Our Faculty

A woman of many firsts, including the first African American to lead the United States Tennis Association (USTA), Adams is the first two-term chairman and president of the USTA, and the first former player to hold that honor. Under her tutelage, the USTA has achieved major milestones including an unprecedented outreach effort into underserved communities. At Northwestern University, Adams led her team to a Big Ten Championship and won the 1987 NCAA Doubles Championship. As a professional player, Adams won twenty career doubles titles. She serves as the vice president of the International Tennis Federation, chairman of both the Billie Jean King Cup Committee and the Gender Equality in Tennis Committee, and the executive director of the Harlem Junior Tennis and Education Program.

Award-winning author and poet. Alvarez’s awards include the Pura Belpré and Américas Awards for her books for young readers, the Hispanic Heritage Award, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award. In 2013, she received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama.

Colombian-American artist motivated by political, cultural, and social concerns. His practice often focuses on creating “Living Sculptures,” where co-creators come together to transform their experience of the world. An architect by training, he has created public art projects with communities in India, Japan, Kenya, South Africa, Afghanistan, Spain, Colombia, and the United States.

An accomplished playwright, Billy Aronson came up with the original concept for the musical , to which he also contributed lyrics. He has written for many popular children shows, including Postcards from Buster, Code Name: Kids Next Door, The Upside Down Show, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and Beavis and Butthead.

Charles Bailyn is the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University and inaugural dean of faculty at Yale-NUS College. He earned a B.S. in astronomy and physics from Yale and a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard. His Ph.D. thesis on X-ray emitting binary stars received the Robert J. Trumpler Award for best North American Ph.D. thesis in astronomy. Bailyn was awarded the 2009 Bruno Rossi Prize for his research on the masses of black holes.

Nina Banks is associate professor of economics and an affiliate of women’s and gender studies and Africana studies at Bucknell University. She is also the faculty director of Bucknell in Ghana, and academic director of Bucknell's Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty. President of the National Economic Association (NEA), Banks also serves on the board of directors of the Economic Policy Institute and editorial board of The Review of Black Political Economy. Her research makes visible the unseen work of Black and other marginalized women by developing an economics of their unpaid work and community activism against racial and ethnic disparities. Banks is the founder and organizer of the NEA’s annual Freedom & Justice conference, and the American Society of Hispanic Economists.

Professional acting coach and teacher for more than three decades, and award-winning actor, director, and artistic director, Barrish has spent years honing and sharing techniques to maximize spontaneity and bring performances to life. In 1986 he co-founded The Barrow Group, a company that has left an indelible mark on the New York theater scene, garnering accolades and praise for nurturing a high level of acting integrity. He has worked with, among others, Anne Hathaway, Mike Birbiglia, Tony Hale, and Michael Stahl David.

Dancer, choreographer, and the artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Battle graduated from Juilliard in 1994. After Juilliard, he danced with, and choreographed for, the Parsons Dance Company. In 2001, he formed his own Battleworks Dance Company. Prior to his appointment at Ailey, he choreographed work for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and The Ailey School. In 2005, Mr. Battle was honored as one of the “Masters of African-American Choreography” by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

In addition to serving as provost of Barnard College, Linda Bell holds the position of Claire Tow Professor of Economics at the college. In her varied professional and scholarly capacities, she has served as a consultant to the World Bank and the US Department of Labor, as well as held visiting faculty appointments at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and at Stanford University. She is an empirical economist and scholar of labor markets and public policy. Provost Bell has dedicated her teaching and research to examining answers to applied policy questions, most recently focusing on disparities in gender compensation at the executive level.

R. Brandon Fradd Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University. Bhargava was the 2014 recipient of the Fields Medal, sometimes called the “Nobel Prize of Mathematics.” A renowned educator, he teaches a popular course at Princeton on “The Mathematics of Magic Tricks and Games” and was one of the authors of the new National Education Policy of India.

Comedian, storyteller, director, and actor who has performed in front of audiences worldwide. His shows My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend and Thank God for Jokes were both filmed for Netflix. His most recent show, The New One, ran for ninety-nine performances on Broadway at the Cort Theatre. In 2017, Mike was honored with the Kurt Vonnegut Humor Award.

Born and raised in Panama, Blades graduated from Panama’s National University of Law and Political Science Faculty before becoming a full-time musician, songwriter, actor, and activist. He graduated from Harvard School of Law in 1985. Blades’ music is most often associated with Afro-Cuban salsa and Latin jazz and his lyrics with politically inspired Nuyorican salsa. He has composed dozens of musical hits, including “Pedro Navaja”, “El Cantante” and “Patria,” which many Panamanians consider their second national anthem. He is the winner of ten Grammy awards.

Casey Nelson Blake, professor of American Studies and History at Columbia University, specializes in modern U.S. intellectual and cultural history, with an emphasis on topics at the intersection of modernist art and politics in the twentieth century. He is the author of several works, including The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State and is co-editor of The Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution. He was the Senior Historian for the New-York Historical Society exhibition.

Kathryn Bond Stockton is distinguished professor of English, former associate vice president for equity and diversity, and inaugural dean of the School for Cultural & Social Transformation at the University of Utah, where she teaches queer theory, theories of race and racialized gender, and twentieth-century literature and film. Two of her books—"Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where 'Black' Meets 'Queer'" and "The Queer Child" were national finalists for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies. In addition, her recent book "Making Out" was a national finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award for memoir. Her latest books are "Gender(s)" and "God Between Their Lips."

Professor of geobiology in earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences at MIT, and a Return Sample Science Participating Scientist on the Perseverance rover mission to Mars. Bosak’s work interprets the record of life on the early Earth by asking how microbes shape sedimentary rocks, leave biogeochemical patterns in sediments, and help fossilize microbes and organic matter.

Richard H. Brodhead had a long career as a scholar and prize-winning teacher of American literature and culture at Yale, where he served as the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English and Dean of Yale College. During this time, he also spent eight summers teaching high school teachers at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English. In 2004 he left to become the president of Duke, a position he held for thirteen years.

Professor of English and Aetna Endowed Chair of Writing at the University of Connecticut, Brueggemann also teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College during the summer. She has been deaf (genetic) from birth. After college, she taught high school in her rural Kansas community for five years before going to graduate school. In the mid-1990s, bolstered by the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, she helped conceptualize the new field of Disability Studies. She is author and editor of many books and articles at the intersections of Deaf/Disability Studies and writing/art.

Head of education at The Frick Collection, Burnham was recognized by the National Art Education Association for sustained achievement in teaching in 2001, appointed a Getty Museum Scholar in 2002, and received the James D. Burke Prize for achievement in the arts in 2003, the first museum educator to receive this award.

C.N.H. Long Professor and Chair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at the Yale University School of Medicine. Caplan has been recognized by numerous awards for his teaching, mentorship and research. His laboratory focuses on understanding the ways in which epithelial cells communicate with one another to generate and maintain their unique structures. His group also studies Autosomal Dominant Polycystic Kidney Disease, a prevalent and serious genetic disorder that distorts the normal architecture of renal epithelial cells and that is a major cause of kidney failure.

Provost for Research at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Carin researches machine learning, artificial intelligence, and applied statistics, and publishes widely, with over 450 peer-reviewed publications. He is a Fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers and co-founder of Signal Innovations Group and of Infinia ML.

Neal Carruth is NPR’s first-ever general manager of podcasts. He oversees the teams who work on many of NPR’s most popular podcasts. Carruth is a recipient of a Peabody Award and a Gerald Loeb Award.