Jeannette Bastian

Jeannette A. Bastian is Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and the Director of the Archives Management concentration. She has taught at Simmons since 1999.  Formerly Territorial Librarian of the United States Virgin Islands from1987 to 1998, she received her MLS from Shippensburg University, an M.Phil in Caribbean Literature from the University of the West Indies (Mona) and a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include archival education, memory, community archives, and postcolonialism.

She is widely published in the archival literature and her books include West Indian Literature, An Index to Criticism, 1930-1975 (1981) Owning Memory, How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History (2003), Archival Internships (2008), and Community Archives, The Shaping of Memory (2009). 

Jeannette Bastian's Curriculum Vitae

Rachel Galli

Nobel prize winning geneticist Barbara McClintock wrote, “Everything is one. There is no way to draw a line between things.” This is certainly true in my own field of Neuroscience, where the study of brain and behavior integrates many areas of study and emphasizes the connection between mind and body. It is also true of my work here at Simmons. It is difficult to draw a line between my teaching, research, and mentoring efforts, in part because they are intertwined around a central theme of increasing the participation of women in the sciences. I traveled a nontraditional path in finding my passion and vocation, and I especially enjoy helping others explore their interests and career possibilities. Sometimes you’ll be surprised where life takes you, and it is the life skills and education you acquire in college that can help you make the most of your opportunities. I love to teach, and here at Simmons I’m able to work closely with students as they become active participants in a learning process that occurs in the classroom, in the research lab, and in advising relationships and extracurricular activities.

Gerald Benoit

Professor Benoit directs the Information Science & Technology Concentration at SLIS and teaches undergraduate computer science, graduate information science, and doctoral-level classes. Prior to entering the academic world, he worked as a rare materials librarian, later settling into programming/analysis and even started the marketing firm, Imada Wong Park + Benoit. Prof Benoit’s work experience and research interests aim at improving the human experience through ethical, technically-informed, and purposeful application of information systems. Consequently, his service, research, and teaching activities integrate the sciences and arts of information. Students in his courses learn standards, hands-on competencies, interoperability of data, professional and scholarly communication to fulfill their own career interests while addressing real-world needs. His work is framed by the philosophy of language, aesthetics, computation, and the emancipatory use of technology. Working with colleagues, Benoit’s research studies the innovation and management of new systems.

Daniel Joudrey

Daniel Joudrey, an expert in organizing information, joined the Simmons faculty in 2005 and teaches information organization and three separate cataloging courses. Prior to coming to Simmons, Joudrey was a teaching fellow and research assistant at the University of Pittsburgh for Dr. Arlene G. Taylor, a well-known cataloging authority. Joudrey was also a metadata policy intern at the Library of Congress. Before that, he worked for an international non-profit social services organization. He is lead author for the newly revised and expanded 11th edition of Introduction to Cataloging and Classification and co-author of the 3rd edition of The Organization of Information. Joudrey received his Ph.D. and MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh and his B.A. in theatre from George Washington University. He writes on education for cataloging and metadata, subject access, and other cataloging topics. He has been a member of the American Library Association for nearly 15 years.

Daniel Joudrey's Curriculum Vitae

Suzanne Leonard

Suzanne Leonard is Associate Professor of English, and co-coordinator of the college's interdisciplinary minor in Cinema and Media Studies. She is the author of Fatal Attraction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) and co-editor of Fifty Hollywood Directors (Routledge, 2014).

She regularly instructs classes on American film and television studies, feminist media studies, women's literature, literary interpretation, and cultural studies, and frequently teaches courses affiliated with the Women's and Gender Studies department and the college's Gender and Cultural Studies Master's program. She also teaches graduate classes through the Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies at MIT.

Professor Leonard is most interested in the intersections between feminism and popular culture, and her work has examined topics including: the treatment of the adultery plot in feminist novels; marriage envy; Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton's epic romance; Lily Tomlin; political spouses and The Good Wife; reality television and celebrity culture; and working women in American film and television.

Professor Leonard is currently working on a book on marriage and wives called Wife, Inc.: The Business of Marriage in Twenty-First Century American Culture.

Bridget Lynch

As an artist, B. Lynch, has been working with the topic of folly for many years. Her theatrical installations of the Folly pantheon have been shown at many solo exhibitions in New England. Her new project: The Red and the Grey showed at two venues in 2013.

Lynch has been combining digital and other media for several years, including "Tragical, Comical"... an installation with video and a site-specific labyrinth at the Grimshaw-Gudewicz Gallery in Fall River MA in 2008.  She presented a mixed media and video installation, Truth & Folly at UMass Amherst November 2004. Chain of Fools: Hogarth Reinterpreted by B. Lynch, a mixed media and video installation at University of New Hampshire. January 2006 her project Just a Pack of Cards, with the Open Studio Program was on view at the Currier Museum in Manchester NH. Other shows of note are: the Throne Project 2003, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Fool’s Progress, Eastern CT State University;The Game of Folly, The Art Complex Museum; and Plucked Fruit, Montserrat College of Art. Lynch has shown extensively in group shows, including The Chicken Show at the Boston Center for the Arts; as well as shows in Germany and the Midwest. Her popular lectures on the topic of Folly and art have been given at many universities and colleges.

Nevada, California, Texas and Alaska have played host to her videos and sound projects from 2011-2012. Video projects were screened at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburg, University of California Chico State, Lexington Art League among others. The Artist Foundation, Boston, premiered her solo video project: The Lunar Cycle 1 in November 2009.  Studio Green Gallery in Munich Germany premiered two videos in Fall 2009. Miss Kittikins... is included in Creatures Great & Small, a show originating at Murray State College in Kentucky, it has a catalog and traveled to Paducah and Lexington Ky.  
 
The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts awarded her a fellowship in 2008. She has won several awards for her projects, including a Puffin Grant and Ludwig Vogelstein award. She is a co-founder of the Hall Street Artist Collaborative, which produced two outdoor video screenings. Her bibliography includes reviews in Sculpture Magazine, ART New England, the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, the Patriot Ledge, the Wire and others, as well as several exhibition catalogues, and two cable TV presentations. She is included in the Springfield Ohio Museum of Art; The Boston Public Library, Boston; the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, MA; Eastern Connecticut State University Collection; University of NH Art Museum; Private collections in the USA, Germany and Sweden.

Critics say of her work: “Created with compassion, originality and wit, Lynch’s tableaux are metaphors for society.”—Alicia Faxon Art New England. "Lynch has inspiration and intellect to spare. Her installation embraces the illogic of chance, double dealing, and rule breaking that too often define our lives. Her work also includes the overt nod to Dada and recalls Duchamp's passion for chess."—John Stomberg ART New England. 

Hugo Kamya

Scholarly and Practice Interests

Katherine Jungreis

I am delighted to be beginning my fifth year as a full time faculty member after 23 years as an adjunct here at Simmons School of Social Work. When then Professor Sophie Freud initially suggested that I teach the Psychopathology course (now Assessment and Diagnosis) while I was a doctoral candidate at Simmons, I told her that I had never really considered teaching and wasn’t sure it was such a good idea. She countered with, “this is an offer you can’t refuse” and her wisdom was clear as I quickly found that teaching became one of the greatest pleasures of my social work career. 

Following graduation from Smith School for Social Work, I worked for almost twenty years at a community mental health center in a poor and working class town. My clinical work was with adults, families, groups and emergency services and I dealt with a variety of issues including many people with severe mental illness and their families. During that time Cambodian refugees moved into the community and we were actively involved in trying to provide culturally meaningful mental health services to them.

Like many others in our field, the direction of my work has been constantly evolving. Initially after graduation, I received training and became very involved with family therapy. Later, as I became more attuned to connecting the various parts of myself in my work, I wove in my curiosity about integrating spiritual/religious issues and psychotherapy. I joined the Jewish Therapists Network and taught in the Certificate Program for Jewish Communal and Clinical Social Work at Simmons. Other areas of special interest to me have included social work ethics, working with couples, mindfully connecting theory to practice and the use of movies as a powerful learning tool. Appreciating the meaning of work and the workplace was a central focus during the ten years that I consulted to the staff at the Federal Employee Assistance Program.

Most recently, I have been intrigued with relational aspects of social work supervision. I have given presentations and consulted on this topic and in the summers I teach in the Certificate Program for Advanced Clinical Supervision at Smith School for Social Work. While I no longer supervise students and staff in an agency setting, I have been able to continue a significant amount of clinical consultation to practitioners as well as consulting to staff at South Shore Mental Health Center which afforded me the ability to work again in a community mental health setting.

I believe that to most effectively teach I need to be directly involved in the work and that my ongoing clinical experiences enrich the learning in the classroom. I have found Simmons to be a wonderfully supportive, interesting and committed community that truly cares about helping students to be skillful, thoughtful and caring social workers. I am excited to be part of this community and to contribute to the professional growth of future social workers.

Lena Zuckerwise

Lena Zuckerwise is a political theorist specializing in contemporary political thought and democratic politics. Her first book, which will be published in 2015, brings the work of Hannah Arendt into the company of several key debates in democratic theory. Professor Zuckerwise’s writings on the subjects of post-colonial feminism, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, and the theory of foundationalism will appear later this year in the Encyclopedia of Political Thought. Other interests include gender and feminist theory, and the politics of race in the United States. Professor Zuckerwise teaches courses in historical political thought; contemporary feminist theory; the politics of human rights; and modern and contemporary theories of justice. Prior to coming to Simmons, Professor Zuckerwise taught at Wellesley College and Mount Holyoke College in the political science and gender studies departments, respectively. She completed her Ph.D. in 2010 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she was the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award. Professor Zuckerwise lives in the city of Boston with her partner, three-year-old son, and corgi, Olive, who has befriended many of her students. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking and cooking.

Michael Brown

Michael L. Brown is Professor of Mathematics and Statistics. He came to Simmons in 1986 and, for his first fifteen years at the College, taught half-time in mathematics and statistics, and half-time in computer science. Following that period, he has been teaching entirely in mathematics and statistics.

Professor Brown’s interests have been wide-ranging and interdisciplinary. As an applied mathematician, earlier in his career, he published in major journals in mathematical statistics, biophysics, and medical informatics. He also produced working papers in computer hardware design and econometric modeling. He in addition published expository mathematics. He was a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Computer Research Center of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

In recent years his interdisciplinary reach has taken new directions. He seeks to connect the mathematical sciences with issues of public interest, as well as with the arts. Twelve of his Letters to the Editor (eleven signed with his Simmons affiliation) on these topics have appeared in the New York Times. He is also concerned with the deeper motivations for learning and, more generally, questions of meaning and ethics in psychological life. He is a member of the Faculty Learning Community on Student Learning Theory, and has been a longtime member of the Simmons Honor Board. In the arts, he has a particular interest in theatre and drama, exemplified for instance by his very well-received performed readings at the Harvard Strindberg Symposium, a centennial gathering of scholars in honor of one of the founders of the modern theatre.

His Ph.D. is in Applied Mathematics, with a specialty in mathematical statistics, from Harvard. His A.M. is in Applied Mathematics, with a specialty in the mathematical physics of fluid dynamics, also from Harvard. His B.A. is from Columbia College of Columbia University in New York, where he was the valedictorian of his graduating class of more than 600 students.

Laura Saunders

Laura Saunders received her master's from Simmons College GSLIS in 2001, and after working as a reference and instruction librarian for several years returned to Simmons College and completed her PhD in 2010. She teaches courses in reference and information services, user instruction, services...

Jo O'Connor

O’Connor has worked for nearly 30 years in the marketing communication industry with specialties in entertainment, sports, oral presentation and event planning.

She has held leadership roles for the Boston Celtics, the Boston Garden/FleetCenter, CBS Radio, Sonesta Hotels, the Wang Center for the Performing Arts as well as worked twice in an agency setting.

Previously, O’Connor was full-time faculty member for 10 years at Boston University’s College of Communication – overhauling the oldest student PR agency in the county PRLab and has been awarded numerous teaching awards there. She has also taught advertising at Northeastern University for four years and is currently teaching online communication courses at Lasell College, where she has been for five years. She also runs a boutique mar/comm agency representing several regional clients.

O’Connor is delighted to be teaching full-time at Simmons College in Boston, where she is overseeing the new joint major (a collaboration between the Communication Department and School of Management) in Public Relations and Marketing Communication.

Go Sharks!

Judy Beal

Dr. Beal has had many leadership roles in her 40 years as a nurse. She currently serves as Professor and Dean of the School of Nursing and Health Sciences at Simmons College with responsibility for three nationally accredited academic programs. Prior to coming to Simmons in 1983, Dr. Beal taught at Boston University and Skidmore College. Dr. Beal has been a leader in nursing education since 1978. 

At Simmons she has been instrumental in building early innovative models of academic practice partnerships locally and then globally. In Boston, the unique model of "hospital as client” with the hospital financing the academic progression of employees in RN- BSN and RN-MSN programs grew from 1 partnership 5 years ago to 8 partnerships. With foundation funding, she partnered with the University of Cairo to replicate an accelerated second degree BSN program for unemployed university graduates. This effort significantly advanced workforce capacity and elevated the level of professional nursing practice in Egypt. With academic and practice partners in Saudi Arabia and with philanthropists in Bangladesh and Israel she is further replicating these programs.

As a RWJ Executive Nurse Fellow from 2008-2011, she created a national forum on academic-practice partnership by successfully engaging a national association to identify this issue as a strategic priority. She developed and co-led the AACN-AONE Task Force on Academic-Practice Partnerships. This group has significantly elevated the conversation on and strategy for developing academic-practice partnerships.

She has served as president, secretary, director and chair in many organizations including: Sigma Theta Tau International, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), the Massachusetts Association of Colleges of Nursing (MACN), Massachusetts Association of Registered Nurses (MARN), and Yale University Alumni Association. Most recently, she has served as a two term elected board member and is the newly elected secretary of AACN, secretary and vice president of MACN, chair of the MARN Nominations Committee, and co-lead of the RWJF Massachusetts Action Coalition.

Dr Beal is widely published with more than 100 peer reviewed articles. Her well- funded program of research focuses on role development of neonatal nurse practitioners and for the past 15 years on the development of a model of clinical nurse scholars. She is sought after as a regional and national speaker. Dr. Beal is on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Maternal Child Nursing as well as a peer reviewer for the Journal of Pediatric Nursing, the Journal of Professional Nursing, and Research in Nursing and Health. Dr. Beal is the Vice President of the MA Association of Colleges of Nursing, where she is active in the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education’s Nursing and Allied Health Initiative. 

Dr. Beal received her BSN from Skidmore College, her MSN from Yale, and DNSc from Boston University. She is a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing and the National Academies of Practice.

Becky Thompson

Becky Thompson, Ph.D. is a scholar, poet, activist, and yoga teacher whose work focuses on trauma and healing. She is the author of several books on social justice including Survivors on the Yoga Mat: Stories for those Healing from Trauma, When the Center is on Fire: Passionate Social Theory for Our Times, (co-author, Diane Harriford); Mothering without a Compass: White Mother’s Love, Black Son’s Courage; A Hunger So Wide and So Deep: A Multiracial View of Women's Eating Problems, A Promise and a Way of Life and a recently published book of poetry, Zero is the Whole I Fall into at Night.  She is Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at Simmons College and has taught at Duke University, Wesleyan University, the University of Colorado, Bowdoin College, and elsewhere. She has received numerous honors and awards, including from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association for University Women, the Ford Foundation, Political Research Associates, the Creative Justice Poetry Prize, and the Gustavus Myers Award for Outstanding Books on Human Rights. Becky is a senior level yoga teacher (RYT-500) and teaches at conferences, workshops, in college classes, and community centers internationally and nationally.