Peter Maramaldi

Martha Mahard

Martha Mahard has more than three decades of professional experience with the Harvard University Libraries, including work in photography and visual collections at the Fine Arts Library, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the Harvard Theatre Collection of The Houghton Library. In addition to her numerous journal articles and presentations in the field of photographic archives, cultural heritage, and digital preservation, she is the co-author with Ross Harvey, of The Preservation Management Handbook: A 21st Century Guide for Libraries, Archives and Museums (published by Rowman and Littlefield in April 2014). With Michele Cloonan she was co-principal investigator for the IMLS (Institute of Library and Museum Services) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarians grant which supported the development and implementation of the Cultural Heritage Informatics concentration. She has served as a consultant on major projects for museums and libraries, including the Worcester Art Museum and the Boston Public Library, and is a current board member at the Northeast Document Conservation Center. Mahard received an M.A. in Theatre History from Tufts University, and her M.S. and D.A. from Simmons SLIS.

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.

Diane Grossman

Diane Grossman received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from New York University, where she was an Ida Parker Bowne Scholar. She is a Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Philosophy and Chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department. Grossman has served Simmons as Chair...

Ellen Grabiner

I am currently the Chair of the Communications Department at Simmons College, in Boston, Massachusetts. I was hired seventeen years ago as an instructor quite simply because of my immersion in what were then the newest media in the communications field: the world wide web, digital imaging, and digital video editing. I was hired with the hope that I would help to bring the department into the 21st century, both in terms of preparing the communications students for the world that awaited them, but also in terms of helping them to explore, articulate and question the tremendous changes in media that surrounded them.

Fast-forward seventeen years and we are all still reeling from the accelerating speed at which new media has evolved. There is not a corner in the developed world today that has remained untouched by this gargantuan moving target of change. As a department that understands communication as a discipline that not only utilizes media but also critiques it, at Simmons we have embraced an approach that emphasizes media convergence: we employ new media to observe, explore, question, track, and understand new media. At the same time, we encourage our students to inhabit a meta-space in which they can approach the study of new media through philosophical, theoretical, political, social, technological, and aesthetic lenses.

My work as an educator, mentor, and developer of curricular initiatives includes co-design and co-direction of Simmons’ interdisciplinary minor in Cinema and Media Studies, my pioneering work in the first learning communities as part of the Simmons Honors program, my development of courses in cinema and media theory, storytelling, digital cultures and communications technologies, and my design and leadership of an intensive January course at Simmons called the World Challenge.

Leanne Doherty

Dr. Doherty received her PhD in Government with a concentration in Public Policy from Northeastern University after receiving a BA in Government from Clark University. As an undergrad, she had many different roles as a student, not unlike many of our students here at Simmons: captain of the Women’s Basketball team, member of the Admissions Staff, and explorer of the many academic opportunities that a liberal arts college has to offer.

Currently, Dr. Doherty serves as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs for the College of Arts and Sciences where she supports the Dean of CAS around faculty and student academic needs. These include areas such as general education, academic support, and majors/program curriculum. She is also the director of the graduate Program in Public Policy as well as the 3+1 accelerated program in Public Policy. 

A proud member of the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Dr. Doherty’s teaching is centered around the American Political System, with a concentration on gender and politics, popular culture and public policy. She was honored to be named Professor of the Year by students in 2008 and received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising in 2009. 

She is also the co-host of the Sports Profs, a weekly sports talk radio show on Simmons College internet Radio. Each week, Dr. Doherty with Dr. Daren Graves from the Education department talk sports as it intersects with race, gender, and class. “Real talk, with an academic twist.” When not at Simmons, Dr. Doherty enjoys watching and playing all sports with her two partners in crime, husband Mark and son, Donovan. She also enjoys music, reading, and really bad television.

Susan Duty

After obtaining a doctoral degree in occupational epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2002, I joined the nursing faculty in the nursing program at Simmons College. I am a Professor and Faculty Director of the Health Professions Education PhD Program. I teach research methods across the baccalaureate, master's and doctoral curriculums. I am also certified as an Adult Nurse Practitioner with specialization in Occupational Health. In addition to my teaching responsibilities, I work clinically at South Shore Hospital in Weymouth, MA as a Nurse Research Scientist helping build the infrastructure for nursing research there.

My research agenda explores environmental exposures to plasticizers including phthalates and bisphenol A and I work collaborative with students and multidisciplinary faculty on studies exploring Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus colonization of people, pets and surfaces. I has many peer reviewed publications and have presented this work regionally, nationally and internationally. In my role as Nurse Research Scientist in the clinical setting, I have extended my scholarly activity into clinical research translation aimed at reducing 30-day readmissions, improving satisfaction with patient care, reducing hospital acquired adverse outcomes and improving the infrastructure for palliative care.

Grant funding has been secured from highly competitive National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety, the National Institute for Environmental Health and Safety, as well as from the Simmons College President's Fund and from private foundations like the Passport Foundation and the New England Deaconess Hospital School of Nursing Alumnae Association. I recently completed a 2-year, $250,000 workforce development grant from the Commonwealth Corporation to improve the infrastructure for palliative care at Simmons College and at our practice partner site- South Shore Hospital.

I am a member of the Organization of Nurse Leaders Research Council, the MA Action Coalition - Academic Practice Partnership working group and I am the Treasurer of the Theta-at-large Chapter of Sigma Theta Tau International. I serve as a peer reviewer for many top tier journals and have received The Theresa LaPlante Award for Excellence in Administration from Sigma Theta Tau.

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

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.

Eduardo Febles

Professor Febles, a native of Puerto Rico, received a B.A. in French and Political Economy from Tulane University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in French Studies from Brown University. He also studied at L'École Normale Supérieure, L'Institut d'Études Politiques, and La Sorbonne in Paris. Before coming to Simmons, he taught at Goucher College and Brandeis University. His research focuses on the intersections between politics and literature, especially in 19th century France. He is the author of Explosive Narratives: Anarchy and Terrorism in the Works of Emile Zola, published by Rodopi Press in 2010. He also edited with his mother, Dr. María Vega de Febles, a collection of articles written by his grandfather entitled Crónicas Ejemplares and published by Ediciones Universal in 2010. He is presently working on a project about the connections between homophobia and anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus Affair. He is also the author of several scholarly articles, book reviews, and short stories.

Pamela Bromberg

Pam Bromberg began her academic career as a Blake scholar and has migrated over the years to teaching and scholarly work on a broad variety of writers, including contemporary women and post-colonial novelists. Recent publications include essays on Blake's visual art, but also on the work of Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood, Lillian Hellman, and Buchi Emecheta. She has also contributed essays on teaching Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Emma to the MLA's Approaches to Teaching volumes; a new essay on “Mansfield Park:s Austen’s Most Teachable Novel” has just been published in the series. She has recently presented work on Margaret Atwood at international conferences, leading to the publication of an essay in Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye.

Her interest in Austen has inspired a seminar on Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, a course that provides in depth study of the development of two of England's greatest novelists. In recent years she has been teaching exciting new seminars on the Postcolonial Novel and The Colonial Legacy in Africa: History and Literature. In both of those courses students have the opportunity to work on novels of their choosing for final projects.

Niloufer Sohrabji

As a college student I was drawn to economics because it taught me how to think about, and address the many challenges that ail our world. I became an educator because I wanted to share this knowledge and inspire my students to make a positive difference in the world.

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.

Valerie Leiter

Val Leiter teaches courses on medical sociology, research methods, and sociology of childhood and youth—these topics dovetail with her research on children and youth with disabilities, medicalization, and gender and health. She received the Irving K. Zola award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies in 2004 for her work on "Parental Activism, Professional Dominance, and Early Childhood Disability." Her first book, Their Time Has Come: Youth with Disabilities on the Cusp of Adulthood, was published in 2012, a result of her William T. Grant Foundation Scholars project on the “Transition to Adulthood Among Youth with Disabilities.” The Sociology of Health & Illness: Critical Perspectives (9th edition), co-edited with Peter Conrad, was also published in 2012.

She is active in the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the American Sociological Association, where she has multiple leadership positions, including membership on ASA’s Committee on Professional Ethics and the Editorial Advisory Board of Social Problems. On campus, Val is the Co-Chair of the Institutional Review Board, Co-Director of the Public Health program, and a member of the steering committee for the Master in Public Policy program.

Val mentors several students each year on their independent research projects. Right now, she is working with Sidney Jean (Public Health) on her senior thesis on women’s body images, Renata Bule (Public Health) on her senior thesis on health care for refugees and asylees, Mary Harrington (Public Health) on the role of faith and spirituality in medical care, Sarah Hewitt (Master in Public Policy) on calorie count menu policies, Youjin Kim (Sociology) on youth culture in Korea, and Danielle Funk (Master in Gender and Cultural Studies) on STDs among women who have sex with women.

Val is also a dedicated student of Iyengar yoga, learning from multiple teachers in the Boston area.