Faculty Bios by
Last Name
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Charley Ellis
YACOL courses taught: Developing a Successful Investment Program
Dr. Charles D. Ellis is the founder and former managing partner of Greenwich Associates, an international consultancy where he advised large institutional investors, foundations, and government organizations in more than 130 financial markets across the globe. He taught investment management courses at the Yale School of Management and at Harvard Business School. He sat on the Board of Directors of America’s largest fund company, The Vanguard Group, which manages over $1.7 trillion dollars in assets. In addition, Charley was a successor trustee of Yale University, where he chaired the university’s famed investment committee with David Swensen. He was awarded the Graham & Dodd Award of Excellence from the Financial Analysts Journal and is one of only twelve people recognized by the CFA Institute for lifetime contributions to the investment profession. He has served on the governing boards of both Harvard and Yale business schools, as well as New York University’s Stern School of Business and Phillips Exeter Academy.
In short, Charley is one of the most highly regarded and sought-after experts in the investment field. Ellis is known for his philosophy of passive investing through index funds, as detailed in his book Winning the Loser’s Game. His latest book is “The Index Revolution” (John Wiley & Sons, 2016).
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Leslie Fagen
YACOL courses taught: To Stand By Things Decided
A senior partner in the Litigation Department of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, Les Fagen has successfully handled complex civil litigation matters for more than 35 years. Les is a highly experienced trial lawyer and commercial litigator who has represented dozens of the firm’s most important clients. Representing defendants and plaintiffs, he has achieved favorable outcomes for clients at trial and on appeal and in both federal and state courts. Les also has substantial experience in domestic and international arbitrations and mediations and is regularly tapped by boards and executives for advice on litigation strategy. Les is a graduate of Yale College, where he was a member of the Berkeley College Class of 1971 and the captain of the fencing team.
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John Mack Faragher
YACOL courses taught: The American West
John Mack Faragher was born in Phoenix, Arizona and raised in southern California, where he attended the University of California, Riverside (B.A., 1967), and did social work, before coming to Yale (Ph.D., 1977). After fifteen years as a professor at Mount Holyoke College he returned to Yale in 1993. His books include Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979); Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (1986); Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (1992); The American West: A New Interpretive History(2000), with Robert V. Hine; A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from their American Homeland (2005); and Frontiers: A Short History of the American West (2007), with Robert V. Hine. He teaches the history of the American West and directs the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders..
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Jim (James) Flannery
YACOL courses taught: The Many Worlds of W.B. Yeats; Yeats: Nationalism and the Masks of Revolution
Among my publications, I am the author of W.B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre: The Early Abbey Theatre in Theory and Practice (Yale Press 1976, 1988), a book considered the definitive study of the founding and formative years of the National Theatre of Ireland. I am also a stage director and producer with an international reputation as the major interpreter of the challenging plays of Yeats. For several years, I functioned as the Executive Director of a highly successful Yeats International Theatre Festival at the Abbey Theatre. Memories and Prophecies: A Theatrical Examination of the Plays of Yeats is another book I am working on based on my experience studying and staging Yeats over the past fifty years.
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Hugh Flick JrYACOL courses taught: And In the Beginning; The Mythic Trickster; In the Beginning … Cosmogonic Myths; Flood Myths; Heroic Otherworldly Journeys and What They Can Teach Us; The Otherworldly Journey and its Meaning
Hugh Meredith Flick, Jr. (A.B., M.Ed., A.M., M.B.A., J.D., PhD) was a Lecturer in Religious Studies and South Asian Studies at Yale University. He served as the Dean of Silliman College for twenty-six years. Before arriving at Yale, Dr. Flick was an Assistant Professor of Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University where he taught with Professor Albert Lord. He is a US Navy veteran and has traveled extensively throughout Mexico, Latin America, India, Asia, and Africa. He has served as the Faculty Lecturer on an Association of Yale Alumni tour of India, as the Study Leader on a Harvard Alumni Tour of Mystical India, as the Lecturer on a Smithsonian Institution tour of Legendary Peru, and as a Professor on the University of Virginia’s 2015 Spring Semester at Sea.
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Alexander Garvin (d)
YACOL courses taught: What Makes a Great City
Alexander Garvin has combined a career in urban planning and real estate with teaching, architecture, and public service. He is responsible for initial master plans for the Atlanta BeltLine, Tessera (a 700-acre new community outside Austin), and Hinton Park in Collierville, Tennessee. Between 1996 and 2005 he was managing director for planning at NYC2012, the committee established to bring the Summer Olympics to New York in 2012. During 2002-2003, as Vice President for Planning, Design and Development, he was responsible for planning the rebuilding of the World Trade Center for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Over the last 46 years he has held prominent positions in five New York City administrations, including Deputy Commissioner of Housing and City Planning Commissioner. For the past 50 years Garvin has taught at Yale University, his alma mater, where, as Adjunct Professor of Urban Planning and Management, he has taught a wide range of courses in architecture, city planning, and real estate development. Garvin is the author of The American City: What Works and What Doesn’t, now in its third edition; The Planning Game; Parks, Recreation and Open Space: A 21st Century Agenda; Public Parks: The Key to Livable Communities; What Makes a Great City; and numerous articles.
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Priscilla Gilman
YACOL courses taught: Innocence and Experience in British Romanticism; Jane Eyre and Great Expectation; Paradise Lost; Poetry and Slownes; Virginia Woolf's Novels; Jane Austen; Innocence and Experience in British Fiction; Jane Eyre and Rebecca; Wuthering Heights and Tess of the d'Urbervilles; Poetry for a time of Pandemic; Only Connect!; Howard's End and To The Lighthouse; Three Novels by Toni Morrison; Middlemarch; Great Expectation; Richardson & Fielding: Pamela, Shamela, and Joseph Andrews; Bleak House; Jane Austen Novels: Part 1; Jane Austen Novels: Part 2
Priscilla Gilman is a former professor of English literature at both Yale University and Vassar College and the author of The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy (Harper), and The Critic's Daughter. She graduated from Yale summa cum laude, with exceptional distinction in the English major. She went on to earn her masters and Ph.D. in English and American literature at Yale and spent two years as an assistant professor of English at Yale and four years as an assistant professor of English at Vassar College before leaving academia in 2006. From 2006-2011, she worked as a literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit Associates, representing a wide range of literary fiction, inspirational memoir, wellness, and psychology/education books. During these years, she also taught poetry appreciation to inmates in a restorative justice program and to New York City public school students and spoke at numerous early childhood and education conferences and events.
The Anti-Romantic Child, Gilman’s first book, was excerpted in Newsweek magazine and featured on the cover of its international edition. It received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, was an NPR Morning Edition Must-Read, Slate‘s Book of the Week, selected as one of the year’s Best Books by the Leonard Lopate Show, and chosen as a Best Book of the year by The Chicago Tribune. The Anti-Romantic Child was one of five nominees for a Books for a Better Life Award for Best First Book and was awarded the Mom’s Choice Gold Award, rewarding the best in family-friendly media and literature. Andrew Solomon called it “rapturously beautiful and deeply moving, profound, and marvelous.” Gilman’s second book, The Critic’s Daughter, was published by W.W. Norton on February 7th, 2023; a memoir about her relationship with her brilliant and complicated father, the late drama and literary critic Richard Gilman, it is set in the heyday of intellectual culture in New York of the 1970s and 80s. The Critic's Daughter received starred reviews in Kirkus and Booklist; Nick Hornby described it as “Beautiful: honest, raw, careful, soulful, brave and incredibly readable.”
Gilman has written about literature, parenting, autism, and education and reviewed fiction and literary non-fiction for the Daily Beast, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times’ Motherlode, The Chicago Tribune, MORE, O: The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Redbook, the Boston Globe, and Huff Post Parents. Her New York Times op-ed, “Don’t Blame Autism for Newtown,” was the most shared piece on the site for two days after its publication and her piece for Slate, “’My Spaceship Knows Which Way To Go’: How David Bowie Helped my Autistic Son Become Himself,” has been read by millions of people worldwide after being praised and shared by the official David Bowie website and social media accounts.
Since 2011, Gilman has taught literature in countless settings: private book groups, classes for Yale Alumni College, an Asian literature book group for the Asia Society in Manhattan, workshops in high schools and at non-profits for Humanities New York, graduate seminars for medical students at Mt. Sinai Medical School, high school English classes at the Collegiate School and Grace Church School. She was the parenting/education advice columnist for #1 New York Times bestselling author Susan Cain’s Quiet Revolution website and since 2013, has been a regular book critic for the Boston Globe. She speaks frequently at schools, conferences, and organizations about parenting, education, autism, and the arts. She has received fellowships and grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Speranza Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the New York Council for the Humanities. In 1997, Gilman won the Yale College Graduate Prize Teaching Fellowship; in 2019, she won the Yale Alumni College Distinguished Teaching award. In 2018, she became a certified Mindfulness and Loving-Kindness meditation teacher.
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John Stuart Gordon
YACOL courses taught: The Artistry and Meaning of American Silver
John Stuart Gordon, the Benjamin Attmore Hewitt Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts, attended Vassar College, received a M.A. from the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture and a Ph.D. from Boston University. His dissertation explored the career of antiquarian and industrial designer Lurelle Guild. He has written and curated on topics ranging from the stained glass windows of John La Farge to the architect-designed housewares produced by Swid Powell. His most recent publication is A Modern World: American Design from the Yale University Art Gallery, 1920-1950. In addition to his curatorial work, he supervises Furniture Study, Yale University Art Gallery’s expansive study collection of American furniture and wooden objects.
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Seth Green
YACOL courses taught: Innovating for Good; Accelerating Impact:
Seth Green is the founding director of the Baumhart Center, an interdisciplinary center at Loyola University Chicago that equips Chicagoland leaders and students with the business tools to accelerate social impact. Seth is also an executive lecturer in the Management Department of Loyola’s Quinlan School of Business, where he teaches courses on nonprofit leadership, social entrepreneurship, and corporate social responsibility. Seth joined Loyola after 15 years of leading institutions at the forefront of fighting poverty and expanding opportunity. Most recently, he served as executive director of Youth & Opportunity United (Y.O.U.), a Chicagoland nonprofit that prepares low-income youth for post-secondary and life success. During his tenure, he spearheaded an expansion of Y.O.U.'s programs from serving 450 youth in 2010 to 1,600 in 2017. He also envisioned and led a $16.4 million fundraising campaign to build a new Y.O.U. youth center and financial endowment. Seth began his career as a consultant at McKinsey and Company, where he worked with private sector clients on strategic planning and change management. A recipient of McKinsey’s Community Fellowship, he spent one year of his time at the firm supporting nonprofit clients, including the Gates Foundation and United Way. Seth is a sought after speaker on social entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility, nonprofit leadership, and cross-sector partnership, having spoken on these topics at the U.S. House, U.S. Senate, World Bank, United Nations, and other leading institutions. He served for numerous years as a discussion facilitator for the Clinton Global Initiative and he was a plenary speaker at the 2011 White House-sponsored conference on Connecting Communities for the Common Good. Before joining Loyola, Seth was also a lecturer at Northwestern University, where he taught courses on nonprofit management and social impact leadership. Seth is a frequent media contributor, having served as a guest on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, CNN, and MSNBC, and having written op-eds for the Christian Science Monitor and Miami Herald. In addition, his work has been featured by hundreds of publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. For his social innovation leadership, Utne Reader named Seth one of 50 “Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” Seth has a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, master’s degrees from the London School of Economics and Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship, and a law degree from Yale University. He currently serves on the Impact Investing Advisory Council of the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago, on the Council of Advisors of Loyola Limited, and as a member of the Economic Club of Chicago.
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Bruce Gudmundsson
YACOL courses taught: Cases from Clausewitz
Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson is an historian and case teacher who lives and works in Quantico, Virginia. Between 2007 and 2017, he held the Case Method Chair at the Marine Corps University, where he taught decision-forcing cases on subjects that ranged from logistics in the Falklands War to military operations in the borderlands that connect Mexico and the United States. Gudmundsson, who holds a BA from Yale College and a D.Phil. from Oxford University, has also taught at the US Army War College, Dickinson College, and the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. His books include Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914-1918; On Artillery; On Armor; and (with John English), On Infantry.
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Mary Habeck
YACOL courses taught: Understanding al-Qa'ida and Isis; Russia Resurgent; The Never-Ending War: The U.S. Confronts Extremism; Looking Inside the Black Box: How the NSC Makes Foreign Policy; Polarized America; Wars in the Head: Vietnam and Afghanistan; Afghanistan and the War on Terror; Understanding Russia and Ukraine; Wars in the Heat; Great Power Competition; The Black Box: Understanding the National Security Council; Russia Resurgent: How Russia Went From Defeat in the Cold War to Global Power; American Military History: Part 1 (1890-1945); American Military History: Part 2 (1945-Present); Conflict with China; Russia, Iran, and China: Is this World War III?; National Security Polarization in the U.S.; Vietnam: How the War in Vietnam is Affecting America Today; Understanding Iran, HAMAS, and Hezbollah
Mary Habeck is a strategic planner and an expert on military matters, Russia, Great Power Competition, and extremism. She teaches on these issues at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Georgetown, American University, and Patrick Henry College, and is a consultant for various parts of the federal government. From 2005-2013 she was an Associate Professor in Strategic Studies at SAIS, teaching courses on extremism, military history, and strategic thought. Before moving to SAIS, Dr. Habeck taught American and European military history in Yale’s history department, 1994-2005. She received her PhD in history from Yale in 1996, an MA in international relations from Yale in 1989, and a BA in international studies, Russian, and Spanish from Ohio State in 1987.
Dr. Habeck was appointed by President Bush to the Council on the Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities (2006-2013), and in 2008-2009 she was the Special Advisor for Strategic Planning on the National Security Council staff, where she worked on extremism.
In addition to books and articles on doctrine, World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and al-Qa’ida, her publications include Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (Yale, 2005) and three sequels, Attacking America: Al-Qa’ida’s Grand Strategy (2018), Managing Savagery: Al-Qa’ida’s Military and Political Strategies (2019), and Fighting the Enemy: The U.S. and its War against al-Qa’ida (2020).
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Valerie Hansen
YACOL courses taught: The Indian Ocean Trade Between the Islamic World and China
Valerie Hansen teaches premodern Chinese and world history at Yale, where she is the Stanley Woodward Professor of History. She loves teaching because it gives her an opportunity to learn more about primary sources because of the insights of seminar participants. Enjoying travel, she has led YAA trips to India, Central Asia, and most recently Scandinavia. She has lived in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore for extended research stays. Her most recent book, The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began (Scribner, 2020) has been translated into fifteen languages.
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Peter Hawkins
YACOL courses taught: Pirates: Fact, Fiction and History; Dante - The Path to Hell; Purgatorio—From Darkness to Light; Paradiso; Augustine’s; Confessions: A Life Story; Poetry of T.S. Eliot: A Fresh Look
Peter Hawkins’ work has long centered on the author of the “Commedia.” In addition to essays and chapters there are his books: Dante’s Testaments: Essays on Scriptural Imagination, (1999), The Poets’ Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses (2001), co-edited with Rachel Jacoff, and Dante: A Brief History (2006). The poet features as well in his expansion of his 2007 Beecher Lectures on Preaching in “Undiscovered Country: Imagining the World to Come (2009)”. His research in the history of biblical reception has led to three coedited volumes to which he also contributed essays, “Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs” (2006), “Medieval Readings of Romans” (2007), and “From the Margin I: Women of the Hebrew Bible and their Afterlives” (2009). Together with Paula Carlson he edited the Augsburg Fortress four-volume series, “Listening for God: Contemporary Literature and the Life of Faith.” He has also written on twentieth-century fiction (“The Language of Grace”), utopia (“Getting Nowhere”), and the language of ineffability (“Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett”). Professor Hawkins’ essays have dealt with such topics as memory and memorials, televangelism, scriptural interpretation, and preaching. His most recent book, co-written with Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg, is The Bible and the American Short Story (2018). From 2000 to 2008 he directed the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts at Boston University. While at BU he won the Metcalf Prize for Excellence in Teaching. He is Professor of Religion and Literature Emeritus at the Yale Divinity School.
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Mark Hesselgrave
YACOL courses taught: Architectural Fantasies: the Art of Architectural Drawing
Mark Hesselgrave received his Bachelor’s degree from California Polytechnic State University in 1980, and his Master’s in Architecture from Yale in 1985. During his time at Yale, he took advantage of the then co-habitation of the Art and Architecture Schools, taking a number of courses in the School of Art. Hesselgrave was also the primary Teaching Assistant for Philip Grausman’s drawing course at the School of Architecture. Mark received the Drawing Prize upon graduation from the school. Mark has taught Foundation Drawing at Purchase College, SUNY. Mark joined the firm of Cesar Pelli & Associates in 1985. There he worked on a wide range of projects for universities and institutions across the country, including the Cleveland Clinic, UC Riverside, UCLA, Trinity College, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. Mark’s skill in coordinating complex technical projects led to his promotion to Senior Associate. A private consultant since 2009, Mark’s firm provides design, project management, and technical services. He works in all architectural capacities, but his primary contribution is in the aesthetic and technical development of interiors and exterior wall systems. Throughout his career Mark has continued to draw, professionally for design inspiration and presentation, and for pleasure.
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Lisa Hess-Hesselgrave
YACOL courses taught: Drawing the Human Figure
Lisa Hess Hesselgrave’s paintings of figures in interiors and landscapes are recognized for precise color, personal content and evocative compositions. She works in many media including oil, watercolor, pastel and collage. Judy Birke wrote of Hesselgrave’s work, “Her domestic interiors tap into a deep well of emotion where nothing is obvious.” Hesselgrave’s work has been included in exhibitions throughout the northeast, including Tatistcheff and Co. and the National Academy of Design in New York City, the John Slade Ely House, in New Haven, and the Cape Cod Museum of Art. Her work is included in private collections throughout the US and abroad. She has taught drawing, painting, and color theory since 1985. Hesselgrave received her MFA from the Yale University School of Art, and her BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She has been awarded residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts in 2002 and 1992, the Vermont Studio Center, 2014, and at the Seaside Institute, Seaside, Florida in 1996. She is an adjunct professor at Gateway Community College in New Haven.
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