Duke University Workshop Participants

June 25-26, 2009

Michael Bérubé

Professor in English Literature and Science, Technology and Society

Penn State University, Pennsylvania

Dr. Bérubé is the Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of six books to date : Marginal Forces / Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Cornell University Press, 1992); Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (Verso, 1994); Life As We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child (Pantheon, 1996; paper edition, Vintage, 1998); The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies (New York University Press, 1998); What ' s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and “ Bias ” in Higher Education (W. W. Norton, 2006) and Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). He is also the editor of The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (Blackwell, 2004), and, with Cary Nelson, of Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (Routledge, 1995).

Chris Bilton (co-convenor)

Director, Centre for Cultural Policy Studies

University of Warwick, United Kingdom

Dr. Bilton has published widely and presented papers on policy and management in the creative industries at conferences in Korea, Taiwan, the Netherlands and the UK. He is the author of Creativity and Management, published by Blackwells in 2006, and is currently at work on Creative Strategy, co-authored with Dr. Stephen Cummings of Victoria University Wellington, New Zealand, due for publication in 2009. He is a member of the editorial board for the International Journal of Cultural Policy and has edited a special edition on 'Creativity and Cultural Policy' this year. At the Centre, Dr. Bilton has been the director of the MA in Creative and Media Enterprise since its inception in 1999. He worked in the cultural sector for ten years before coming to Warwick, touring Britain and Europe as a writer, performer and manager with Balloonatics Theatre Company and working as Arts Development Officer for City of Westminster Arts Council in London. Dr. Bilton has run workshops on management and creativity for managers at Warwick Business School and Copenhagen Business School.

Priscilla Bratcher

Director of Development, Office of the Executive Director for the Arts

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Ms. Bratcher joined the newly created Office of the Executive Director for the Arts at the UNC in 2005, returning to the university after working with the Royal Shakespeare Company. To the position she brought over 20 years of fundraising experience, beginning with the UNC Center for Public Television. During her five years there, she led a team to its first national PBS award for on-air fundraising.  From 1990-94, she served as Vice President for Development of the American Social Health Association and in 1994, moved to Capital Consortium where she worked with clients in three states to design and implement multi-million dollar capital campaigns.  From 1998-2003, she served as Director of Principal Gifts at UNC, managing $1M+ prospects for the university's Carolina First capital campaign, while raising $5M for the renovation of Memorial Hall, one of the university’s signature historic buildings and home to the new Carolina Performing Arts Series. In 2003, she was appointed first managing director of the Royal Shakespeare Company America, the British theatre company’s U.S. fundraising office. She holds an M.F.A. in Arts Management from the University of Iowa. Her numerous speaking engagements have taken her from London to Mexico City. 

Howard Kushner

Professor of Science and Society

Emory University, Atlanta, GA

Dr. Kushner is the Nat C. Robertson Distinguished Professor of Science and Society.  An historian of medicine, Kushner holds a joint appointment in the Institute of Liberal Arts and in the Rollins School of Public Health, Department of Behavioral Science and Health Education. He also serves as Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Health, Culture, and Society. Author of numerous articles on medical and social/cultural history, Kushner also has published four books, including American Suicide (Rutgers University Press, 1991) and A Cursing Brain? The Histories of Tourette Syndrome (Harvard University Press, 1999). Kushner serves on the editorial boards of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine and Journal of the History of Neuroscience. In 1999 Kushner joined a collaborative research project aimed at uncovering the etiology of Kawasaki disease, the greatest cause of pediatric acquired heart disease in the developed world.  This collaboration has resulted in a series of publications in an array of medical and medical history journals.

Patrick McGeer

Master Scientist

Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, California

Dr. McGeer received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989. He was an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of British Columbia, until returning to UC-Berkeley as a Research Engineer in 1991. In 1993, together with three collaborators, he founded the Cadence Berkeley Laboratories. In 1998, with Alex Saldanha, he founded Softface, Inc., the world leader in automated content classification and spend analysis, where he remained as Chief Scientist until 2003. In 2003 he joined Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Dr. McGeer holds seven patents in the fields of programming languages, circuit design, and natural-language processing. He is author of over 50 papers and one book in the fields of Computer-Aided Design, circuit theory, programming languages, and information system design. His research interests include logic synthesis, timing analysis, formal verification, circuit simulation, programming languages, and wide-area distributed systems.

Jean McLaughlin

Director, Penland School of Craft

Penland, North Carolina

Ms. McLaughlin holds an M.A. in Liberal Studies from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. She is a textile artist and arts administrator who has been director of the Penland School since 1999. Penland is a national center for craft education dedicated to helping people live creative lives. Located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, the school offers one-, two-, and eight-week workshops in books and paper, clay, drawing, glass, iron, metals, photography, printmaking and letterpress, textiles, and wood. The school also sponsors artists' residencies, community education programs, and a craft gallery. Opened in 1929 as the Penland School of Handicrafts, it has been in continuous operation since and is today an internationally recognized center for contemporary craft. In her ten years at the School, Ms. McLaughlin has overseen major capital improvements in the studios and residential facilities funded by a capital campaign that exceeded its goal.

Paola Merli

Lecturer in Cultural Studies

University of Nottingham, United Kingdom

Dr. Merli’s research interests are in the relationship between politics and the arts; in the history of, and current developments in, cultural policy, politics and institutions; in representations of artists and the arts in documentaries, film and other media; and in cultural theory (particularly the work of Antonio Gramsci). She has published an influential methodological critique of approaches to the evaluation of the social impact of the arts in the International Journal of Cultural Policy (2002), articles in the International Journal of the Humanities (2005/6) and the International Journal of the Arts in Society (2007), and a scholarly introduction to a book on Italian theatres (Mondadori Electa, 2006). She is currently preparing a monograph titled The Battle for la Scala: The Opera House and Cultural Policy. Other forthcoming work includes journal articles on Gramsci and cultural policy; on the cultural politics of the Royal Opera House in the 1950s and 1960s; and on representations of the opera house in the media in the 1990s. She is book reviews editor for the journal Cultural Trends.

Anna Upchurch

Teaching Fellow, Centre for Cultural Policy Studies

University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

Dr. Upchurch holds a PhD in Cultural Policy Studies from the University of Warwick. She is a former marketing communications practitioner who worked extensively with arts and cultural institutions over two decades in North Carolina. She is interested in the history of ideas about the arts in society and in the position of creative individuals and organizations in market economies. She also holds an M.A. in Liberal Studies from Duke University.

Donna Zapf (host and co-convenor)

Director, Graduate Liberal Studies program

Duke University

Dr. Zapf is trained in classical music, plays clarinet, and has academic degrees in musicology. Her teaching interests have focused on interdisciplinary and contextual approaches to the histories and theories of the fine and performing arts. Her research interests include contemporary music and opera, multiculturalism, cultural policy, and the arts in Canada. Prior to her appointment at Duke, she directed the Graduate Liberal Studies program at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada, and chaired the MFA program and taught in the School for the Contemporary Arts there.

In addition to these participants, Dr. Zapf will invite six to eight additional participants from the Duke and Triangle communities.