House Deans: Professional Profiles
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.
April Herring, Fisher Hassenfeld College House
April Herring comes to Penn from Philadelphia University where she was the Director of Residence Life for the past two years. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Student Development from Slippery Rock University. From 1995 to 2002, she served at LaSalle University, as Assistant Director of Resident Life for Staff Development and then Associate Director for Community Development. While at LaSalle, Herring initiated the first faculty in residence program as well as the first living learning community. At Thiel College in Greenville, Pennsylvania, she was the Residence Hall Director and the Director of Residential Life/Campus Judicial Officer from 1992 to 1995 respectively. From 2002-2004, she was president her own company, Group Works, which specialized in creating business plans, providing training and consulting. She is a member of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, 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. She has trained residential staff on ethics, diversity awareness, conflict mediation, crisis management, learning style theory, classism, and group dynamics.
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 has held a number of positions within the Department of Housing and Conference Services since 1991, most significantly as early move-in coordinator, billing counselor, graduate assignments counselor, and publications writer. During the summer of 1993, Dr. Donovan 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" will be published by Routledge in late 2004. Dr. Donovan frequently teaches classes in Film and Literature.
Kenneth Grcich, Rodin College House
After
graduating from Indiana State University in 1996, Mr. Grcich (pronounced "gurr-sitch")
received an M.A. in Social Work here at Penn while serving in Rodin
College House as a Graduate Associate and Program Coordinator. He has
now returned to Rodin College House as House Dean after serving as
the Assistant Director of Residence Life and as an instructor at Southern
Illinois University Edwardsville from 2002-2005. Prior to that position,
he served as Residential College Director at St. Louis' Washington University.
He is a member of the Association of College and University Housing Officers
- International and the American College Personnel Association, and has
previously served as the president of the Saint Louis College Housing
Association.
Dr. Suhnne Ahn, Harnwell College House
Dr.
Ahn comes to Penn from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University.
For four years, she served as a faculty member in the Musicology Department
of the Conservatory, and as Director of Student Affairs in the Preparatory
Division. 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 is titled Genre, Style, and Compositional Procedure in Beethoven's
"Kreutzer" Sonata, Opus 47. For over ten years, Dr. Ahn has taught music
history surveys and seminars to both undergraduates and graduates in topics
such as Fundamentals of Music Theory; Twentieth Century Opera; Cantatas
of J.S. Bach; and Beethoven: Music and Sources. In 1993, she won the Oscar
Straus Schafer Fellowship for "devotion to the teaching of undergraduate
courses in music." Her performance background includes both piano and
violin with concert experience at the Aspen Music Festival of 1986 and
a tour of the People's Republic of China. She also has extensive college
house experience as the Chamber Music Coach of Mather House at Harvard
in 1987and the Resident Music Tutor of Lowell House from 1989 to 1995.
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 courses as "Renaissance Language and Vision",
"Petrarch and Boccaccio", "Italian Renaissance Drama", and various undergraduate
and graduate seminars on the works of Dante. While at Yale, he served
as President of the Graduate-Professional Student Senate. At the State
University of New York at Buffalo, he served as director of Undergraduate
Studies in Italian, faculty advisor to the Italian Student Association,
and coordinator of the Italian Language program. He is currently working
on a study of the Roman aesthetic influence in the works of Dante.
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.
Dr. M. 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.
Dr.
Marilynne Diggs-Thompson, Riepe College House
Before coming to Penn, Dr. Diggs-Thompson taught cultural anthropology at Hunter College, where she has served as undergraduate advisor in the Anthropology Department and as a member of the curriculum planning committee of the Women's Studies Program. Prior to Hunter, she worked for seven years as executive assistant to the president of Marymount Manhattan College, in which role she also served in an acting capacity as director of student services, director of residence life, and director of academic counseling. The French-speaking Caribbean is the subject of much of Dr. Diggs-Thompson's scholarship. Her doctoral dissertation, written at the CUNY Graduate School and University Center, considered modernization and transformation in Guadeloupe, and she is presently studying fertility change, family formation, education, and migration among the French West Indian communities of New York and Canada. Her research has also examined the broader issues of contemporary urban education and post-colonial politics, and among her many recent papers and publications have been multiple presentations to the annual meetings of the Association of American Anthropology, the American Ethnological Society, the Caribbean Studies Association, and the European Studies Association.
Alison LaLond Wyant, Stouffer College House
Alison LaLond Wyant joins CHAS as the new House Dean of Stouffer College House after several years at the University. First hired to coordinate the partnership between the Greenfield Intercultural Center and the Center for Community Partnerships, Alison assisted in the development of new programs intended to foster cultural understanding within and commitment to the broader community. One notable product of this work was the Franklin Community, a Residential Program that began in the temporary Stouffer Annex space before moving over to Harnwell College House. Most recently she has served as the Associate Director of Civic House, where she advised Penn's student-led community service and advocacy initiatives. Before coming to Penn, Alison directed a community-based service learning program for high school students through Baltimore's Students Sharing Coalition. She also served a one-year term with AmeriCorps as a full-time construction assistant for Chesapeake Habitat for Humanity. Alison earned a BA from Loyola College in Maryland and an M.S.Ed. from Penn's Graduate School of Education, where she is currently an Ed.D. candidate in higher education management.
Dr.
Nathan Smith, Ware College House
Dr. Smith received a B.A. in English from the University of Tennessee in 1995, and a Ph.D. in Education, Culture and Society from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001 where he was nominated for the Phi Delta Kappa Dissertation Award. From 1996 to 1998, he served as a PACE Program Coordinator and Research Fellow at Penn's Cantor Fitzgerald Center for Research on Diversity in Education. Dr. Smith also served as Educational Specialist for the Greater Philadelphia High School Partnership (1999-2001), where he was involved in developing curricula and student services in a number of local schools. He has taught courses on American pedagogy, multiculturalism and ethnography in Penn's Graduate School of Education; and from 2000-2002 he taught English at Central Bucks West High School. His scholarly writing has been published in Anthropology and Education Quarterly and anthologized by the American Sociological Association. University residential living and learning is a long-standing interest of Dr. Smith's, both personally and professionally. While part of the Graduate Education doctoral program, he served for three years as a Graduate Associate in Stouffer College House.
