NCIS welcomes our newest members, whose fields include linguistics, education policy, communication and politics.

Darnella Davis received her doctorate in Education Policy from The George Washington University, where she researched federal Indian education policy, producing a study that asked how a culturally relevant curriculum engages Native Americans, statistically the poorest performing student group in the United States. Dr. Davis holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she also taught drawing and color theory. She began her advanced education with a scholarship to the Parsons School of Design, studied French language and civilization at the University of Dakar in Senegal, and completed a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts, graduating cum laude from the University of Michigan. 

During her career as a research analyst, Dr. Davis wrote technical reports and edited publications on equality of access to rigorous curricula for traditionally underperforming K-12 public school students. In her work as a writer, researcher, artist, teacher, yoga practitioner, and samba enthusiast, Dr. Davis has consolidated many of her interests in Untangling a Red, White, and Black Heritage, A Personal History of the Allotment Era, a book that covers 130 years of her racially-mixed family history and their place in our nation’s current racial discourse (forthcoming in 2018 from the University of New Mexico Press). Her next project examines Alexis de Tocqueville’s thoughts about the future of the three races that inhabited the U.S. in 1830 and their long-term impact on democracy.

Can Küçükali holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. In his doctoral thesis, later published as a book, he conceptualized discursive strategies as hegemonic projects and analyzed their functions in the policymaking process of Turkish politics. His areas of interest include aggression and legitimation in political discourse, Critical Discourse Analysis, political discourse analysis and rhetorical strategies. He also published articles on Turkish and German politics. Recently, he has published an open access book, Discursive Political Analysis.

Elizabeth Jonick-Grant graduated Summa Cum Laude from Miami University with a B.A. in sociology and philosophy and holds an M.A. in Philosophy from Miami University with a special emphasis on ethics. Dr. Joniak-Grant received an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology at UCLA with a special emphasis on deviance, homelessness, interaction, social control, institutions, and qualitative research methods, particularly ethnography and in-depth interviewing. While at UCLA she conducted research on a drop-in center for homeless youth, a mobile van unit conducting HIV testing in high-risk populations, and spent three years conducting ethnographic research with homeless youth living on the streets. She also oversaw a variety of undergraduate and graduate ethnographic projects in her role as a teaching fellow. Currently Dr. Joniak-Grant serves as a consulting patient representative for the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration.

Julie Hunsberger received her Ph.D. in Communication and Rhetorical Studies from Duquesne University.

James Horrox is an independent researcher and freelance editor based in Los Angeles. He holds a B.A. and Ph.D in Politics and has published on a range of humanities and social science subjects, primarily focusing on communities and the voluntary sector, neotribalism, and 19th/early 20th century European social and political thought. He has worked as an Associate Lecturer at Manchester University, Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Salford and the Open University.
 
 

New members joining NCIS include scholars from Bulgaria as well as Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the United States, with disciplines ranging from architecture to engineering.

Daniel S. Brown, an adjunct instructor at several universities and colleges, including the University of Toledo and Oakland Community College, earned his Ph.D. in English with a specialization in Victorian British Literature from the University of Florida in 2012. He worked as a visiting instructor at the University of South Florida in Tampa from 2012–2015. Brown’s research interests include realism, Pre-Raphaelitism, masculinities, and the interactions between verbal and visual representation.

Roberta Cohen is a specialist in human rights, humanitarian, and refugee issues, and a leading expert on the subject of internally displaced persons and on human rights conditions in North Korea. Cohen has published more than 100 articles on human rights and humanitarian issues. She has received numerous awards, including the Diplomatic and Consular Officers, Retired Fiftieth Anniversary Award for Exemplary Writing on Foreign Affairs and Diplomacy and the Washington Academy of Sciences Award for Distinction in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Cohen has been a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of International Migration, and an adjunct associate professor at the Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in American University’s Washington College of Law. She holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Bern Faculty of Law, a master’s degree “with distinction” from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a bachelor’s from Barnard College (Columbia University), which awarded her its Distinguished Alumna Award in 2005.

After receiving a Ph.D. in history from Texas A&M University in 2012, David Conley Nelson published Moroni and the Swastika: Mormons in Nazi Germany with the University of Oklahoma Press in 2015. Conley holds bachelor’s degrees in journalism from the University of Oregon and French from the University of Houston and served six years as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. He combines his focus on small religious denominations and totalitarian governments with research on collective memory—how groups and even whole societies choose to remember their past.

Miriam Díaz-Gilbert, author of English for Pharmacy Writing and Oral Communication, publishes on spirituality and healing and teaches theology/religious studies. Her unfinished dissertation topic focused on modern ultrarunning in the context of desert asceticism. She has directed a writing center has lectured on first-year writing and rhetoric, and academic ESL. Diaz-Gilbert is a Huffington Post blogger who has written on a variety of topics, including ultrarunning and spirituality, and has been teaching in higher education nearly 25 years and running ultramarathons since 2005.

A director of project management at Celldex Therapeutics in Needham, Massachusetts, James M. Huebner has more than 20 years experience in drug development project management, competitive intelligence, clinical operations and discovery and basic research. He is a frequent invited lecturer on drug development and project management at national professional meetings and has served as a course director and faculty member for the Pharmaceutical Education & Research Institute (PERI) since 2005. Huebner holds masters degrees in Biological Sciences from Western Michigan University and in Ethics & Public Policy from Suffolk University in Boston and publishes in academic journals.

Perry Miller in November 2016 defended his dissertation on the application of psychoanalytic concepts to mental health self-help literature. His research interests include the contributions of interdisciplinary cultural studies to institutional and public humanities, especially in the areas of community mental health and medical humanities.

Priya Parrotta Natarajan, a writer, musician and facilitator, is committed to fostering empathy, curiosity, and responsibility across geopolitical divides in the interest of our shared, brilliant planet. She is the author of The Politics of Coexistence in the Atlantic World (forthcoming), which brings to light what is arguably the Caribbean’s greatest gift to the world: centuries of experience in living together, under dizzyingly complex conditions. Recently featured as one of Washington, D.C.’s “Outstanding Millennials,” Natarajan was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Scott Pellegrino’s current research concentrates on the logical analysis of language and knowledge by investigating the nature, structure, and limits of world description and quantification. His secondary research interest includes historical biographical, architectural, and geographical research of St. Louis during the Second Industrial Revolution.

With a doctorate degree in Marriage and Family Studies and several graduate degrees in Literature, Library Science, Theology, James Sauer has published more than 250 articles and reviews as well as essays in anthologies. Sauer, a Buffalo, New York, native, plans to begin significant research on topics in politics and theology with a focus on specific authors such as C. S. Lewis, John Newton, John Bunyan, Pascal, and Chesterton.

A full time as an engineer since 1990, Steven Sawyer holds Ph.D. and master’s degrees in Economics and works periodically as an adjunct professor as well as on other projects, such as analyzing Nigerian price data. Sawyer’s research has been published in the Journal of Economic Issues.

James Stout teaches in the San Diego Community College system and his dissertation “Breakaway Nations: The Use of Sport and Physical Culture to Create a Cross-Class Catalan Identity during the Second Republic,” examines youth groups in the Second Republic, the role of sport in empowering republican women and the use of cycle races to define and united a diverse community. A former professional athlete, Stout also is founder and executive director of a nonprofit organization that works with people in the Native American community.

Architect and an independent researcher Iva Stoyanova works in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and holds a M. Arch. (2011, UACEG, Sofia, Bulgaria) and a Ph.D. with merits, Doctor Europaeus, in Preservation of Architectural Heritage (2015, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy). She upgrades her doctoral studies “Gallery Vittorio Emanuele II. The iron-glass cover: conservation, innovation, continuity” and develops her research interests as an independent scholar. She is interested in historical building techniques, conservation and preservation of heritage architecture (19th/ 20th c.). Her passion is to study the building technology of threatened heritage architecture and to reconstruct it virtually.

NCIS welcomes two new members, Dr. Claudia Keenan and Dr. Sarah Weaver. 

Dr. Claudia Keenan is an historian of American education and culture with interests ranging from progressive education to the symbolization of U.S. First Ladies. In recent years, her publications have focused on local history in Westchester County, N.Y., and Atlanta, and continues to research in American history and culture circa 1870–1920. After growig up in Mt. Vernon, N.Y., Keenan graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in cultural anthropology. In 1995, inspired by the story of the Bronxville, N.Y., public schools (among the few progressive school districts in the nation during the 1920s), she entered NYU’s doctoral program in History of Education. Keenan’s thesis, P.T.A. Business: A Cultural History of How Suburban Women Supported the Public Schools (2002), explored the manipulation of local PTA initiatives to affirm social hierarchy, manage flaming youth, and otherwise enforce conservative values. Subsequently, she taught at Emory & Henry College and published articles and chapters on various topics. Keenan lives in New York City and blogs about little-known historical figures at “Through the Hourglass.”

Dr. Sarah Weaver is a scholar of nineteenth-century British literature. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Cambridge in 2015 for a dissertation that examined the influence of Victorian philology on Alfred Tennyson's poetry.

NCIS welcomes three new members and one associate member!

While building a career in business, Ken Gorfkle also earned a doctorate in Spanish literature, graduating from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2014. At UNC, he focused on semiotics, poetics, and contemporary Latin American literature and gained expertise on the work of the internationally recognized contemporary Chilean poet, David Rosenmann-Taub. Dr. Gorfkle has written received a grant and multiple awards from the foundation that preserves and promotes the work of this gifted and multifaceted artist and has been reworking his doctoral dissertation, “The Intersection of Life and Death in David Rosenmann-Taub’s Tetralogy Cortejo y Epinicio” for publication. He is preparing a series of articles based on an interpretative approach to the poet’s work for academic audiences and also is preparing to disseminate the poetry to a lay audience.

Geneveive Newman, a recent alumna of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts MA program in Cinema and Media Studies. Her research interests include decolonial and Third Cinema, horror and science fiction media, transnational Irish cultural production, and critical cultural studies. An independent scholar, her current research focuses on marginalization, decolonialism, and formal experimentation in horror media and literature.

Angela E. Roe, Ph.D, is a cultural anthropologist, writer and filmmaker of Curaçaoan, Surinamese and Dutch descent. Dr. Roe’s passion is to conduct solid anthropological research and to make her academic work accessible to large, non-academic audiences. Therefore, in 2012 she launched the Warwarú ImageNation Foundation, a nonprofit research, media and event organization that spotlights (Dutch) Caribbean tangible and intangible heritage, and that pursues ideological decolonization through a wide variety of events and research projects. Her foundation's first project was the award-winning documentary Sombra di Koló/The Shadow of Color (2014), on race and racism in Curaçao.

NCIS Associate member Gary Rubin is a financial services professional with more than 30 years experience. He holds a masters degree in Applied and Professional Ethics from the University of Leeds and is a published author in the areas of financial advisers and ethics. He currently is researching applied and professional ethics with a focus on business ethics in the field of financial services.