SAGES

Gail Arnoff, "Questions of Identity"

Gail Arnoff has been a teacher since 1967. For many years she taught on the psychiatric units of Hanna Pavilion and Cleveland Clinic, as part of the Cleveland Municipal School District’s Residential Schools. Most recently she was a special education and English teacher at Collinwood High School. While there she founded Collinwood Creations, an arts journal of student work which has received recognition from the MBNA Foundation, the Plain Dealer, WCPN, and Borders. As a teacher in the Facing History and Ourselves program, Gail has developed an interest in helping young people deal with issues of identity. Students in her seminar will study works from the Holocaust, Civil Rights Movement, and Decolonization eras in order to discover how others have thought about these issues.

When not teaching, Gail enjoys running marathons for Team in Training, which raises money to fund leukemia and lymphoma research. She has mentored a young woman from the I Have a Dream Program, a Little Sister, and new marathoners. In addition Gail writes short stories and spends as much time as possible with her grandchildren, Elai, Dar, Aaron, and Aviv.

Elizabeth Banks, "Exploring a Sense of Place: The Doan Brook Watershed and Photography"

Elizabeth "Betsy" Banks is currently Assistant Director for the Center for Civic Engagement & Learning (CCEL) at Case Western Reserve University. In this position, she coordinates both co-curricular volunteer programs and academic service-learning, developing links between curriculum and the Cleveland community. She has coordinated and led the Service Learning Faculty Fellows Seminar, the Case Civic Engagement Fellows Program, and the Case AmeriCorps Program in which students designed and taught place-based environmental education in urban Cleveland neighborhoods.

In addition to her experience in higher education, Betsy has worked in biodiversity conservation and land management with The Nature Conservancy on a Maine island, a large California nature preserve, and a statewide network of natural areas in Kentucky. She has also taught environmental education in northern Michigan, led wilderness trips in Colorado, conducted seabird research on a New Brunswick island, participated in an oral history/photography project in a Labrador Inuit village, and led conservation education programs in Yellowstone, the Everglades, and Nevada's high desert.

Betsy received a BA in Anthropology and Environmental Studies from Bowdoin College and an MS in Environmental Science from Miami University. She has studied photography through the Rocky Mountain School of Photography, the Maine Photographic Workshops, and the Cuyahoga Valley Photographic Society. Her favorite things include nature photography, writing, hiking, birding, traveling, and Maine's northern lakes and coastline.

Steve Cagan, "Looking at the World"

For over twenty-five years, Steve has done extensive photography in Latin America documenting aspects of daily life of working people in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba and Colombia. (This in addition to major photo projects about workers in Ohio.) Among other outcomes, the book This Promised Land, El Salvador (Rutgers, 1991), written with his wife, Beth Cagan (published also in an expanded Spanish-Language edition, El Salvador, La Tierra Prometida [San Salvador, 1994]), won an award as "Book of the Year" from the Association for Humanist Sociology in 1991.

Among Steve's other awards are: two Fulbright Fellowships; an Artist's Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; several fellowships from the Arts Councils of Ohio and New Jersey; and Teacher of the Year (1991), Rutgers University. He is returning from more than five months in Colombia on a Fulbright Fellowship just in time for the spring semester.

When he's not working on photography or social issues, Steve likes to spend time watching birds and developing a garden of native plants. He invites everyone to visit his web site at stevecagan.com, to check out his ongoing blog about his observations in Colombia at stevecagan.blogspot.com, and to see a large number of photographs at pbase.com/stevecagan.

Bill Doll, "Advertising and the American Dream"

Bill Doll is a lawyer with a doctorate in sociology and a former theater critic for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland. Bill heads his own communications and research consulting firm, Bill Doll & Company.

Founded in 1988, the firm works with corporations, professional service firms and not-for-profits on complex communications and advocacy issues. These clients have included banks, law firms, health systems, arts organizations and other not-for-profits, among them National City Corporation, KeyCorp, KPMG/Cleveland, Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, The CSA Health System, Playhouse Square Foundation and the Greater Cleveland Partnership.

His articles and speeches for clients have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fortune Small Business, the Washington Post, the National Law Journal, Vital Speeches, among others.

Bill serves is on the Executive Committee of the Great Lakes Theater Festival and is a former president of the Cleveland Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

For more background and work examples: www.billdollco.com

Carter Edman, "Towards a New Museum"

Carter A. Edman is an architect at Bostwick Design Partnership in Cleveland, where he has worked on a variety of projects for clients including, recently, the Inland Seas Maritime Museum, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Ohio Northern University, and the Cleveland Hearing and Speech Center. He works in all phases of planning, design, and construction. Bostwick Design Partnership is a full-service architectural firm which uses a team-based approach to design.

Carter has previously taught two SAGES seminars as well as an architectural materials and methods class at Cuyahoga Community College. He holds a Master of Architecture degree from Miami University, where he completed a thesis study of the Cleveland Museum of Art and its current expansion. Prior to graduate school, he worked as a writer for ImageMatrix, a marketing and communication company based in Cincinnati. Before that, he served as a deck officer aboard the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz.

Carter is active in the cultural life of Cleveland's museum community, including various activities with the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Artists' Foundation.

Kathy Ewing, "Schoolhouse Rocked: Education Reform from John Dewey to Homeschooling"

Kathy Ewing grew up in Canton, Ohio, and graduated from Kent State University. She has taught at all levels, from nursery school through college, at both public and private schools. Her writing has appeared in Northern Ohio Live, Cleveland Magazine, Case Magazine, the Plain Dealer, Growing Without Schooling, and The Book Group Book, among other publications. She currently teaches Latin at Cleveland State.

In 1987, she began home schooling her two children, Doug and Margaret, and continued for about ten years. During this time she and her children were active in local home schooling networks and organizations. Doug is now an alumnus of the Ohio State University; Margaret is a junior at Syracuse University.

Alan Federman, “Divisiveness or Dialogue: How We Deal With Difference”

Alan Federman (B.A., University of Cincinnati, M.A. in Clinical/Counseling Psychology, University of Akron) has been an adjunct professor at Cleveland State University, Baldwin Wallace College, and Lakeland Community College for the past ten years. He has been a Gestalt therapist in private practice since 1989 and is a graduate of the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland. His interest in how people develop polarized worldviews began during the 2001 presidential election controversy and he has conducted research on how opinions can be shaped by emotional manipulation. For the past five years, he has been involved in a number of dialogues on the Israel/Palestine conflict, working towards developing understanding and compassion among participants on both sides of the issue. More recently, he has been working with groups to help bring about a confluence of the spiritual and political, with hopes of being part of the next wave of consciousness-shifting in society. Alan is also an amateur writer, with an unpublished comic novel resting quietly on a bookshelf waiting to be discovered.

Karen Grochau, "Life is a Contact Sport"

"The purpose of my seminar is to use principles of organizational behavior and ethical systems as organizing frameworks to examine values, actions, and outcomes in different types of organizations. Nonprofit organizations (and primarily arts and cultural organizations) will be our main focus, with other examples drawn from the private for-profit sector and the public governmental sector. We will compare the missions, core values, and operating procedures of these diverse organizational types. It’s been fun trying to weave all that together.

"As for my history, I came to Cleveland in the late 60’s to earn a master's degree in Art History here at Case, and began what became a long career in museum education (in Newark, N.J., at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and at the Western Reserve Historical Society, where I served as Curator of Education). I loved teaching, creating innovative programs, and providing really neat opportunities for volunteers in a museum setting and watching them grow. In 1980, I stumbled upon the field of Organizational Behavior while attending a seminar at Berkeley and discovered that the oldest and largest program in the country existed right here in Cleveland. Going back to school at a youngish 40 a few years later, I devoted my Ph.D. studies to nonprofit organizations, group decision-making and effectiveness, and especially the governance of nonprofit organizations. I had a close association with the Lilly Endowment and its involvement in trusteeship, was the first student to be appointed a Mandel Scholar here at Case, and have been involved with the Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations since its inception. Some years later, I became the Assistant Director of the Arts Management Program at the Mandel Center. I have taught a variety of courses and executive education programs through the Mandel Center, the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Weatherhead, and Ohio State as an adjunct faculty member, while continuing to consult with nonprofit organizations on leadership and trusteeship issues. I have enjoyed the combination of teaching, consulting, and facilitating retreats in a variety of organizations, one role informing the other.

"As I’ve become more politically engaged recently, I think more about our personal, organizational, and national priorities and values, the ways that we invest time and resources, and the impact we will have on future generations, a sure sign of growing older and, hopefully, wiser – and the source of my new course. I expect to learn a lot from this opportunity."

Mary K. Holmes, "Food, Farming, and Prosperity"

Mary K. Holmes views herself as a civic entrepreneur. As a student of American Studies (B.A. with honors from the University of Michigan), she was impressed by the power of interdisciplinary approaches to intellectual history and tried in her teaching (M.A.T., Johns Hopkins University) to use innovative methods to engage students. After two years as Operations Manager for the American Bicentennial Celebration in Boston, where she was involved in creating three major exhibits, staff training programs, and visitor maps and brochures, she entered Harvard Business School intent on putting her organizational skills to work in manufacturing.

After graduating with an M.B.A. in 1979, she spent five years in manufacturing systems management at one of the Route 128 high-tech companies outside of Boston and then co-founded a software startup which she later sold to a major corporation. Since moving to Cleveland in 1990 she has helped business and not-for-profit clients focus their strategies using market research and competitive analysis. In addition, she has used her skills and experience to start or support many community-building organizations, including The North Union Farmers Market, Ohio’s largest and most successful farmers’ market, and Red {an orchestra}, a new professional orchestra currently in its fifth successful season.

In the spring of 2001, after serving for eight years as board president of the North Union Farmers Market, Mary decided to study the evolution of agriculture and community development in the United States as she participated in conferences around the country and became actively involved in the national farmers’ market movement. In October 2002, she helped to organize the 17th Annual Western Reserve Studies Symposium, titled “Local Foods and Markets: Reconnecting Farmers and Consumers in the Western Reserve.” She was also a consultant to the “Rural Communities Leadership Project” at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.

In the fall of 2004, Mary was the Symposium Chair for the 18th Annual Western Reserve Studies Symposium entitled, “Land Use and Prosperity in the Western Reserve: A Call to Action.” She has spoken to many groups on about the globalization of food production and the impact that industrial methods have on our health and well-being. She is a strong advocate for local foods and farmers markets and has appeared many times on local radio promoting fresh, local products. In the fall of 2005 she published a special report for The Farmland Center entitled, Entrepreneurial Farming: Part of the Plan for Prosperity in Northeast Ohio, which can be viewed in PDF format at www.thefarmlandcenter.org.

Mary has read extensively on the new urbanism, the new agrarianism, and economic revitalization, and has published several articles in the Plain Dealer.

Roy Kaelin, "Upheavals in Astronomy"

Roy Kaelin (B.S., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1978; M.B.A., Iowa State University, 1984) brings to his SAGES University Seminar a background of teaching astronomy and other natural sciences at Loyola and DePaul Universities and valuable experience from his years at Chicago's Adler Planetarium.

As Manager of Astronomy Education at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, he now works to augment its educational offerings in astronomy, to enhance sky shows delivered at its Shafran Planetarium, and to establish a steady program of observation and imaging from its Mueller Observatory.

In his University Seminar, Upheavals in Astronomy, he introduces students to scientific instruments that have brought about revolutionary change in our understanding of the cosmos. The seminar endeavors to deepen students' historical and practical knowledge of scientific devices, in part by providing them with hands-on acquaintance with such devices. Students critically examine the historical context in which advances in astronomy were made and evaluate the consequences of humanity's displacement as the model of a geocentric universe gave way to the modern model of an expanding universe.

A native of Illinois, Roy enjoys encouraging his astronomy students at Case Western Reserve University to appreciate the splendors of the night sky from Midwestern locales. In addition, he has written popular articles on observational astronomy and telescope construction, and has recently published a collection of science fiction stories, The Star Machine and Other Tales.

Joe B. Keiper, "Forensic Sciences: How They Impact Your World"

Joe Keiper became the Curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in 2000. He is also an adjunct assistant professor of biology at Case Western Reserve University and the consulting entomologist for the Cuyahoga County Coroner's Office. Those two interactions have led to his participation in the SAGES class "Forensic Sciences: How They Impact Your World," originally taught by Dr. Jim Simmelink.

As an entomologist, Joe has developed interests in diverse areas such as wetlands conservation, disease vectors, and global climate change. However, forensic entomology has also been an area of interest for many years. Since attending his first forensics seminar in 1995, he has studied the role of insects in decomposition by exposing animal carcasses to the elements in many parts of Ohio. The data thus collected may assist in determining approximate times of death during investigations of human death under mysterious or suspicious circumstances.

Before coming to Cleveland, Joe earned his Ph.D. at Kent State University, where he studied insect ecology, and spent two-and-a-half years at the University of California - Riverside studying mosquitoes and other insects in constructed wetlands. During his career, he has developed a great fear of human impact on the environment, but also nurtures great hope that we can help Nature fix what we have done by acting promptly, wisely, and with good science as a guide.

Bernard L. Jim, "Spectacle in American Culture" and "Cities (Under Construction)"

Bernie earned a Ph.D. in History at Case Western Reserve University in August 2006. In his dissertation, Ephemeral Containers: A Cultural and Technological History of Building Demolition, he examines the history of wreckers and wrecking machines, and uses an exploration of the discourse surrounding building demolition as a window into the impact of modernity on notions of progress, the construction of identity, and the American public's relationship to the built environment. He has presented his work before the societies for historians of technology and historians of architecture, and has published an article on the razing of city hotels in the Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, Issue 25, on "The American Hotel."

Bernie has taught courses in American History, Technology and Culture, and Technology and Society for Cleveland State University, Weatherhead School of Business, and the history department of Case Western Reserve University. In addition to his academic work, Bernie has experience circulating, maintaining, and developing temporary exhibitions for science and technology museums, and has acted as a researcher in the field of cultural resource management. In his SAGES courses, he asks his students to reconsider the role of the commonplace and the remarkable in the built world and the natural world.

Barbara Leukart, "The Quest for Perfection: The Law as a Vehicle for Social Improvement"

Barbara Leukart (B.A., Barnard College; J.D., Case Western Reserve University Law School) is a partner at the law firm Jones Day, where she has represented management in all areas of labor and employment relations, and defended numerous Title VII, age discrimination, and Americans with Disabilities Act cases at the administrative, trial, and appellate levels. Her experience also includes the litigation of wrongful discharge, employment contract, and intentional tort cases. On behalf of employers, she has handled cases brought under the Equal Pay Act, Section 301 of the Taft-Hartley Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act, and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. She has experience in counseling companies on a wide range of employment issues, including advice on union representation campaigns, contract negotiations, the creation and implementation of employment policies, the conduct of discrimination investigations, and corporate management reviews conducted by the OFCCP.

Pursuant to an appointment by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, Leukart has served on that court's Advisory Committee on Rules. She has been a member of the Civil Justice Reform Act Task Force for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio and serves as a mediator for the court. She is a member of the Celebrezze Inn of Court, the ABA (Labor and Employment Law Section), and the Ohio State and Cleveland Bar Associations. Leukart has been admitted to practice before the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Sixth, Fifth, and Third Circuits. She is listed in Chambers USA directory of America's Leading Business Lawyers and in Ohio Super Lawyers as a leading Ohio employment lawyer. She currently serves as president of the board of trustees for Cleveland Public Art.

Srikanth Mallavarapu, "Cognitive Estrangement: Science Fiction," "Writing Difference: Ethnography and Fiction"

Srikanth Mallavarapu has a Ph.D. in English from SUNY Stony Brook, where he was also a member of Don Ihde’s Technoscience Research Group. In the fall of 2003 he joined the School of Literature, Culture, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow. He has also been awarded a certificate in the Study and Practice of New Media Theory from the Wesley Center for New Media at Georgia Tech.

Mallavarapu’s research is interdisciplinary, weaving together strands from literary theory, postcolonial studies, philosophy of science, and cultural studies. Entitled Possible Worlds in Science Studies: A Postcolonial Perspective, his dissertation uses the idea of incommensurability as a starting point for an exploration of the problems surrounding intercultural translation. Bringing work in Science Studies and postcolonial theory into a more direct conversation with one another, Mallavarapu suggests that we need to pay attention to embodiment, material practices and performativity in order to develop a vocabulary that captures the complexities of negotiating difference. His concern with the representation and negotiation of difference in different modes, genres, and forms has been reflected in his teaching. Over the last few years, he has taught classes that have explored themes such as social constructivism, the idea of the cyborg, and feminist critiques of science.

Sean Martin, "Ethnicity and Local History"

Sean Martin is currently the Associate Curator for Jewish History at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, Ohio. In this role, he collects and maintains material related to the Jewish history of northeastern Ohio, overseeing the Cleveland Jewish Archives and serving as part of the curatorial staff for the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Beachwood, Ohio.

Sean holds an MA degree in history, an MA degree in Yiddish language and literature, and a PhD, focusing on East European Jewish history, from The Ohio State University. Sean has taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Reinhardt College in Waleska, Georgia, and served as an adjunct faculty member at Kent State University, Cleveland State University, and University of Phoenix. He has conducted extensive research in Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania and given talks on Jewish history and the Holocaust in the United States and Poland. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on the Jewish history of Krakow in the 1920s and 1930s and was published in 2004 by Vallentine Mitchell as Jewish Life in Cracow, 1918-1939. He is currently researching the history of Jewish child welfare in interwar Poland.

Richard B. Nelson, "Beethoven and the Age of Revolution"

Rick Nelson is Head and Professor of Music Theory at the Cleveland Institute of Music. In addition, he is a Presidential Fellow at Case where he teaches a seminar in the SAGES program. He is also Assistant Organist at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights where he and his wife, Beth, direct three choirs for children and youth which comprise more than 60 participants. Before coming to Cleveland, he was on the faculty of Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, for twenty years where he taught music theory. He received the Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees from the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music and the Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester. He also attended the Conservatoire Americaine in Fontainebleau, France, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger.

Dr. Nelson is active as a theorist, organist, and harpsichordist. An eighteenth century specialist, he has published articles in the Journal of Music Theory, Gamut, Journal of Musicological Research, and the College Music Society Symposium. He has served as President of the Georgia Association of Music Theorists as well as Music Theory Southeast. In addition, he is a published composer and has been a reader for the Graduate Record Examination in Music and for the Advanced Placement Test in Music for the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, NJ.

Erika Olbricht, "Music and Text"

Erika Olbricht has her Ph.D. in English from the University of New Hampshire. Her dissertation focused on seventeenth-century British theatre and dramatic literature. She taught at Pepperdine University, where she offered courses in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Pastoral Literature (among others) and was the theatre department dramaturg for productions ranging from King Lear to Eve Ensler's Necessary Targets, performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2006. She also holds an M.A. in Historic Gardens and Landscape Conservation from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. Her work there focused on kitchen gardens, including allotments, and early American gardens. Her interest in historic green space and productive gardens informs her current scholarly work, which includes articles on early modern sericulture and apiculture (silkworms and bees). Last year, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University in Agrarian Studies, where her work focused on sixteenth-century agricultural tithing practices as part of a larger project on early modern British beekeeping.

Marcy Levy Shankman, "Change Agents"

Marcy Levy Shankman has been involved with leadership and organizational development training and consulting since 1998. In her consulting practice, she works mainly with higher education institutions, nonprofit organizations, and high schools. Areas of expertise include developing and facilitating individual and organizational learning opportunities. She is the co-author of Emotionally Intelligent Leadership: A Guide for College Students (Jossey-Bass, expected February 2008). She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses at Indiana University and the University of Maryland at College Park and will be teaching a leadership theory class at Baldwin Wallace College. She has also developed to assessments related to emotional intelligence: the EI Profile: An Emotional Intelligence Self-Assessment and the EI Full Spectrum, a 360° Evaluation Tool. In addition to a Ph.D. from Indiana University in higher education administration, she also earned a Bachelor of Arts from the College of William and Mary and a Master of Arts from the University of Maryland at College Park. A resident of Shaker Heights, she volunteers for the Shaker Heights Public Schools, the College of William and Mary, and her synagogue.

Chris Sheridan, "Sport and American Culture in the Twentieth Century"

Chris Sheridan is chief of staff to the president at Case Western Reserve University and the head coach for the women's rowing team. She earned her bachelor's degree in history at Yale University, where her studies focused on civil rights and school desegregation. She has worked for newspapers for more than 20 years, winning a wide range of awards for investigative and explanatory journalism as well as for editorial writing. Perhaps her most memorable assignment involved going "undercover" to infiltrate a cult recruiting college students in New England, where she found herself racing down Interstate 95 after another reporter's error made the organization's security staff suspicious. She and the two other reporters on the team escaped unharmed, and their expose forced the cult to cease operations in the region.

Since she moved to Cleveland in 1995, Chris has become an active masters' rower, and in 2000 began coaching a regional team for high school women in greater Cleveland. In 2002 she took over Case’s crew program, and that spring a novice women's boat made the semifinals at a national championship regatta. Since then Case's women have won a series of regional titles in indoor rowing, and one athlete participated in a U.S. National Team Identification Camp for the group preparing for the 2008 Olympics.

Chris taught her first SAGES course in 2004, drawn to the program because of its similarities to one she enjoyed as an undergraduate in New Haven. The value of that program was not merely in the content covered, but the lessons students learned about close reading, classroom debate and effective writing. She hopes Case's students draw comparable benefits from their SAGES experiences.

Mark Starr, "The First Amendment and Freedom of Speech"

Mark Starr is the Assistant Director of Greek Life at Case. In that role he oversees housing, risk management and judicial affairs for Case's Greek community. He received his BS in Chemical Engineering from Case in 1995. After spending five years in the workplace, Mark returned to Case and received his law degree in 2003. He was admitted to the Ohio Bar in 2004. Although he doesn't currently work as an attorney, Mark is passionate about the law, especially the First Amendment.

Mark is a native of Worthington, Ohio, but has called the University Circle area home for the last 14 years. In his spare time, Mark volunteers for his fraternity, attends Indians games, follows his fantasy baseball team and enjoys reading. Mark and his wife, Heather, have two children.