Ms.Patricia C. Williams
W.E.B. Du Bois College House
Patricia C. Williams is a native New Yorker with a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Liberal Studies from Fordham University. She has served as Managing Editor of Umoja News since October of 2000. Before that, Williams was the Director of Student Services at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (Brookdale Center) of Yeshiva University in New York. From 1988 to 1991, she was the Coordinator of Academic Budgets and Records in the Office of the Academic Vice President at Fordham University's Rose Hill campus. From 1991 to 1999, she served in the Graduate School of Business at Fordham's Lincoln Center campus, first as a Senior Program Advisor then as Assistant Director of Student Affairs. She has taught undergraduate English courses on both composition and rhetoric at Fordham, as well as a survey literature course, and served as both a tutor and teacher in the New York Public Library's Literacy Program. Williams has published articles in Umoja News and TEAMWORK, a publication of National Association of African American Studies. Her poems have appeared in the Paterson Literary Review and various anthologies, and she has held poetry readings in many schools and libraries. Williams currently chairs the Board of Directors for Fordham's Black and Latino Alumni Association. In recent years, she has taught in Penn's Critical Writing Program, and she is currently a lecturer in the Graduate School of Education. Publications include a chapter about historically black colleges and universities, as well as an editorial for Diverse Issues in Higher Education. She is currently completing a journal article on McCarthyism, as well as a book chapter about the successes of non-traditional Black female students.
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Ms.April Herring
Fisher Hassenfeld College House
April Herring has a Masters Degree in Student Personnel and a BA in Communications. She is currently working on her Ed.D. in Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania and is specializing in Higher Education History. Prior to coming to Penn, April had 17 years of progressive higher education administration experience, most recently as the Director of Housing and Residence Life at Philadelphia University. She also owns her own consulting and training company, GroupWorks, which she founded in 2002, and has presented and consulted at a variety of businesses ranging from Fortune 500 to non-profits, Colleges and Universities. She is a member of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, ASHE, NASPA and ACPA. Herring has held an adjunct professor position at both LaSalle University and Penn, teaching interpersonal communication, public speaking, small group communication, and professional development in engineering. Currently at Penn she has taught the History of Higher Education in the Graduate School of Education. She has trained residential staff on ethics, diversity awareness, conflict mediation, crisis management, learning style theory, classism, and group dynamics.
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Dr.Christopher Donovan
Gregory College House
A native Philadelphian, Dr. Donovan received a B.A. in English from Penn in 1992, and a Ph.D. in Contemporary American literature from New York University (where he was awarded a full Fellowship-in Residence) in January 1999. While in New York, Dr. Donovan worked at several major publishing houses, including Vogue magazine. On Penn's campus, he held a number of positions within the Department of Housing and Conference Services starting in 1991; during the summer of 1993, he served as Head Prefect for an innovative program for gifted students in the arts, offered by the College of General Studies, called the Penn Summer Academy in Communications. In March 1999, he worked within Penn's newly established Conference Services division, promoting the campus to outside organizations and helping to coordinate dining and facilities aspects of on-campus conferences. His book Postmodern Counternarrative: Irony and Audience in the Novels of Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Charles Johnson and Tim O'Brien was published by Routledge in late 2004. In addition to more than a decade of dedication to the residents of Gregory as their House Dean, Dr. Donovan frequently teaches classes in Film and Literature, in addition to the for-credit Film Culture Program which he founded at Gregory and co-administrates there today.
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Dr.Suhnne Ahn
Harnwell College House
Dr. Ahn has served as House Dean of Harnwell College House since 2002. Before coming to Penn, she held positions at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University where she served as Director of Student Affairs in the Preparatory Division for four years and where she has remained a faculty member in the Musicology Department of the Conservatory since 1997. She holds a B.A. in Music from Yale (1986), an A.M. in Musicology from Harvard (1990), and a Ph.D. in Musicology from Harvard (1997). Her dissertation, “Genre, Style, and Compositional Procedure in Beethoven's ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, Opus 47,” examines Beethoven’s creative process as well the hybridization of concerto and sonata genre influences contained within. Her work has been published in The Beethoven Violin Sonatas: History, Criticism, Performance by University of Illinois Press, and her scholarship stems from a music performance background in both piano and violin. Current scholarly endeavors are directed toward the ongoing development of a web-based “e-edition” of the violin concerti composed by virtuosi based at the Paris Conservatory during its early formation at the end of the 18th century. For over fifteen years, Dr. Ahn has taught music history surveys and seminars to both undergraduates and graduate students. At Penn, she has developed courses in the critical writing program and cinema studies program including, Elizabeth I: The Lioness Monarch in Film, Composers and their Music in Film, and The Late Great Kate: Katharine Hepburn and an Authentic Life in Film. She has extensive college house experience from her years as an undergraduate of Jonathan Edwards College and as a graduate student serving as Resident Music Tutor of Lowell House. At Harnwell, she has established and cultivated numerous traditions including its annual Sapphire Ball and monthly Dean’s Teas. Sustaining six residential programs, she has also fostered a community enhancing musical and artistic opportunities such as weekly Brandenburg Brunches and initiatives with the College House Music Program.
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Dr.Frank Pellicone
Harrison College House
Dr. Pellicone received his B.A. from Cornell University in 1986 and his M.A., M.Phil, and Ph.D. at Yale in the Department of Italian Languages and Literature (1994). He has taught such popular courses at Penn as Language and Vision in the Italian Renaissance, Blood, Sweat, and Pasta: Representations of Italian Americans in Literature and Film, and many other courses through the Departments of Romance Languages and English. At the State University of New York at Buffalo, he served as director of Undergraduate Studies in Italian and coordinator of the Italian Language program. Prior to attending graduate school, Dr. Pellicone worked as a mediator and arbitration administrator for the New York Better Business Bureau, helping resolve disputes between consumers and automobile manufacturers.
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Ms.Stephanie Weaver
Hill College House
Stephanie Weaver holds a Master of Science degree in Community School Psychology with an emphasis in Clinical Child Psychology from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville where she also worked as a Residence Director and Assistant Hall Director for four years prior to coming to Penn. In that role, she managed the Family Resource Center and adjudicated student disciplinary cases, among many responsibilities. From 2004 to 2007, she served as a therapist and referral coordinator at Gateway Regional Medical Center in Granite City, Illinois, providing psychosocial assessments, counseling, family and group therapy, and served as a resource for the greater St. Louis community. She has been involved in presentations and conferences on student well being and development, both regionally and nationally, from 2001 to the present. Weaver was the Committee Chair for the St. Louis Area College Housing Association Paraprofessional Conference in 2006, and co-created A.P.P.L.E. (A Preparatory Program for Leadership Experience) for student residential advisors and staff. Her chief area of expertise is in adolescent depression and anxiety in young adults.
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Dr.M'hamed Krimo Bokreta
Kings Court English College House
Dr. Bokreta received three advanced degrees in geology at the University of Algiers during the years 1974-1976. In 1992, he completed a Ph.D. in Geology at Penn. Among his honors are a National Council for Research Fellowship in Italy in 1986 and in 1989, and a Research Fellowship from the Geology Institute of Poland in 1975. With a working knowledge of six languages, he has written for American Mineralogist and is researching an article on the properties of garnet. Dr. Bokreta has been closely involved in residential housing, academic programs and student advising at Penn since 1985. Since 1990, he has served as Assistant Dean for Residence at Kings Court English House and was instrumental in building four model living-learning programs there. At the 1997 Frontiers in Education conference in Pittsburgh, Dr. Bokreta and Penn colleagues presented "The Partnership Between the Science and Technology Wing and the School of Engineering and Applied Science: An Experiment in Living and Learning" that was subsequently published in the IEEE Catalog of 1997.
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Dr.Marilynne Diggs-Thompson
Riepe College House
Before coming to Penn, Dr. Diggs-Thompson taught cultural anthropology at Hunter College in New York where she served as undergraduate advisor in the Anthropology Department. At Hunter, Dr. Diggs-Thompson created and taught over ten new seminar topics in cultural anthropology, four of which she has reprised at Penn. She has served as graduate thesis advisor for students in New York and at Penn, and she has taught upper level and graduate seminars within Penn’s College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS) and for the past five years, a highly popular freshman seminar in the College entitled Desire and Demand: Culture and Consumption in the Global Marketplace. She is the author of several articles within the “Strategies in Teaching Anthropology” series published by Prentice Hall, and has contributed several articles to the Anthropology Newsletter (AN) published by the Association of American Anthropologists. In addition to increasing her knowledge of “student and residential campus culture” as the Riepe College House Dean in the Quad, she has expanded her research interests to include the transition to modern consumerism—historically analyzed from the Victorian Age to the present, and, more recent economic fluctuations associated with “global consumer culture.” Demographic change and migration in France and the French-speaking Caribbean continues to be the subject of much of Dr. Diggs-Thompson's scholarship. Her doctoral dissertation, written at the CUNY Graduate School and University Center, considered consumption, modernization and demographic transformation in Guadeloupe, and she continues to study causal factors related to fertility transitions—including women’s economic autonomy, education, and migration experience among French West Indian, Algerian and other French-speaking minority groups in the Europe, the Caribbean and North America. Her research has also examined the broader issues of contemporary urban education and post-colonial politics. She has given multiple presentations at the annual meetings of the Association of American Anthropology, the Association of Black Anthropologists, the American Ethnological Society, the Caribbean Studies Association, and the European Studies Association. She is a member of the review board of several foundations and professional journals.
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Mr.Ryan Keytack
Rodin College House
Ryan Keytack joined Rodin College House in the summer of 2010, bringing extensive experience in residential and collegiate leadership. He holds a B.A. in English/Communications from Walsh University in North Canton, Ohio, where he also served as the Director of Student Activities and Union upon graduation. He earned an M.A. in theatre from Bowling Green State University, also in Ohio, while serving as a Graduate Hall Director. From 2007-2010, he served as the Associate Director of Undergraduate Admission at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland where he managed on-campus recruiting and programming; prior to that he was the Coordinator of First Year Education at the same institution. From 2004-2005, he was a Community Director at George Washington University in Washington, DC, overseeing living and learning communities. In addition, he has teaching experience on topics such as Race and Gender in African-American Literature and World Literature. For the Sigma Phi Epsilon Fraternity, he is an Advisor/Faculty Fellow and Member. Among his many areas of enthusiasm, alongside theatre and performance studies, acting, directing, improvisation, and musical theatre history, are research in higher education; academic support; program development and assessment; diversity and sexual conduct education; networking, and creating a positive impact on the student experience through development and leadership programs.
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Ms.Amanda Atkinson
Stouffer College House
Ms. Atkinson received her B.A. from Sweet Briar College in 2000 and her Master of Education in Higher Education Administration at Harvard's Graduate School of Education in 2002. Her positions before coming to Penn include serving as the Assistant Director for Student Programs at the Viterbi School of Engineering at USC's Los Angeles campus; working as the Assistant Director of Residence Life at Occidental College, and serving as Assistant Director of Residential Programs at Columbia.
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Dr.Utsav Schurmans
Ware College House
Dr. Schurmans received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. in Anthropology from Arizona State University, having earlier earned both his M.A. and B.A. in Archaeology from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. Focusing on the archaeology of early humans in and outside of Africa, Dr. Schurmans has extensive research experience in North Africa, the Near East, and Europe. Among his accomplishments are his 2001-2005 appointment to the William Penn Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania along with the awarding of both a grant from the National Geographic Society and two grants from the Leakey Foundation, funding his archaeological research in Morocco. Since 2009 he has been the Assistant for Student Programs at the University Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, and he has lectured at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at Penn since 2007.
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