College Educators (H-N) clone

There are scores of SYAers whose careers are focused on early childhood, academia and community-centered instruction.

Following is the second installment of SYAers who teach at the college level, with last names beginning with H-N.

Emily Hanson CN’96, formerly the program director of the China Center and Confucius Institute at University of Minnesota, is now the director of its College in the Schools, a program for academically prepared and motivated junior and senior high school students to earn college credits by taking courses. Emily attended SYA China as a junior from South High School (MN) and graduated from Lewis and Clark College before attending the University of Minnesota for her postgrad studies.

Jessica Harmatys CN’98 is the BRIDGE program coordinator in the international student service office at University of Wisconsin. Building Relationships in Diverse Global Environments, is an international friendship program that helps international students connect with U.S. students. Jessica attended SYA China as a junior from James Madison Memorial High School (WI) before graduating from the University of Wisconsin.

Brooke Harrington FR’86 is an academic and author, and professor of economic sociology at Dartmouth College. Her research for the past 15 years has investigated this question of who creates change in markets and other financial institutions. She is an economic and organizational sociologist by training, with an empirical focus on finance. Her latest book for Harvard University Press concerns an elite occupational group within finance and its impact on international law and stratification. She’s interested in how things get done – what social actors actually do in their daily lives – and how that aggregates to the macro-level of financial markets, culture and political institutions. Her work intersects with the literatures of political economy, anthropology, social psychology and behavioral finance. Brooke attended SYA France as a senior from The Latin School of Chicago. She received her bachelor’s at Stanford, and both her master’s and PhD from Harvard.

Jeff Heath ES’66 is a combined fieldwork and historical linguist at the University of Michigan. He has done fieldwork on Australian Aboriginal languages (1970s), Maghrebi Arabic (1980s), and since 1989 on languages of interior West Africa, especially Mali and southwest Burkina Faso. He is interested in rich morphology and its evolution, and in tonal and prosodic systems of African languages. For more information on his research, visit his webpage. Jeff attended SYA Spain from Phillips Exeter Academy, received his bachelor’s and master’s from Harvard and his PhD from University of Chicago.

Sam Heath ES’71 recently retired as a Spanish teacher for the New Hampshire School System, a position he began in the early 2000s after teaching at Phillips Exeter Academy, his high school alma mater. He attended SYA as a junior and received his bachelor’s from Columbia.

Tim Hildebrandt CN’95 is an assistant professor of social policy and development at London School of Economics. His teaching, at both undergraduate and post-graduate levels, focuses on social policy and development, non-governmental organizations and sexuality. Trained as a political scientist, Tim’s current research program aims to better understand how social policies affect marginalized populations (such as LGBT people) and how social actors (such as NGOs) seek to rectify inequalities in policy processes and outcomes. Although internationally-recognized as a China expert, his recent research has been more comparative in nature, examining Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, the UK and the US. Tim attended SYA China as a junior from the Breck School (Minn.) before receiving his bachelor’s from St. Olaf College and his PhD from University of Wisconsin. (Read more.)

Donovan Hohn FR’89 is the author of The Inner Coast: Essays (W. W. Norton, 2020) and Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea, a New York Times Notable Book and runner-up for both the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. His essays have appeared in such publications as Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Lapham's Quarterly and The New Republic. A recipient of the Whiting Writer’s Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, Hohn spent a number of years editing essays, fiction and literary journalism at Harper’s, and a few years as features editor of GQ. He has taught nonfiction in the MFA program of the University of Michigan and is now on the creative writing faculty of Wayne State University in Detroit. Donovan attended SYA France as a junior from St. John’s School (TX) before receiving his bachelor’s from Boston College and postgrad studies at Oberlin and University of Michigan.

Aaron Hollander IT’02 is Editor of Ecumenical Trends, Associate Director of Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute, and adjunct faculty in Theology at Fordham University. In 2022, he was elected President of the North American Academy of Ecumenists; additionally, he serves on the steering committee of the Ecclesiological Investigations International Research Network and on the faculty of the Summer Course in Ecumenism at the Centro Pro Unione in Rome. He is a scholar of ecumenical theology and lived religion, educated at the University of Chicago (PhD 2018), the Irish School of Ecumenics (Trinity College Dublin), and Swarthmore College. He attended SYA Italy as a junior from the Collegiate School (NY).

Clare Huntington FR’85 is the Joseph M. McLaughlin Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law. She is an expert in the fields of family law and poverty law, publishing widely and serving as an Associate Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Children and the Law. Clare has served as the Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and the Associate Dean for Research, and she has won numerous teaching awards, including the Teacher of the Year award in May 2021. Her legal experience includes serving as an Attorney Advisor in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel as well as clerking for Justice Harry A. Blackmun and Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States, Judge Merrick B. Garland of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Judge Denise Cote of the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York. Prior to joining the Fordham faculty in 2011, Claire was an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Law School. She attended SYA France as a senior from Phillips Exeter Academy. She earned her JD from Columbia Law School and her bachelor’s from Oberlin College.

Lexi Hutto ES’73 is an associate professor of marketing at Millersville University. She has extensive teaching experience including appointments at Metropolitan State University of Denver, the University of Tulsa and Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She has deep industry experience in retailing and marketing, which includes serving as the first Director of Market Research at Advance Auto Parts where she led several impactful initiatives. Lexi attended SYA Spain as a junior from Munster High School (IN), received her bachelor’s from Northwestern University, MBA from Indiana University and her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh.

Tom Jackson ES’67 is a legal scholar who was the ninth president of the University of Rochester (1994-2005). He holds the position of Distinguished University Professor and has faculty appointments in the department of political science in the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Rochester. He is one of the nation's foremost experts on bankruptcy law. Prior to Rochester, Jackson was vice president and provost of the University of Virginia and dean of Virginia's School of Law. He had also been a professor of law at Harvard Law School and Stanford. Tom attended Phillips Academy, earned his bachelor’s from Williams College and his JD from Yale. He clerked for Judge Marvin E. Frankel and William Rehnquist, then an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

Karen Kilby FR’82 was appointed the Bede Professor of Catholic Theology at Durham University, become the second occupant and first woman of one of Britain’s most prestigious posts in Catholic academia. Prior, she taught at the University of Birmingham and the University of Nottingham. She has served as president of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain and the Society for the Study of Theology from 2017 to 2018. Karen is also an occasional contributor to various theological publications, an invited presenter at international conferences and has given university sermons at St. Andrews, the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge. Karen attended SYA France as a senior from Haddam-Killingworth High School (CT) and attended Yale.

Jeremy King ES’81 is a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. He studied Soviet history in college, but then fell prisoner one summer to the charms and tragedies of Central Europe. Trained at Columbia University as a historian of Austria-Hungary and its successor states, he has lived for several years in Prague, Budapest, Vienna and a few other formerly Habsburg cities, as well in Berlin. His book Budweisers into Czechs and Germans presents a case study of how German and Czech leaders nationalized politics between the revolutions of 1848 and the genocide and mass expulsions of the 1940s. Jeremy attended SYA as a senior from Phillips Exeter Academy, earned his bachelor’s from Yale and his PhD from Columbia. (Read more.)

Lucas Klein CN’96 is an associate professor of Chinese and head of East and Southeast Asian Faculty at the School of International Letters & Cultures at Arizona State University. Prior, he spent a decade at City University of Hong Kong and the University of Hong Kong. He attended SYA China as a senior, received his bachelor’s from Middlebury College and his master’s from Yale. In the “small world of SYA” category, Haun Saussy FR’77 served as one of Lucas’s dissertation advisors.

Hisa Kuriyama FR’71 FR’05P is the Reischauer Institute Professor Cultural History at Harvard University. Prior to his appointment, he worked at the University of New Hampshire, Emory University and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto. Hisa's research explores broad philosophical issues (being and time, representations and reality, knowing and feeling) through the lens of specific topics in comparative medical history (Japan, China and Europe). His book, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (Zone, 1999), received the 2001 William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, and has been translated into Chinese, Greek, Spanish and Korean. His recent work includes studies on the history of distraction, the imagination of strings in the experience of presence, the transformation of money into a palpable humor in Edo Japan, the nature of hiddenness in traditional Chinese medicine and the web of connections binding ginseng, opium, tea, silver and MSG. He has also been actively engaged in expanding the horizons of teaching and scholarly communication through the creative use of digital technologies both at Harvard and at other universities in the U.S. and abroad. Hisa attended SYA as a junior from Phillips Exeter Academy, received his bachelor’s and master’s from Harvard. After completing acupuncture studies in Tokyo, he received his PhD from Harvard.  

Angeline Lillard FR’79 is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. She is the Director of the Early Development Laboratory, one of four Child Development laboratories in the Psychology Department at the University. Angeline is an expert in Montessori education and the author of Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius, which is in its third edition and was awarded the Cognitive Development Society Book Award in 2006. Her other areas of expertise are pretend play, and more generally, how participating in fictional worlds influences people. She is a Fellow of both the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association and was awarded both the latter's Boyd McCandless Young Scientist and Outstanding Dissertation Awards. Angeline attended SYA France as a senior from The Hotchkiss School, her bachelor’s from Hampshire College and her doctorate in psychology from Stanford University. She was awarded the American Psychological Association’s Boyd McCandless Award for Distinguished Early Career Contribution in 1999. 

Margaret Litvin FR’91 an associate professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Boston University and studies the transnational entanglements of modern Arabic literature and theater. She teaches Arabic and world literature, including literary translation, “Global Shakespeares” and “1001 Nights in the World Literary Imagination.” She was founding director of the Middle East & North Africa Studies Program (2013-2017). She advises students in the Arabic minor and WLL’s BA in Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages & Literatures. She is a core faculty member of the new Masters in Literary Translation. She attended SYA France as a junior from Phillips Academy, received her bachelor’s from Yale and her PhD from the University of Chicago. (Read more.)

Neil MacFarlane FR’72 is the Lester B. Pearson Emeritus Professor of International Relations, St. Anne’s College at the University of Oxford. He is a specialist on Russian foreign policy and the regional dynamics of the former Soviet Union, with particular reference to that region's southern tier. He is also interested in the impact of international organizations in the management and resolution of civil conflicts and also in the political and economic transitions of former communist states. He attended Phillips Academy, received his bachelor’s from Dartmouth, his master’s, master’s of philosophy and PhD from Oxford. (Read more.)

Siobhán Mattison FR’97 is an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology and director of Human Family and Evolutionary Demography Lab at the University of New Mexico, and a rotator at the National Science Foundation. Her research focuses on explaining health and welfare in light of variation in human kinship and social structure norms. She conducts fieldwork with Mosuo (Na) people in Southwest China and among Melanesian Ni-Vanuatu. She attended SYA as a junior from Columbia High School (NJ), received her bachelor’s from Cornell and master’s and PhD from the University of Washington.

Christopher Maurer ES’67 is the associate chair of Romance Studies, head of Spanish section and professor of Spanish at Boston University. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, received his bachelor’s from Columbia and his postgrad at University of Pennsylvania. He teaches and writes about Spanish poetry with special emphasis on poetry’s relations with music and painting, translation and textual criticism. His first book was a biography and edition of the sixteenth-century poet Francisco de Figueroa and his most recent, with Andrew A. Anderson, Federico Garcia Lorca en Nueva York y La Habana: Cartas y recuerdos. He is the editor of García Lorca’s Collected Poems and Selected Verse; his lectures (Conferencias); his early prose (Prosa inédita de juventud) and has translated several books. His biography of American painter and writer Walter Inglis Anderson won the 2003 Eudora Welty Award and the Non-Fiction Prize of the Mississippi Academy of Arts and Letters. (Read more.)

Grayson McCouch FR’74 is the Clarence TeSelle Professor and Professor of Law at the University of Florida. He teaches primarily in the areas of trusts and estates, estate and gift taxation and estate planning. Before teaching at UF, Grayson clerked for Judge Hugh Bownes on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, practiced law with firms in Boston and Minneapolis, and served as a member of the law faculty at the University of Miami and the University of San Diego. He has published numerous books and articles, reflecting a wide range of scholarly interests including estate and gift taxation, inheritance law, social security, retirement savings policy and tax shelters. Grayson is a co-author of leading casebooks on gratuitous transfers and federal estate and gift taxation. He is a member of the American Law Institute. He attended SYA as a junior from Phillips Exeter Academy, earned his bachelor’s from Harvard, his JD from Stanford University and his LL.M. in Taxation from Boston University.

Susan McCouch ES’71 is known for developing the first molecular genetic map of rice and for her key and sustained role in turning rice into a model for genetics and breeding research. She is the Barbara McClintock Professor of Plant Breeding and Genetics in the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University. Her lab has explored extensively the genotypic diversity of wild and cultivated Oryza species, championing the use of loci from wild relatives to improve complex phenotypes in domesticated rice. Her pioneering efforts to develop and share molecular and informatics tools and resources have accelerated rice breeding worldwide. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. She attended SYA Spain in the inaugural class of coeducation as a senior from Phillips Academy, received her bachelor’s in Hispanic Studies from Smith College, master’s in plant pathology from the University of Massachusetts and PhD from Cornell. She has contributed extensively to educational initiatives and international outreach, and been recognized by numerous teaching, research and faculty awards. Along with her fellow alumnae from the Class of SYA Spain 1971, she is the recipient of the 2021 SYA Distinguished Alumni Award.

Shawn McHale FR’77 is a professor in the Department of History at the Columbian College of Arts & Sciences at George Washington University. He focuses on the comparative study of colonialism, violence and modern Southeast Asian history, with a particular interest in Vietnam. His latest book is The First Vietnam War: Violence, Sovereignty, and the Fracture of the South, 1945-56 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), a deeply researched study of the violent end of French colonialism in southern Vietnam. He has also written on the rise of a Vietnamese print culture, 1920-1945. He is currently researching and writing a book on Vietnamese engagements with Theravada Buddhism, 1930-1990. He is the recipient of Fulbright-Hays and ACLS/ Robert H.N. Ho fellowships.

Darcy McLean ES’01 is Director of Public Interest Programs for the College of Law and Deputy Director of the Center for Access to Justice at Georgia State University. She is responsible for developing and overseeing the center’s programs and publications, overseeing the award-winning student Pro Bono Program and the Public Interest Law and Policy certificate program, and teaching law school courses through the center’s access to justice curriculum. Darcy was the recipient of the 2022 Steven J. Kaminshine Faculty Award for Excellence in Service. She has written articles on immigration law and co-wrote an amicus brief in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt that was cited twice in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s concurring opinion. She is the co-chair elect of the AALS Section on Pro Bono and Access to Justice and the Secretary of the board of the Atlanta Bar Association’s Public Interest Law Section. She was a founding member of the Southern Center for Human Rights’ Leadership Council and sat for two years on the Equal Justice Works National Advisory Committee. Darcy is on the Young Alumni Participation Council for Brown University and sits on SYA’s Board of Trustees. She attended Westminster Schools (GA), received her bachelor’s from Brown and her JD from University of California.

Jeff Mellow ES’84 is a professor in the Criminal Justice Department and on the faculty of the Criminal Justice Doctoral Program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). His research focuses on correctional policy and practice, program evaluation, reentry and critical incident analysis (i.e., escapes, suicides, and riots) in corrections. Jeff has administered research and evaluations on a wide variety of correctional topics, including the evaluation of NYC Department of Probation’s Neighborhood Opportunity Network; a study of a transitional correctional health care system in Washington, DC; the evaluation of a New Jersey halfway back parolee program; the mapping of the innovation in correctional health care service delivery in NYC; and the site directorship for the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring Program in Manhattan. Most recently, he received funding to provide training, technical assistance and research on core issues in Latin America prisons. In addition, he is co-author of three monographs focusing on improving reentry from jail to the community, including the National Institute of Corrections’ Transition from Jail to Community Online Learning Toolkit. His work has been published in several scholarly publications. Jeff attended SYA Spain as a junior from Richardson High School (TX), earned his bachelor’s from American University and both his master’s and JD from SUNY Albany.

Eliza Minot FR’86 teaches English at Barnard. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Tiny One and The Brambles. Her third novel, In the Orchard, will be published in April 2023.

Merritt Moore IT’05 is not only a ballerina and quantum physicist. She has added Distinguished Artist in Residence and Adjunct Professor of Practice at NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus. She studied at both the University of Oxford and Harvard University, and attended SYA Italy as a junior from Harvard-Westlake School (CA). Merritt works to combine her interests in physics and ballet through her research and dedication in both the arts and sciences.

Sam Myers FR’83 is an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and is board certified in internal medicine. As a senior research scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, he works at the intersection of human health and global environmental change. He is the founding director of the Planetary Health Alliance. Sam received his bachelor’s from Harvard College, his MD from Yale, performed his residency in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and received his MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health.  He attended SYA France as a senior from Milton Academy.

Nicole Newendorp FR’86 is the associate director of studies and lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University. She is an anthropologist who studies migration and family life in Asia and the United States. Her new book, Chinese Senior Migrants and the Globalization of Retirement, explores how Chinese-born senior migrants make sense of their later-life relocation to the Boston area. Her detailed ethnography places particular emphasis on how seniors’ memories and subjective experiences of movement within and beyond China over past decades continue to influence their 21st century migration trajectories as well as their aspirations for well-being following retirement in both China and the U.S. She attended SYA as a junior from St. John’s School (TX), earned her bachelor’s at Columbia and her master’s and PhD from Harvard.