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

Biology

GLS Advisory Committee Term: 2021-2024

Jonathan Shaw is a Professor in the Department of Biology. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from the University of Michigan. Dr. Shaw's research is on the systematics, population genetics, and evolution of bryophytes (mosses). Some of his research interests have included the taxonomy and classification of particular groups of mosses, developmental anatomy, and genetic relationships among populations of very rare species. A current focus in the lab is the evolution of peatmosses (Sphagnum) and Dr. Shaw's field work tends to be in polar and high altitude environments. He has published some 200 scientific papers and has edited two books, one on the evolution of tolerance in plants to toxic metals in the environment, and one on the biology of bryophytes. Dr. Shaw taught for eight years at a liberal arts college (Ithaca College) before coming to Duke in 1996.

Sanford School of Public Policy / Center for Documentary Studies
Cultural Anthropology

GLS Advisory Committee Term: 2022-2025

Charles D. Thompson, Jr. is Professor of the Practice of Cultural Anthropology and Documentary Studies at Duke University, and Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. He holds a Ph.D. in religion and culture from UNC-Chapel Hill, with concentrations in cultural studies and Latin American studies. He also holds an M.S. degree in Agricultural Education from NC A&T State University. A former farmer, Thompson remains concerned about issues affecting laborers within our food system. He has written about farmworkers, and he is an advisory board member of Student Action with Farmworkers, the Duke Campus Farm, and other Duke food and agriculture initiatives. 

Thompson is author or editor of seven books, including Going Over Home: A Search for Rural Justice in an Unsettled Land, Border Odyssey: Traveling the US/Mexico Divide (2015), Spirits of Just Men: Mountaineers, Liquor Bosses, and Lawmen in the Moonshine Capital of the World, and, with Melinda Wiggins, The Human Cost of Food: Farmworker Lives, Labor, and Advocacy. He is also the producer/director of seven documentary films, including Rock Castle Home,  Homeplace Under Fire, Border Crossing 101, Faces of Time, Brother Towns/ Pueblos Hermanos (2010), We Shall Not Be Moved (2008), and The Guestworker (2007). His current work includes a project hosted by Kenan Institute for Ethics entitled, “America’s Hallowed Ground.”

History

GLS Advisory Committee Term: 2019-2022

Susan Thorne, Associate Professor of History, teaches courses on the social history of Britain and the British Empire, and on the history of European expansion more generally. She is currently working on Charles Dickens’ influence on Anglo American “ways of seeing” the children of the urban poor.  The Dickensian Affect:  Reckonings with Reform in Early Victorian Southwark (in progress) juxtaposes Dickens’s representation of criminal poverty and urban childhood in his most popular novel, Oliver Twist (1837-8) to archival accounts generated by the poor law’s reform during the 1830s and hungry ‘40s. 

Sociology

Edward Tiryakian, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, has taught many courses in GLS, from “Altruism and Philanthropy” to “The Sociology of Disasters.”  Past president of two national organizations and past director of International Studies at Duke, he is widely traveled and published in sociological theory, sociology of religion, sociology of development.

Graduate Liberal Studies

As the Director of Graduate Liberal Studies, Anne Mitchell Whisnant oversees all aspects of the program, participating in both administration and academics. She joined GLS as director on August 15, 2019. Dr. Whisnant is a historian whose teaching, research, speaking, consulting, and writing focus on public history, digital and geospatial history, and the history of the U.S. National Parks. She has taught public history at UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC-Greensboro, East Carolina University, and George Mason University. In 2006 she published Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History, the first fully grounded history of the parkway's development, with the University of North Carolina Press. She subsequently served as scholarly adviser for Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway, an online history collection developed collaboratively with the Park Service and the UNC Libraries. More of her Blue Ridge Parkway work may be seen here. As a consultant, Dr. Whisnant has been the co-principal historian on several other National Park Service projects. From 2008-12, she chaired a task force commissioned by the Organization of American Historians and the National Park Service to study historical practice within the Park Service. The resulting report, Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service, won the 2013 Excellence in Consulting Award from the National Council on Public History.

Graduate Liberal Studies

Kent Wicker's academic interests include 1) issues of class, gender and region in American and post-colonial literatures; 2) narrative theory and the historical development of the novel; and 3) literary representation, realism, satire and fantasy.  He is also interested in embodiment, religious and intellectual history, and the history of everyday life.   With Donna Zapf, he created the GLS Core Course in interdisciplinary studies and now serves as assistant director of the GLS program.  He holds a BS in International Relations from Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and a PhD in English from Duke.

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