Fellows, 2011-2012

 

Gail Arnoff

"Questions of Identity" 

Gail Arnoff has been a teacher since 1967. For many years she taught on the psychiatric units of Hanna Pavilion and Cleveland Clinic, as part of the Cleveland Municipal School District’s Residential Schools. Most recently she was a special education and English teacher at Collinwood High School. While there she founded Collinwood Creations, an arts journal of student work which has received recognition from the MBNA Foundation, the Plain Dealer, WCPN, and Borders. As a teacher in the Facing History and Ourselves program, Gail has developed an interest in helping young people deal with issues of identity. Students in her seminar will study works from the Holocaust, Civil Rights Movement, and Decolonization eras in order to discover how others have thought about these issues. When not teaching, Gail enjoys running marathons for Team in Training, which raises money to fund leukemia and lymphoma research. She has mentored a young woman from the I Have a Dream Program, a Little Sister, and new marathoners. In addition Gail writes short stories and spends as much time as possible with her grandchildren, Elai, Dar, Aaron, Aviv Eira-Boaz and Yahav.

Steve Cagan

"How Photos Shape What We See"

Documentary photographer and activist. Projects include: “Industrial Hostages,” on Ohio factory closings in the 70s and 80s; Indochina, 1974; daily life in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Cuba, and “Working Ohio,” a portrait of workers in northeast Ohio. Current major project: “El Chocó, Colombia: Struggle for Cultural and Environmental Survival.” Exhibited and published widely on three continents. Two Fulbright Fellowships, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, several Ohio Arts Council grants. Taught in Visual Arts Department, Rutgers University, 1985 to 1993. 2008, exhibited and lectured in Photography Festival, Medellín, Colombia. 2009, exhibited and lectured at biennial Encounter of Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics, Bogotá. 2010, invited exhibitor and panelist. Argentine Documentary Photography Biennial. 2011 invited to curate exhibit and present at Festivals in El Salvador and Ecuador. Co-author with his wife Beth of This Promised Land, El Salvador, (1991 Book of the Year Award , Association for Humanist Sociology). 1991, “Teacher of the Year” at Rutgers University.

Bill Doll

"The Future of News" 

Bill Doll is a lawyer with a doctorate in sociology and a former theater critic for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland. Bill heads his own communications and research consulting firm, Bill Doll & Company. Founded in 1988, the firm works with corporations, professional service firms and not-for-profits on complex communications and advocacy issues. These clients have includedbanks, law firms, health systems, arts organizations and other not-for-profits, among them National City Corporation, KeyCorp, KPMG/Cleveland, Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, The CSA Health System, Playhouse Square Foundation and the Greater Cleveland Partnership. His articles and speeches for clients have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fortune Small Business, the Washington Post, the National Law Journal, Vital Speeches, among others. Bill serves is on the Executive Committee of the Great Lakes Theater Festival and is a former president of the Cleveland Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. For more background and work examples: www.billdollco.com.

Narcisz Fejes

 

 

 

 

"Global Tourism" and "Food Craze" 

Nárcisz' primary research interests and teaching experience are in interdisciplinary and comparative studies of gender and sexuality in literature, film, media and cultural studies. Her work also extends into the areas of globalization, studies of representation and identity, and tourism. In her class "Passport to Eastern Europe," students familiarize themselves with the constructed and textual nature of geopolitical categories such as continents, nation states, and the concepts of East and West. They also gain an understanding of the special histories and cultures of the borderlands of Eastern Europe and its literary and cinematic representations. In her "Global Tourism" class, students consider various tourist activities with critical distance and address their ethical dimensions. Her courses place much emphasis on helping students evaluate cultural encounters and contexts and develop into responsible and culturally sensitive observers. Both of these classes include segments drawn from Nárcisz' research on the ways in which literary works, films, and the media portray sex tourism and sex trafficking in the former Soviet bloc. She also analyzes practices of migrant work on the European continent and their gender implications, the growth of the mail-bride industry, and the shifting definitions of masculinity in Eastern Europe. Narcisz has a Ph.D. in English from Case Western Reserve University and completed her pre-doctoral studies in the United States, Finland, and Hungary. She also participated in a seminar organized by the University of Amsterdam's School for Cultural Analysis on "Media,Globalization, and Post-Communist Eastern European Identities" in 2006. Nárcisz is a recipient of various teaching awards, including the inaugural Richard A. Bloom, M.D., Award for Distinguished Teaching in the SAGES Program. She enjoys traveling and plans to learn documentary film-making.

Susan Oehler Herrick

"Performing: Musical Arts and Society in Action"

Susan Oehler Herrick is a career educator and consultant with a doctorate in ethnomusicology. An ongoing curiosity fuels her work: How have people used music to voice identities, navigate social barriers, and bridge communities? In her current SAGES course students explore one facet of this question, examining live performance as a social setting where people connect their ideas and musical actions. Herrick’s publications and projects revolve around the history of African American music and culture, popular music pedagogy, and arts education. Since 1991, she has taught in public schools, colleges, and nationally noted non-profits, such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. As the museum’s Education Programs Manager (2004-2008) she gained a strong reputation for leading outstanding interdisciplinary institutes for teachers, and Herrick co-designed the Rock Hall’s award-winning distance learning program. She also has taught undergraduate level courses on the blues, humanities, ethnography, and world music at Indiana University-Bloomington and Lakeland Community College, where she is a Part Time Faculty Member in the Arts and Humanities. Current projects include an invited article on applied ethnomusicology for a book proposed to Oxford University Press and consulting for the Center for American Music at the University of Pittsburgh. Herrick enjoys living in Cleveland with her husband and two cats.

jimi izrael

"American Splendor: The Book"

jimi izrael is an award-winning reporter and culture-critic from East Cleveland, Ohio He’s a sought-after pundit and culture critic appearing on talk radio and television news panels internationally and from coast to coast, including Fox's Hannity and Colmes, The O'Reilly Factor, The Larry Elder Show, XM Radio and he’s a regular voice on various shows on National Public Radio, including Day to Day, News and Notes, Talk of the Nation and WHYY’s Radio Times. His work appears in the Los Angeles Times, Salon.com, USA Today, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chicago Tribune, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The American Spectator, The Plain Dealer, The Milwaukee Sentinel and many other newspapers and popular media.

Bernard L. Jim

"Spectacle in American Culture" and "Puzzled"

Bernie earned a Ph.D. in History at Case Western Reserve University in August 2006. In his dissertation, Ephemeral Containers: A Cultural and Technological History of Building Demolition, he examines the history of wreckers and wrecking machines, and uses an exploration of the discourse surrounding building demolition as a window into the impact of modernity on notions of progress, the construction of identity, and the American public's relationship to the built environment. He has presented his work before the societies for historians of technology and historians of architecture, and has published an article on the razing of city hotels in the Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, Issue 25, on "The American Hotel."  Bernie has taught courses in American History, Technology and Culture, and Technology and Society for Cleveland State University, Weatherhead School of Business, and the history department of Case Western Reserve University. In addition to his academic work, Bernie has experience circulating, maintaining, and developing temporary exhibitions for science and technology museums, and has acted as a researcher in the field of cultural resource management. In his SAGES courses, he asks his students to reconsider the role of the commonplace and the remarkable in the built world and the natural world.

Sean Martin

"Ethnicity and Local History"

Sean Martin is currently the Associate Curator for Jewish History at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, Ohio. In this role, he collects and maintains material related to the Jewish history of northeastern Ohio, overseeing the Cleveland Jewish Archives and serving as part of the curatorial staff for the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Beachwood, Ohio. Sean holds an MA degree in history, an MA degree in Yiddish language and literature, and a PhD, focusing on East European Jewish history, from The Ohio State University. Sean has taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Reinhardt College in Waleska, Georgia, and served as an adjunct faculty member at Kent State University, Cleveland State University, and University of Phoenix. He has conducted extensive research in Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania and given talks on Jewish history and the Holocaust in the United States and Poland. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on the Jewish history of Krakow in the 1920s and 1930s and was published in 2004 by Vallentine Mitchell as Jewish Life in Cracow, 1918-1939. He is currently researching the history of Jewish child welfare in interwar Poland.

Daniel Melnick

"Life of the Mind"

Daniel Melnick is an emeritus professor of English from Cleveland State University, and he has taught in the Sages program (and occasionally in English) since his retirement from CSU in 2005. The focus of his teaching and research is twentieth century literature and particularly the modern period. His book on music and modern fiction is Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music (Fairleigh Dickinson, 1994), and a series of his essays on modern fiction has appeared in various journals - the latest article being about Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes. (His on-going series of 'notes on the modern period' can be accessed at www.danielmelnick.com). He is also the author of a series of short stories and two novels, Hungry Generations and Acts of Terror and Contrition. His B.A. and Ph.D. in English are from the University of California at Berkeley.

John Panza

"The Ubiquitous Frankenstein"

John Panza is an assistant professor of English and Humanities at Cuyahoga Community College’s Eastern Campus, where he teaches courses in poetry, honors composition, and humanities. He serves as the English Department Coordinator.  John also serves as board president of Heights Arts, a community arts non-profit now in its eleventh year. Heights Arts operates a gallery, supports and exhibits local and regional artists’ work, supports public art projects in and around Cleveland Heights, serves as the catalyst for the Cleveland Heights Poet Laureate project, and hosts a classical house concert series. John’s first book, a poetry anthology called Awake at the End, was published by Bottom Dog Press in 2008. He is currently working on a book-length manuscript of poems called Don’t Get Any Stupid Ideas. John’s poems have been published and anthologized in several local and regional magazines and books. When not teaching, volunteering, or writing, John plays drums. His primary project is Chief Bromide, a wall-of-sound psych-rock group with two albums to its credit, Chief Bromide Land (2009) and High Windows (2010). John was also a member of the 2010 Cleveland Lottery League, out of which grew another band, Melted Face Constitutional, a ridiculously loud, bass-driven, sonic catastrophe. John lives in Cleveland Heights with his wife, Jane, and daughter, Eva.