National Association of Women in Higher Education (NAWE). She received the Doherty Prize for excellence in education in 1993 and the Undergraduate Advising and Mentoring Award in 1994. She founded the Carnegie Mellon chapter of Student Pugwash to encourage students to think about the social responsibility of science and technology.
  
     
 

Martin Prekop, Professor of Art

  
  Prekop came to Carnegie Mellon from the Art Institute of Chicago where he had been a member of the faculty since 1967 and then dean since 1987. Prekop was appointed dean of the College of Fine Arts and Professor of Art in September 1993. He is a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art, the Cranbrook Academy of Art and received a master’s of fine arts from the Rhode Island School of Design. He also studied at the Slade School of Art in London and was a visiting artist at Newcastle-upon-Tyne Polytechnic Institute, the University of Ulster, Carlisle University, the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Chicago. Prekop is a Fulbright recipient and has received grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. He has had five solo exhibitions at the Cicero Gallery and has also exhibited at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the State of Illinois Gallery. Prekop also headed a committee, sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the U.S. Arts Exchange Program at Columbia University, to design and implement an arts curriculum at the Yunan Art Institute in China.
  
     
 

Melissa Ragona, Assistant Professor of Art

  
  A Center fellow in 2001-2002, Melissa Ragona was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of English during the 2002-2003 school year, where she coordinated the University Film Festival. Ragona's critical and creative work focuses on sound design, film theory and new media practice and reception. Her essay, "Hidden Noise: Strategies of Sound Montage in the Films of Hollis Frampton," appeared in the journal, October in 2004. She also participated in the Princeton conference: Gloria! The Legacy of Hollis Frampton (November 2005) in which she addressed the relationship between film and sculpture in the work of structuralist filmmaker Hollis Frampton and sculptor Carl Andre. Her essay, "From Abstract Expressionism to Popism: Marie Menken's Cinematic Study of an Aesthetics of Surface," is forthcoming in the Duke University Press book, Women Experimental Filmmakers this spring. Two other critical essays, one on the use of sound in the work of filmmaker Paul Sharits, the other on experimental film and sculpture will be appearing in books from University of Minnesota Press and Centre for British Film and Televisions Studies in London, respectively. She is currently working on a book manuscript: Readymade Sound: The Recording Aesthetics of Andy Warhol, which examines Warhol's tape recording projects from the mid-sixties until the late 70s in light of the rich history of audio experiments in modern art in which sound and listening became central objects of study. Ragona is currently Assistant Professor of Art in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.  
     
 

Luis Rico-Gutierrez, Special Faculty in Architecture, and
Associate Dean, College of Fine Arts

  
  Rico-Gutierrez champions the Carnegie Mellon philosophy to provide intensive professional learning experiences for students. Before coming to Carnegie Mellon, Rico-Gutierrez instructed students in Urban and Computer Aided Design at the Queretaro campus of Monterrey Tech. While teaching at Monterrey Tech, he also directed Carnegie Mellon's "Distance Studio," an innovative project where students from both institutions used cutting edge information technology to collaborate on design tasks. Rico-Gutierrez joined the Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture faculty in 1996. He has an M.A. in Building Performance from Carnegie Mellon and is currently completing his Ph.D. in Computer Supported Collaborative Design. He has a B.A. in Architecture from Monterrey Tech University, Mexico and completed graduate studies in design and social housing at the Leoz Foundation in Madrid, Spain.
  
     
 

Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Associate Professor of English and Rhetoric

  
  Ritivoi is interested in how individuals negotiate personal and social identity in periods of
political and cultural transition. She has written about Eastern European immigrants' efforts at adjusting to a new society, about Eastern European intellectuals struggling to be accepted in Western circles in the post-communist era, and about the role of memory and nostalgia in the shaping of a political consciousness. Her first book, Yesterday's Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity was published in 2002, and her second book, Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory in 2006. She is also the editor of Interpretation and Its Objects: Studies in the Philosophy of Michael Krausz (2003).
  
     
 

Hilary Robinson, Stanley and Marcia Gumberg Dean of the College of Fine Arts

  
  Previously from the School of Art and Design at the University of Ulster, Robinson taught the History and Theory of Art to studio fine art students. Appointed to direct the school's research in 1998, she then became head of the school in 2002. Robinson led it to achieve the joint highest rating out of the 75 art and design institutions in the United Kingdom. Trained as a painter in the 1970s, Robinson spent many years working as an artist and as a freelance arts administrator, critic and lecturer. Her past employment includes gallery work at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London and at the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow, Scotland; research and development work for an Art in Public Places agency; and co-authoring The Rough Guide to Venice. In the 1980s she received her M.A. at the Royal College of Art, London, gaining the Allan Lane award for Outstanding Contribution to Cultural Theory; and in the 1990s she earned her Ph.D. at the University of Leeds. Robinson's own research is in the field of contemporary art theory. Her first anthology was Visibly Female (1987), and she also published Feminism-Art-Theory 1968-2000 (2001), Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: the Politics of Art by Women (2006).
  
     
 

Roger Rouse, Associate Teaching Professor of History

  
  Roger Rouse received his Ph.D. in 1989 from the University of California at Davis. His research is concerned broadly with theoretical and empirical issues related to the cultural politics of class dynamics. He is particularly interested in exploring how the restructuring of capitalism along neoliberal lines has been played out and experienced over the last three decades in Mexico and the United States. He has pursued these interests ethnographically through research with people involved in migration between rural west-central Mexico and various parts of the United States, most notably California’s Silicon Valley. Reflecting his interest in work at the intersection of anthropology and cultural studies, he is also engaged in a broader, non-ethnographic project that relates shifts in dominant forms of cultural production in the United States since the early 1980s to the growing emphasis on specifically neoliberal and transnational processes of capital accumulation. One of his books, In a Moving World: Transnational Migration, Class Conflict and the Politics of Family Life, will be published by Princeton University Press, and another is in progress.
  
     
  Susan Polansky, Teaching Professor of Hispanic Studies and Head, Department of Modern Languages  
  Susan received her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Boston College.  Her research in Peninsular Spanish Studies has focused on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Spanish drama and narrative.  Some of her work has centered on poet figures and narrators in the writings of members of the Spanish Poetic Generation of 1927 (Pedro Salinas, Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda). She has explored the place of the artist under censorship, in exile, and in the modern world. Her most recent book is The Poet as Hero: Pedro Salinas and His Theater (2005).  It is a study of Salinas’s turn to writing plays in exile from Spain. His dramatic works continue the themes of his poetry, yet his exile forcefully focuses him on his own separation from Spain and the widespread social disruption caused by the Spanish Civil War and World War II.  Susan has also published textbooks for the teaching of Spanish.  Currently she is working on a study of mannequin figures in the work of Federico García Lorca. She is a recipient of the Elliot Dunlap Smith Award for Distinguished Teaching and Educational Service of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (2004) and the Barbara Lazarus Award for Culture and Climate (2006).  
     
 

Judith Schachter, Professor of Anthropology, History and Art

 
  Schachter served as director of the Center for the Arts in Society 2000-2006. She has been involved in interdisciplinary education since her appointment to Carnegie Mellon in 1984. Her publications include Ruth Benedict (1983); Kinship with Strangers (1994), A Town without Steel: Envisioning Homestead, (with C. Brodsky, 1998); A Sealed and Secret Kinship (2000), as well as a number of methodological and theoretical articles. Schachter has concentrated on analyses of families in crisis; in several of her articles, she has also explored the interconnections between individual lives and larger social and political changes. Schachter does extensive research in Hawai'i; her current work is a collective biography and a cultural-historical portrait of one extended family.
  
     
 

Beryl Schlossman, Professor of French and Francophone Studies and European Studies

  
  Beryl Schlossman received her Ph.D. from the Université de Paris and Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of several books of literary criticism Joyce’s Catholic Comedy of Language, The Orient of Style: Modernist Allegories of Conversion, and Objects of Desire: The Madonnas of Modernism, as well as Angelus Novus, a collection of poems published by Editions Virgile, Fontaine-lès-Dijon, France. She received a Charlotte W. Newcombe dissertation fellowship at The Johns Hopkins University and a Mellon post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia. She taught French and comparative literature at Emory University before joining the Department of Modern Languages at CMU. She teaches French and Francophone studies, literature, cinema, and the arts in society. Her poetry and short fiction are published in France as well as the U.S.
  
     
 

Riccardo Schulz, Associate Teaching Professor in Music (Sound Recording)

  
  Riccardo Schulz is founder and president of Pittsburgh Digital Recording & Editing Company, and a specialist in recording, editing, and mastering classical music. Schulz has recorded and/or produced more than a hundred compact discs on a variety of record labels, including Élan, New Albion, Mode Records, Ocean Records, Norvard, and New World Records. He has also recorded and/or mastered CDs of world music, jazz, alternative rock groups, and selected hip-hop artists. A few of the groups and individuals he has collaborated with include Cuarteto Latinoamericano, Andrés Cárdenes and Luz Manríquez; conductors Denis Colwell and the River City Brass Band, and Keith Lockhart and the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra. Schulz has master's degrees in mathematics from Duquesne University and musicology from the University of Pittsburgh. He is former program annotator for the Y-Music Series, and former music critic for WQED-FM's Sunday Arts Magazine.
  
     
 

Franco Sciannameo, CFA Distinguished Scholar in Multidisciplinary Studies and Director of BHA/BSA Interdisciplinary Degree Programs

  
  Born in Italy, Film Musicologist and Cultural Historian Franco Sciannameo studied in Rome at the Conservatorio di Musica “Santa Cecilia” (D.M. in Violin Performance, Literature, and Pedagogy), and later at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena and Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. He also holds advanced degrees in Historical Musicology and Cultural Studies from the University of Pittsburgh. Always concerned with the role of artists in society, Franco Sciannameo writes and lectures extensively on contemporary music and its relation to politics, cinema, and the arts. He has worked closely with a number of celebrated composers, including Giacinto Scelsi, Nino Rota, Ennio Morricone, Franco Donatoni, and Paul Chihara, with whom he collaborated on many performances and recordings. Sciannameo’s articles and essays are featured regularly in The Musical Times (London) and L’IDEA (New York), while his books are published by Mario Adda Editore, The Edwin Mellen Press, Pendragon Press, and The Scarecrow Press.

Franco Sciannameo is the Director of the BHA/BSA Interdisciplinary Degree Programs and a Fellow in the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry where he directs Moysikòs, a WaterSound project.
  
     
 

Diane Shaw, Associate Professor of Architecture

  
  Diane Shaw received her Ph.D. in architectural history from the University of California at Berkeley in 1998, and holds a master’s degree in American studies from George Washington University and a baccalaureate in history from Smith College. Shaw’s work emphasizes the social aspects of urban and architectural landscapes. Always asking “why did they do that?,” her history courses in American architecture, Central American architecture, urban design, and historic preservation all inquire into the cultural meaning of the built environment. Shaw’s research focuses on the vernacular architecture and urbanism of the U.S. Her book City Building on the Eastern Frontier: Sorting the New 19th Century City (2004) shows the creative depth to which the business leaders were able to sort urban space. Shaw’s articles and reviews have appeared in Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, the Journal of Urban History, The Public Historian, and the Journal of Urban History. A member of the advisory board to the Bureau of Historic Preservation within the Pennsylvania History and Museum Commission, Shaw was appointed chair in 2004.
  
     
 

David Shumway, Professor of English and Literary and Cultural Studies, and
Director of the Humanities Center

  
  Shumway's research and teaching focus on American culture and cultural theory. His special interests in American culture include film, popular music, and late 19th and early 20th-century literature. His theoretical interests concern the historical and institutional production of knowledge. He is the author of Michel Foucault (1989), Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline (1994), and Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis (2003). He has also co-edited Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity, Making and Selling Culture, and Disciplining English. He is currently working on Classic Rockers: The Cultural Significance of the Stars and on a study of film director John Sayles.
  
     
 

Susanne Slavick, Professor of Art

  
  Susanne Slavick is a painter and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art in the School of Art where she joined the faculty in 1984 and served as head between 2000 and 2006. After earning a B.A. from Yale, summer study at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and graduate study in Rome, she began exhibiting in Philadelphia where she completed her M.F.A. at Temple University's Tyler School of Art. She has been an artist-in-residence at The MacDowell Colony, Mt. Desert Island through the Four Seals Foundation, and in Skoki, Poland through the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, as well as an exchange professor at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Slavick began showing nationally through the Struve Gallery in Chicago and has exhibited in museums and galleries in New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, and Pittsburgh, as well as in Europe and Asia. Her paintings have been recognized through an artist fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and four awards from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She has recently been recognized as the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts 2008 Artist of the Year.
 
     
 

Kristina Straub, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies, and
Associate Dean, College of Humanities & Social Sciences

  
  Professor Straub’s interests are in feminist cultural studies, sexuality studies, and eighteenth-century British cultural studies. Her book, Divided Fictions, was among a handful of feminist reconsiderations of the novelist Frances Burney that helped to change the assessment of that writer during the 1980s. Sexual Suspects, a book about actors and ideologies of sexuality in eighteenth-century Britain, has contributed to the recent growth in feminist cultural studies of the early modern period. She is writing a book on eighteenth-century London servants. This project is helping her think through how labor, gender, and sexuality are integrally related in the practices and ideologies of London domestic service, in particular, and how one might think about the relation between these usually distinct categories in other historical instances. She is grounded in classroom teaching and interactions with students. She has created a cultural studies edition of Burney's first novel, Evelina, for classroom use, as well as contributing to the Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama, both of which grew out of her commitment to developing good texts for cultural studies classes. She teaches courses in gender studies, feminist cultural studies, and early modern British literature and culture.
  
     
 

Donald Sutton, Professor of History

  
  Sutton has worked on three distinct fields in Chinese studies: the origins of warlordism in the early 20th century, the subject of his Provincial Militarism and the Chinese Republic (1980); popular religion in Taiwan (forthcoming: Chinese Folk Religion in Motion: A Taiwan Performance Troupe in the 20th Century [Harvard University Press, Asia Center Series]); and Miao/Han Chinese relations and identities in west central China, especially in the 18th century. He has published a variety of articles, mostly relating to ritual, myth, and spirit possession in the Journal of Asian Studies, the Journal of Social History, the Journal of Ritual Studies, and Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Modern China, Late Imperial China. Like his teaching, this work stands at the intersection of history and anthropology. His ethnographic research along with video and film recording and articles in the East-West Journal and Film & History show an abiding interest in the arts.
  
     
 

Therese Tardio, Lecturer in Hispanic Studies

  
  Therese Tardio received a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in Hispanic Languages and Literatures. She is the advisor for the international foreign language honor society, Phi Sigma Iota.
  
     
 

Michael J. West, Teaching Professor of French and Francophone Studies

  
  Michael West received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Barbara. His research interests include the intersection of literature and the visual arts in 19th and 20th century Francophone cultures, as well the metanarrative in wartime occupied France. He is currently preparing his manuscript, Spectacular Ideology: the Parisian Expositions Universelles and the Creation of National Cultural Identity for publication; his criticism has appeared in GLQ, and the Journal of Social History. He has been recognized for his teaching as the winner of the university-wide William H. and Frances S. Ryan Award for teaching excellence, and the Elliott Dunlap Smith Award, given for distinguished teaching and educational service in H&SS.
  
     
 

Michael Witmore, Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies

  
  Michael has been interested in the ways in which "spontaneity" serves as a source of knowledge and rhetorical effects in the culture of the English Renaissance. His book, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (co-winner of Perkins Prize for Narrative, 2003), explored the ways in which narrative depictions of "accidental events" allowed them to serve as moments of discovery around the turn of the seventeenth century. He is now finishing a book called Pretty Creatures: Children and the Agency of Fiction in the English Renaissance. He is also writing a short book called Shakespearean Metaphysics that explores Shakespeare's "dramaturgical monism" in three plays (King Lear, Twelfth Night, The Tempest), using as reference points the philosophies of Spinoza, Bergson and Whitehead. He is an organizer of the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.
  
     
  Noel Zahler, Professor & Head, School of Music  
  Noel Zahler, new Head of the School of Music, comes to Carnegie from the University of Minnesota, where he directs the School of Music and teaches composition. Zahler has a Ph.D. in musical arts from Columbia University; a master’s degree from Princeton University; a certificato di perfezionamento from L’Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy; and a bachelor’s degree from the Aaron Copland School of Music at CUNY Queens College.  His awards and prizes include a National Endowment for the Arts Consortium Commission; a Fulbright/Hayes Fellowship to Italy; two McDowell Colony Fellowships; an Aaron Copland Foundation Grant in support of recording; a Connecticut Commission on the Arts Individual Artists Grant; and a Connecticut Public Television (CPTV) prize for the sound score to the computer-realized video “Gothic Tempest.” Zahler’s compositions include a wide range of vocal, instrumental, electro-acoustic, interactive and multimedia works. In addition, Zahler is the co-author of three computer software programs, the “Artificially Intelligent Computer Performer,” “Score Follow” and “Music Matrix.” His writings on music theory and composition, artificial intelligence and music, and computer music have been published in various publications. Zahler was recently elected vice president of the American Composers Alliance, a national organization founded by Aaron Copland and Roger Sessions in 1937.  
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