Peter Botticelli

Peter Botticelli has a doctorate in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an M.S.I. degree with a concentration in archives and records management from the University of Michigan School of Information. His most recent position was at University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science, where he directed the school's Digital Information Management (DigIn) graduate certificate program. Previously, he held research positions at Cornell University Library, the University of Michigan, and Harvard Business School. He has taught graduate courses on digital libraries, digital curation, scholarly communication, and digital preservation and has published research in history and archival studies.

Peter Botticelli's Curriculum Vitae

Justin Jones

License/Certifications/Awards

Professional Organizations Membership

American Physical Therapy Association (1999-present)
MA Chapter APTA Shoulder special interest group (2008-present, served as treasurer from 1/09-1/13)

Growing up, and being involved in athletics, I have always been interested in how people maximize their functional potential as well as how they recover from injury and disease. Physical therapy has allowed me to pursue these interests from several perspectives. As a licensed physical therapist and board certified orthopedic clinical specialist, I treat patients with a variety of orthopedic conditions and have a specific focus and interest in complicated shoulder problems. Teaching at Simmons in the musculoskeletal sequence of the physical therapy program allows me to share my past and current clinical experiences with students in the classroom. This allows for a more dynamic and interactive lecture and lab experience, where I can utilize relevant clinical examples to highlight the content being taught. Additionally, working closely with research faculty, I have been able to look at the issues that I see clinically in combination with the material I teach and formulate research questions in collaboration with my colleagues who can put them into a laboratory based research study. I feel that this allows my clinical practice to inform my teaching, which informs my research. Ultimately, with the evolving technology and access to information that students have, my teaching philosophy is to maximize students time on campus with real life, hands on problem solving experiences that facilitate their growth as future clinicians and evidence based practitioners.

Steve Berry

I attended Vanderbilt University where I double majored in History and Fine Arts earning the Bachelor of Arts and later a Masters of Education degrees. I also hold a M.Div. from Reformed Theological Seminary as well as a M.L.I.S. degree from the University of Southern Mississippi. I earned my doctoral degree in the Graduate Program in Religion of Duke University with qualifying exams on colonial America history, the history of religion in America, history of Reformation Europe, and Atlantic World travel literature. My doctoral dissertation, “Seaborne Conversions 1700-1800” examined the role of religion aboard eighteenth-century British sailing vessels crossing the Atlantic.

I have been a member of the History Department at Simmons University in Boston since 2007 where I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in Early American and Atlantic World history. I currently direct the department’s undergraduate program in public history, which means I teach an introductory course on public history that is combined with the history of Boston, a course that focuses on the role of objects in historical understanding, as well as supervising internships at a variety of museums and historic sites in the area. I teach separate graduate and undergraduate courses on the history of the Atlantic World from Columbus to the Haitian Revolution. I normally handle the first half of the American history survey, which covers colonization through reconstruction as well as an African-American history survey course. Finally, I typically teach our department’s core seminar for our undergraduate majors, “Interpreting the Past,” which introduces students to the theory and method of history. As a teacher of the humanities, my two overall goals for students in all of my courses are to be critical thinkers and excellent writers.

My wife Dana and I live in Maynard, Massachusetts with our teenage daughter and son. In my spare time, I enjoy reading and playing board games. In addition to writing about ships, I love sailing, but I know just enough about boats to be a danger to others and myself.

Mary Jane Treacy

I am a Professor of Spanish Language and Literatures as well as Director of the Honors Program. I wrote a doctoral dissertation on drama, the emergence of comedy, in 16th-century Spain with an emphasis on the comedia of Lope de Vega. Soon after this, I turned to the other face of Spanish theatre: the famous wife-murder plays of Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca and from there to violence (state violence as well as violence against women) in Latin American and Spanish literature.

Violence took me directly to Latin American experiences of the 60s - 90s to see how literature and film attempted to make sense of political upheaval and state violations of human rights. I also examined how personal writings—autobiography, essays, interviews—by members of guerrilla movements explained and framed their participation and use of violence to bring about social change. My particular interest was, and remains, in how women joined these forces and how they explain their experiences as gendered (or not).

Interest in social movements took me from Latin American guerrilla organizations to U.S. social movements. I was given the opportunity to teach Roots of Feminism in the WGST program. Soon after, I joined Reacting to the Past, a group of historians and political scientists centered at Barnard College who design role-playing games for college courses in a variety of fields. I saw that their approach was one that would ideally suit the Roots course, except that I was going to have to write it myself. So I did. Greenwich Village 1913: Suffrage, Labor and the New Woman has now been featured at many national conferences and is played in universities throughout the United States.

Denise Humm-Delgado

My background is in social policy, social action, and advocacy.  I am particularly interested in social justice and human rights issues for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses but also have a strong focus on issues for other marginalized groups as they are affected by racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, youthism, and other forms of oppression. Of course, many people are affected by more than one form of oppression.

My education and work have focused in these areas, and one position before I came to Simmons School of Social Work was Senior Associate in the Office of the Court-Appointed Monitor for Special Education in Boston.  There, under the Allen v. McDonough case brought by parent advocates and the Massachusetts Advocacy Center against the Boston Public Schools for non-delivery of special education services, we strived to obtain rights for the children who were being deprived of an education or whose education was being compromised.  My learning there emphasized what I had been taught in my doctoral program – that advocacy and social action are critical to our social work mission and to achieving social justice and obtaining human rights.  I try to pass on my own "hands on" learning to my students at Simmons School of Social Work, and I am very rewarded by their passion for social justice. 

I have been able to draw from my experience and interests in co-authoring two books that focus on people with disabilities and chronic illnesses as well as other oppressed groups.  The first book was Health and Health Care in the Nation's Prisons: Issues, Challenges, and Policies, and the second book was Asset Assessments and Community Social Work Practice.  In addition, parts of my current volunteer work that are related to my commitment to issues for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses are at the Samuel P. Hayes Research Library & Perkins Archives at Perkins School for the Blind and as a consulting editor for the journal Health & Social Work, and each of those are valuable learning experiences for me.

Jo Trigilio

Jo Trigilio received their Ph.D. in Philosophy with a concentration in Feminist Theory from the University of Oregon. Professor Trigilio has a special interest in the intersection of theory and practice. They specialize in oppression/liberation theories, including feminist and gender theories, race theories, and queer theory.

They are politically active in the queer community of Boston. Professor Trigilio has served on the board of directors for the National Women's and Gender Studies Association for six years. Trigilio was elected and served as the 2018 Boston Pride Marshal. They are currently leading The Boston Dyke March History and Archive Project.

Elizabeth Scott

I am an Associate Professor of Biology and co-director of the Undergraduate Program in Public Health.  I did my graduate training in Applied Microbiology at London University. I am also the co-director and founder of the Simmons Center for Hygiene and Health in Home and Community Settings.

My research looks at broad issues associated with the transmission of microbial pathogens in the indoor environment. The applied research in my lab allows undergraduate students to get involved in developing and piloting research methodologies and also, to get published in peer review journals.

I serve as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the International Forum on Home Hygiene and on the editorial board of the American Journal of Infection Control. This allows me to disseminate information on matters of hygiene and infection control and I am frequently quoted in the press.

My passion is for microbiology and public health and I am committed to the rigorous preparation of Simmons students for graduate programs and careers in this field. I am also deeply committed to two other related issues. One is finding strategies to inform the general public on aspects of microbiology and infection control that impact our daily lives. The other is the issue of keeping women in the STEM disciplines and strengthening the STEM pipeline for women from school through to postdoctoral careers.

Kyong Eun Oh

Kyong Eun Oh joined the Simmons SLIS faculty in the fall of 2013. She earned her Ph.D. at Rutgers University, School of Communication & Information. She received her M.A. in Library & Information Science from Yonsei University, and her B.A. in English Language & Literature as well as Library & Information Science from Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea.

Oh's research interests include categorization, information organizing behavior, and personal information management (PIM). In her dissertation research, she explored the process of organizing personal information from a cognitive sociological perspective, and developed a model that explains the process. Her dissertation, The Process of Organizing Personal Information, won the 2015 ALISE/Eugene Garfield Dissertation Award. She has been involved in a number of funded research projects including those funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Hewlett-Packard (HP) technology, the Center for Executive Leadership in Government (CELG), and the Korea Research Foundation (KRF).

Oh has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in information organization, metadata, research methods, and information technology. She is currently on the governing board of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) and serves as a section editor of Open Information Science. Oh also served as a co-chair of the 2016 ALISE/Jean Tague-Sutcliffe Doctoral Student Poster Competition, the publicity chair of the 2015 International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL), and a program committee member of 2016 iConference. 

Kyong Eun Oh's Curriculum Vitae

Jennifer Putney

Kelly Hager

I've been at Simmons since 2001, teaching in the departments of English and Women's & Gender Studies, in the undergraduate Honors Program, and in the graduate programs in English, Children's Literature, and Gender/Cultural Studies. I was awarded the Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2006. I served as Director of the Graduate Program in Gender/Cultural Studies from 2003-2007, as interim Chair of the D epartment of Women's & Gender Studies in 2010-11, and as Chair of the Department of English from 2011-2014. Before coming to Simmons, I was Head Preceptor in the Expository Writing Program at Harvard and Lecturer and Mentor to new graduate student teachers in the English Department at Yale.

I co-chair the Victorian Literature and Culture Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, and I'm on the editorial board of The Lion and the Unicorn. I'm the author of Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition (chosen by CHOICE as a highly recommended book), the co-author of the Instructor's Guide for the Norton Introduction to Literature, and I co-edited a special issue of Victorian Review on "Extending Families." I've also contributed invited pieces to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature, the Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature, Keywords for Children's Literature, BRANCH (Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History), and The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (Wiley-Blackwell).

Rich Gurney

Dr. Gurney is an expert in the field of Green Chemistry Education, where he has been actively developing curricula for the past 13 years. He focuses his teaching and research on the applications of green chemistry and finding solutions for everyday problems using materials that are "benign by design." As the Principle Investigator and Director of the Undergraduate Laboratory Renaissance Program, funded in part by the W. M. Keck Foundation and the National Science Foundation, Dr. Gurney is currently studying the effectiveness of an entirely project-based, research-integrated, greener organic chemistry laboratory experience as one component of a completely re-engineered, undergraduate, green-laboratory curriculum. The ULR Program encompasses a fundamental reengineering of the undergraduate laboratory curriculum using the principles of green chemistry to expose students to the excitement of research beginning in their first-semester of their undergraduate career. The integrity of the knowledge learned within the ULR laboratory sequence has been maintained, while providing an environment for students to hone their higher-order cognitive skills such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation. From 2008 – 2013, the W. M. Keck Foundation supported the effort to expand this pedagogy to course-based laboratories not only in Chemistry, but also in Physics and Biology, with a total of 9 faculty participants. Dr. Gurney is also highly active in the development of greener polymeric systems capable of closed-loop molecular recycling, in collaboration with Dr. Debora Martino at INTEC (Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnológico para la Industria Química) and the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina. Funding in part to support undergraduate participation in this collaboration and research has been provided by the (Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina (CAI+D Tipo II PI 11-57), CONICET (PIP 112-200801-01079 and D-1280/2011) Argentina, the NSF OISE (#1031394), the Semiconductor Research Corporation Educational Alliance-Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, and the Presidential Fund for Faculty Excellence at Simmons University for the financial support. Dr. Gurney is one of the 16 founding members of the Green Chemistry Education Network and one of the ten founding faculty Board Members for the Green Chemistry Commitment.

James Corcoran

James Corcoran, an associate professor in the Department of Communications, is the author of two books on domestic terrorism. The first, Bitter Harvest: The Birth of Paramilitary Terrorism in the Heartland, examined the rise of the anti-tax movement in rural America embodied by extremists groups such as the Posse Comitatus. NBC-TV turned the book, which was based on Corcoran's Pulitzer Prize nominated coverage of the murders of three U.S. marshals by a militant tax protest group, into a made-for-television movie, starring Rod Steiger, entitled "In the Line of Duty: Manhunt in the Dakotas." Bitter Harvest received the Gustav Meyers Center's award for Outstanding Book on the subject of human rights and the Golden Pen Award. Penguin Press reissued it with a new foreword in 1995 following on the Oklahoma City bombing. A third edition was reissued in 2005.

His second book, Gathering Storm: America's Militia Threat, was co-authored with Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Written after the Oklahoma City bombing, it traced the growth and impact of hate groups, militias, and racist demagogues.

Corcoran is a member of the United Nations' "Roster of Experts on Terrorism and Related Phenomena" and a recipient of the Bush Foundation Leadership Award, which is awarded annually to no more than 20 people who are considered of "substantial standing" in their fields. During his 10-year career as a journalist, which included work for The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead and Newsweek, Corcoran received more than 24 state, regional, and national writing awards.

LaDonna Christian

LaDonna L. Christian, PhD, MSN, APHN-BC, joined the department of nursing at Simmons University eight years ago as faculty in the Dotson Bridge and Mentoring Program and a year later she was named the program Director. She recently completed her doctorate degree in Health Professions Education at Simmons University. She received her undergraduate degree from the University Of Michigan School Of Nursing and her Masters Degree from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in Community Health Nursing. She also completed her Advance Practice Certification in Community Health Nursing and a Certificate of Advance Graduate Studies (CAGS) in Health Professions Education. Her background and clinical expertise is in Public Health Nursing and Environmental Health with a focus on policy and the underserved and minority population. In 2007, LaDonna traveled to Honduras on a one-week medical missions trip to work with the Sisters of Notre Dame to meet the medical needs of the families in Guaimaca. LaDonna also spent 17 years in public health working with HIV, STI, and TB patients. LaDonna began teaching at Brockton Hospital School of Nursing, but has also taught at South Shore Regional Technical High School, and Coppin State University School of Nursing in Baltimore MD. In her present position she works with underrepresented and underprivileged multicultural nursing students, where she has assisted over 130 scholars to reach their goal of becoming a bachelors prepared registered nurse and leaders in their communities. LaDonna is a member of Sigma Theta Tau International and is the Vice President of Theta at Large Chapter at Simmons University. She also belongs to The Mary Mahoney Nursing Honor Society, American Nurses Association, the Massachusetts Nurses Association, Chi Eta Phi Black Nurses Association, The National Black Nurses Association and the New England Regional Black Nurses Association. At Simmons, LaDonna serves as the faculty advisor to the ALANA nursing Liaison, co-facilitator of the Seeking Education Equity and Diversity (SEED) program for faculty, staff, and students, a co-facilitator of the Diversity and Inclusion committee in the School of Nursing and Health Sciences, and a member of the college wide Diversity and Inclusion Action Committee.

Download Ladonna L. Christian's CV.

Amitabh Dashottar

Dr. Dashottar joined the faculty at Simmons University in January 2013. Before Joining Simmons, Dr. Dashottar did Postdoctoral research at the Laboratory of Investigative Imaging and his doctoral research at the Human Performance Laboratory at the Ohio State University.