Faculty

Faculty

Duke University's international reputation for excellence rests upon the research, teaching, leadership, and service of gifted, dedicated scholars and educators. A seasoned complement of graduate faculty members and scholars from throughout the university teach for the GLS program, advise and supervise our students' master's projects, help develop its curriculum, and influence its pedagogy. Since the inception of the program, approximately one hundred faculty members from thirty departments have developed and taught GLS graduate courses or directed the scholarship of individual students. Graduate faculty members also serve on the GLS Advisory Committee, participating in the academic governance of the program.

Duke faculty members maintain a tradition of personal attention to students and a commitment to research. As a result, GLS students receive the benefits of small, personalized seminars taught by leading scholars.

The faculty members whose biographies appear below represent a small fraction of the faculty who have worked with GLS over the years. 

See a full list of current participating faculty here

Duke University Libraries

Trudi Abel is a cultural historian and Rubenstein Library archivist at Duke who created the Digital Durham (http://digitaldurham.duke.edu), a web repository for primary sources relating to Durham from the post-Civil War decades to the present. Currently, Dr. Abel co-directs the NC Jukebox Project with Victoria Szabo (AAHVS). Over the past decade, Dr. Abel has taught Consumer Culture in America and Digital Durham and the New South for the MALS Program. In the summer of 2016, she will offer NC Jukebox, a cross-disciplinary course in which students use new technologies and digitized audio recordings to create fresh interpretation of the history of North Carolina and its roots music.

Music

GLS Advisory Committee Term: 2019-2022

Thomas Brothers is Professor of Music.  He joined the faculty at Duke in 1991 after completing his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley.  He has published three books on Louis Armstrong, most recently Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism (W.W. Norton, 2014).  In addition to African American music, Professor Brothers also teaches music of the medieval and renaissance periods. His most recent book, Help! The Beatles, Duke Ellington, and the Magic of Collaboration, was published in 2018.

Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

GLS Advisory Committee Term: 2023-26

Leo Ching's research interests include colonial discourse studies, postcolonial theory, Japanese mass culture, and theories of globalization and regionalism. He has published in boundary 2, positions and Public Culture.

Theater Studies

Dr. John M. Clum, Professor Emeritus of Theater Studies and English, has led Duke’s MALS, undergraduate and alumni London theater programs for over twenty-five years. He is the author of eight books and numerous articles on modern British and American drama and musical theater. He is also a playwright and director of over seventy-five professional and university theatrical and operatic productions. John has twice won Duke’s Outstanding Professor Award.

    

Classical Studies

Gregson Davis, Andrew W. Mellon Research Professor in the Humanities at Duke University, teaches in the Department of Classical Studies and the Program in Literature. He has previously taught at Stanford University, Cornell University, and, most recently, New York University. His primary research specialties are the interpretation of poetic texts in the Greek and Roman as well as Caribbean traditions (francophone and anglophone).

Romance Studies

Martin Eisner is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at Duke University and Director of Graduate Studies for both the Department of Romance Studies and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He specializes in medieval Italian literature, particularly the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as well as the history of the book and media.

Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences; Sociology, Psychology & Neuroscience

Deborah T. Gold is Professor of Medical Sociology in the Departments of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Sociology, and Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University Medical Center, where she is also a Senior Fellow of the Duke Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development. Professor Gold received her B.A. in English and Latin from the University of Illinois, her M.Ed. in Reading from National Louis University, and her Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy from Northwestern University. Her primary research interests are in the psychological and social consequences of chronic disease in the elderly.  She has done seminal research on osteoporosis and its impact on quality of life.  She has also studied the psychosocial impact of breast cancer, Parkinson’s disease, syncope, head and neck cancer, Paget’s disease of bone, and dementia in older adults. Her current research examines compliance and persistence with medications for older adults with chronic illnesses.

Graduate Liberal Studies

GLS Advisory Committee Term: 2022-2025

Amanda Starling Gould, PhD, is a technology scholar with a particular interest in the environmental effects of digital technologies and questions the ways technologies of connection can cause disconnect, bias, and harm. She thinks, for example, about how our technologies design us, and about how the unequal distribution of power and access are designed into the system. In her current appointment with Duke’s Graduate Liberal Studies program, she seeks to enable students to interrogate these issues and pursue critical interdisciplinary research projects of their own.

She teaches undergraduate, graduate, and adult learners on topics related to critical digital studies, public and digital humanities, designing equitable futures, and for many years taught a class called Learning to Fail for the Innovation & Entrepreneurship department at Duke.

Divinity School

GLS Advisory Committee Term: 2021-24

Amy Laura Hall is the author of four books: Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love, Conceiving Parenthood: The Protestant Spirit of Biotechnological Reproduction, Writing Home with Love: Politics for Neighbors and Naysayers, and Laughing at the Devil: Seeing the World with Julian of Norwich. She has also written numerous scholarly articles in theological and biomedical ethics. Her new essay on Kierkegaard and love will appear in the T&T Clark Companion to the Theology of Kierkegaard (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019). Her book Laughing at the Devil was chosen for the 2019 Virginia Festival of the Book and as a focus lecture for the Chautauqua Institution in June, 2019. She continues work on a longer research project on masculinity and gender anxiety in mainstream, white evangelicalism.

Professor Hall has served on the steering committee of the Genome Ethics, Law, and Policy Center, the Bioethics Task Force of the United Methodist Church, and as consultant on bioethics to the World Council of Churches. She has served on the steering committee of the Genome Ethics, Law, and Policy Center and as a faculty member for the Focus Program of the Institute on Genome Sciences and Policy. She served as a faculty adviser with the Duke Center for Civic Engagement and as a faculty advisor for the NCCU-Duke Program in African, African American & Diaspora Studies. She currently teaches with and serves on the faculty advisory board for Graduate Liberal Studies and serves as a core faculty member of the Focus Program in Global Health. Hall serves as an elder in the Rio Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church.

Nicholas School of the Environment

Bob Healy is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Policy in the Nicholas School and of Public Policy Studies in the Terry Sanford School. Before coming to Duke in 1986, he was a researcher with The Urban Institute, Resources for the Future and The Conservation Foundation/World Wildlife Fund in Washington, D.C. He has written ten books, mainly on issues of land use, environmental management and economic development. The latest are Knowledge and Environmental Policy (MIT 2011) and Environmental Policy in North America (Toronto 2013). Locally, he has long been involved with efforts to protect the New Hope Creek watershed. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Los Angeles.

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