Faculty Bios by
Last Name
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Riley Soles
YACOL courses taught: Ecstasy
Riley Soles is a full-time lecturer in the Humanities Program at Yale, where he teaches courses on literature, religion, and philosophy in a variety of cultural contexts. Before joining the Humanities Program, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music (2019-2021). He attended Harvard College (BA, 2005), earned a master's degree in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School (MTS, 2008) and another master’s from Harvard’s Regional Studies East Asia Program (MA, 2011). Soles finished his graduate work at Yale in the Department of East Asian Literatures and Languages (PhD, 2018), and his dissertation, titled The Ecstasy of the Text, won the Marsten Anderson Prize for exceptional work in the field of East Asian Studies. As a doctoral student, he worked primarily on premodern Japanese poetry with Edward Kamens and on English and American poetry with the late Harold Bloom, with whom he co-taught courses on Shakespeare and poetic influence. Soles’ recent courses, always eclectic and interdisciplinary in their approaches, have been cross-listed in several departments, including English, Religious Studies, East Asian Studies, and Comparative Literature. He also regularly teaches in the literature track of the Directed Studies Program. His book manuscript, based on his dissertation, traces the influence of ecstatic experience on a variety of literary and religious writings, both Western and Eastern. Soles enthusiastically transgresses the narrowly drawn boundaries of specialized academic fields and disciplines, and has written and lectured on the relationship between literature, religion, and philosophy using a wide range of texts and media, from Japanese poetry and painting, Indian Buddhist scriptures, and Chinese commentaries on those scriptures, to the works of Franz Kafka, treatises on the Westerns Sublime, and English language poetry of all kinds. He is particularly interested in the ways poetic tropes transform between poems over time, and in the ways that literary texts articulate their own unique ontologies. Soles believes his main objective as an undergraduate teacher is to inspire and equip his students to be deep readers of great literature, not just for the duration of their time at Yale but for the entirety of their lives afterward.
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Anna Souchuk
YACOL courses taught: Ideas and Inspirations from the 1900s Viennese Coffeehouse; Coming to Terms with the Past: Memory and Memorial in Germany and the U.S.
Anna Souchuk is Associate Professor of German in DePaul's Department of Modern Languages. She received her Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 2008, with a dissertation on constructions of place in the novels of Elfriede Jelinek, Josef Haslinger, and Robert Menasse. Since then, her research has concentrated largely on the collected works of Josef Haslinger and his depictions of Austria’s conflicted relationship to Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), though Dr. Souchuk continues to write on other Austrian writers and artists, including Elfriede Jelinek, Linda Stift, the visual artist Deborah Sengl, and the filmmaker Markus Schleinzer. Her research has been presented frequently at the annual Conferences of the German Studies Association and Austrian Studies Association (the leading conferences in the fields of German and Austrian Studies in the U.S.), along with the Convention of the Modern Language Association. Most recently, she edited a special edition of the scholarly journal Modern Languages Open with a focus on the family novel in German(ic) literature. This project drew on her interests in the generational transmission of the family story as an emblem of problematic Austrian Vergangenheitsbewältigung while exploring the recent increase in popularity of Familienromane (family novels) in German-language literature. Dr. Souchuk teaches a wide variety of courses in DePaul University’s German Program and Honors Program. She has also developed several short- and long-term study abroad programs at DePaul, most recently a long-term program for students to study in Vienna, and a short-term program to Berlin, where students volunteer with refugees and learn about human rights and multicultural Germany.
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Mark Spicer
YACOL courses taught: The Beatles and Their Legacy; The Beatles and Their Legacy part 2; In the Beatles Wake; The Beatles—Early Years; Pop Music Time Capsules: 1961-1980
Mark Spicer is Professor of Music at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He received his B.Mus. and M.Mus. (1987, 1990) from the University of North Texas and his Ph.D. (2001) from Yale University. Prof. Spicer specializes in the reception history and analysis of popular music, especially British pop and rock since the1960s, and his writings have appeared widely in a number of scholarly journals and essay collections. His book Sounding Out Pop, co-edited with John Covach, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2010, and he has since edited the volume on Rock Music for the Library of Essays on Popular Music series from Ashgate (2011). Most recently, he completed a three-year term (2013–15) as Associate Editor of Music Theory Spectrum, the flagship journal of the Society for Music Theory.
Prof. Spicer served for ten years (2005–15) as Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music at Hunter College, as was the 2015 recipient of Hunter’s Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching. In addition to his scholarship and teaching, he maintains an active parallel career as a professional keyboardist and vocalist, having worked with several groups in the US and the UK since the 1980s. In the early 1990s, he was a founding member of the critically acclaimed group Little Jack Melody and His Young Turks, and can be heard on their first two CDs, On the Blank Generation (1991) and World of Fireworks (1994). He continues to take the stage most weekends, both with his own “electric R&B” group, the Bernadettes, and with the Christ Church Choir in New Haven.
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Thomas Stanton
YACOL courses taught: Risk Management Lessons from the Financial Crisis; American Race Relations and the Legacy of British Colonialism; Overcoming the Social Divide: Learning from the History of American Race Relations
Thomas H. Stanton is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) and serves on the Steering Committee of the Academy’s Standing Panel on Social Equity in Governance, which focuses on issues of fairness, justice, and equity in a variety of public contexts, including, but not limited to education, policing, welfare, housing, and transportation. In 2017 NAPA awarded him its George Graham Award for Exceptional Service to the Academy. In 2021, Mr. Stanton was elected to the National Council of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), which bridges public administration scholars and practitioners in the field. Mr. Stanton is a former President of the Association for Federal Enterprise Risk Management (AFERM), an organization dedicated to improving risk management by federal agencies. In 2018, AFERM awarded him its Hall of Fame Award. He is a former member of the federal Senior Executive Service and teaches on the adjunct faculty of Johns Hopkins University.
Mr. Stanton holds an M.A. degree in International Relations from Yale University, where much of his work focused on the impact of European colonialism. He also holds degrees from the University of California at Davis and Harvard Law School. His international publications include articles on the legacy of colonialism and the legal framework of public and private institutions. He has written or edited numerous books, most recently American Race Relations and the Legacy of British Colonialism, (Routledge, 2020). Much of his written work can be found at www.thomas-stanton.com.
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Steven A. Steinbach
YACOL courses taught: Constitutional Controversies: A Historical Survey; Contemporary Constitutional Controversies; A Walk Through the Constitution
Steven A. Steinbach is on the faculty of Sidwell Friends School, Washington, DC where he has served as the Clerk of the Faculty and the chair of the History Department, and where he teaches courses in United States History and American Government. Prior to becoming a high school teacher, he was a partner in the Washington, DC, law firm of Williams & Connolly LLP, where he specialized in criminal and civil litigation. He holds degrees from Harvard College, Yale Law School, and St. John’s College, Annapolis. Steinbach is co-editor of With Liberty and Justice for All?: The Constitution in the Classroom (Oxford University Press, 2022), a unique approach to the study of both the Constitution and US History intended for classroom teachers, their students and interested citizens more generally. The book features contributions from leading constitutional historians and includes a Foreword by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit, the Steering Committee of the Quill Project of Pembroke College Oxford, and the Advisory Council of the Educating for American Democracy Initiative.
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Abraham Stoll
YACOL courses taught: Kingship and Revolution in the Age of Shakespeare
Abraham Stoll is Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of San Diego. He received a BA from Yale in 1992, studying English and literary theory. He received a PhD from Princeton in 2000, specializing in the Renaissance and early modern periods. He was a Mellon Prize Fellow at the University Center for Human Values in Princeton, and has been a research fellow at the Huntington Library and the Folger Library, as well as receiving funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Folger Institute. In 2015, he was awarded a University Professorship at the University of San Diego, and has won several teaching awards. He was Visiting Faculty at Hebrew University in Jersualem, and is an Affiliated Faculty in the Old Globe and USD Shiley Graduate Theatre Program, teaching the actors in USD's top-ranked MFA program in classical acting. Professor Stoll has a new book, Conscience in Early Modern English Literature, forthcoming this fall from Cambridge University Press. It explores the theological and political discourses that surround the idea of conscience, and the way that poets such as Shakespeare and Milton attempt to capture how it feels to be in the throes of conscience. He is also currently editing a new edition of Paradise Lost for Broadview Press. His first book was Milton and Monotheism (2009), and he was the General Editor of the five-volume edition of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (2006-7).
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Paul Sullivan
YACOL courses taught: Economics, Politics and the Arab World; Bullets, Ballets, Bureaucrats and Balances: the Arab World and its Tough Neighbors; A Global Tour of Economics, Politics, Culture and International Relations (Part 1); Natural Resouces and International Security; Climate Change and the Energy Revolution; The Middle East Today; A world tour of energy, economic, environmental, climate, and natural resource issues; Strategic Aspects of the World Economy; Oceans: Why are they important and what we need to know about how they affect us; The Potential Future of Energy and Implications; Brainstorming World Challenges; Unraveling Global Commerce: The Dynamics of Trade, Shipping, and Supply Chains
Dr. Sullivan advises multinational energy companies on natural gas, oil, energy security, nuclear power, the environment, the energy transition, regulations and laws, trade, regional energy markets, minerals, and mining, VUCA, and investment. He is a Nonresident Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center and a Distinguished International Fellow at the NCUSAR. He teaches courses on environmental and energy security at John Hopkins. He has taught classes focusing on global energy, water, food, climate, environmental issues, various strategic aspects of the MENA region, strategic economics, the oceans, brainstorming global challenges, and more for the Yale Alumni College.
He was a full professor at the National Defense University (USA) for over 22 years, where he ran the Energy Industry Study, taught Industry Analytics, Economics of National Security, The Strategic Leaders Foundation Course, and many electives and regional studies related to the MENA region, the Islamic world, strategic economics, and other timely issues. He also ran strategic games. As part of his NDU duties, he ran energy field studies in the US, Asia, Australia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the EU. He was a primary faculty advisor and mentor for dozens of senior officers from many parts of the world, but mostly from the MENA region, Mongolia, and Southeast Asia while at NDU. Dr. Sullivan also taught at Georgetown, The American University in Cairo, and Yale.
Dr. Sullivan has given presentations on five continents at places as varied as Windsor Castle, Ditchley Park, The IEEJ in Tokyo, The IAEE, The Defense College of Mongolia, Harvard, The University of Pennsylvania, The Army HQ in Santiago, Chile, The Swedish FAO, The German Council on Foreign Relations, the Embassy of Latvia in London, among others. His current research interests include the energy-resilience nexus, economic and resource aspects of human security, energy transitions, Asia-US-MENA relations, the energy-water-food-security nexus, EU-Russian energy relations, energy in the rebuilding after conflict, the oceans, the energy-environment nexus, and others.
He has MA, MPhil, and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University. He was part of MIT’s Seminar XXI’s Class of 2006. He obtained a certificate of completion for an ethnoarchaeology field study in Barunga, Australia, run by Flinders University in 2014.
Dr. Sullivan has advised senior leaders on topics of his expertise for decades.
More can be learned at https: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drsullivenergy.
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Gordon Turnbull
YACOL courses taught: The European Literary Tradition: Tragic Drama; Fiction, the Monstrous, and the Limits of the Human; The Campus Novel
Gordon Turnbull (’81 MA, ’86 PhD) is the former General Editor of the Yale Boswell Editions, one of Yale’s most acclaimed scholarly enterprises, which edited the personal papers of the Scottish lawyer and diarist James Boswell, whose landmark life of the English author and lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson helped shape the modern field of biography, and whose manuscripts form part of the great Boswell Collection in Yale’s Beinecke Library. Before this appointment, he taught in the Yale Department of English, and has taught also at of The University of Newcastle (Australia) and Smith College. Born in Sydney, he is a graduate of the Australian National University in Canberra, and came to Yale for graduate study as a Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar, before joining the faculty. In his teaching career at Yale, he specialized in eighteenth-century literature, especially of the Samuel Johnson circle, led advanced seminars in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century drama and in the origins of the novel, and served as course director of The European Literary Tradition, an intensive survey course in the western canons of tragedy and comedy. He has lectured and published widely on Johnson, Boswell, and their circle, and is a featured speaker at the annual Boswell Book Festival, named for James Boswell and devoted to the genres of biography and personal memoir, held each May at Dumfries House in Ayrshire, Scotland. He has taught in the Yale-in-London program, has led several past Yale Alumni College seminars in New York, and has served as faculty leader on numerous Yale Alumni educational programs around the world, most recently (October 2023) co-leading the London Theater Seminar.
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Anders Winroth
YACOL courses taught: Vikings at Home and Away
Professor Winroth specializes in the history of medieval Europe, especially religious, intellectual and legal history as well as the Viking Age. He teaches both halves of the survey lecture course in medieval history, seminars in religious, legal, intellectual, and Scandinavian history. His new book, The Conversion of Scandinavia: Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northern Europe, argues for a radically new interpretation of the conversion of Scandinavia from paganism to Christianity in the early Middle Ages (Yale Press, December 2011). In 2003, Winroth was named a MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which honors individuals for the originality and creativity of their work and the potential to do more in the future. Winroth published The Making of Gratian’s Decretum in 2000. The Decretum was the first scholastic canon law textbook produced in the Middle Ages. Winroth is credited with showing that manuscripts previously thought to be abbreviations of the standard text are actually early versions of the text. “This painstaking analysis would have been impossible absent his mastery of canon law, command of medieval Latin, and aptitude for paleographic reconstruction of materials that exist primarily in the form of unedited medieval manuscripts,” the MacArthur Foundation stated. “By reversing the chronology of the earliest publications in canon law, Winroth opens new avenues for interpreting its origins and development.”
Professor Jon Butler, former chair of the History Department, said, “Anders is a simply stunning scholar and wonderfully warm, humane person. His ingenuity and discipline flow naturally out of a personal graciousness that makes him a marvelous teacher and colleague. By honoring our most creative, path-breaking scholars, MacArthur Fellowships remind us all of academia’s principal purpose—the pursuit of knowledge and learning in the pursuit of truth and human dignity. Winroth, who learned of his honor through a surprise phone call from the MacArthur Foundation, was one of 24 MacArthur Fellows for 2003. “The annual announcement of the MacArthur Fellows is a special opportunity to celebrate the creative individual in our midst,” said Jonathan F. Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation. “The new MacArthur Fellows illustrate the foundation’s conviction that talented individuals, free to follow their insights and instincts, will make a difference in shaping the future.” The foundation’s board of directors choose MacArthur Fellows based on the recommendations of a selection committee and several hundred nominators. The committee members and nominators serve anonymously.
“To receive this fellowship, many people must have believed in my potential to do more things,” Winroth said. “There are people out there who must have recommended me, others who evaluated my work. I have a responsibility to them and to the foundation now.” In 2003, Winroth’s book on the Decretum was awarded the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication by Yale University. Then Dean of Yale College Richard H. Brodhead motivated the award: “In the judgment of the referees, the book is a remarkable piece of hard-headed academic detective work that changes our understanding of the Middle Ages in a significant way.” The book was also given the prestigious John Nicholas Brown Prize by the Medieval Academy of America in 2004.
Winroth is co-editor of Canon Law, Religion, and Politics: Liber Amicorum Robert Somerville (2012) and Charters, Cartularies, and Archives: The Preservation and Transmission of Documents in the Medieval West (2002). His research is focused on the cultural, intellectual and legal history of the European High Middle Ages and on the economic and social history of early medieval Scandinavia. Winroth received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1996 and was the Sir James Knott Research Fellow at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne 1996-1998. He joined the Yale faculty as an assistant professor in 1998, was promoted to associate professor in 2003 and to full professor in 2004. He was the chair of the Medieval Studies Program 2005-2007.
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Craig Wright
YACOL courses taught: Madness at the Movies; Exploring the Art and Science of Relaxation
Craig Wright, Moses Professor Emeritus of Music at Yale, holds an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard. During his tenure at Yale, Wright served as chair of the Department of Music (1986-1992) and Academic Director of Online Education (2014-2017). He has published seven books on music and cultural history the most recent being The Hidden Habits of Genius (Harper Collins), an Amazon Top-20 Book Selection for 2020. His two Yale/Coursera online courses, “Introduction to Classical Music,” and “The Nature of Genius” have attracted more than 225,000 participants. Yale has recognized Wright’s contributions to undergraduate teaching in the form of its two most prestigious prizes, the Sewall Prize and the DeVane Medal. He was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago, and in 2010 was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Justin Zaremby
YACOL courses taught: Free Speech and its Discontent; Theories of Justice
Justin Zaremby received his B.A., Ph.D. in Political Science and J.D. from Yale, where he taught political science and humanities. Currently a practicing lawyer at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP in New York, he is the author of Legal Realism and American Law and Directed Studies and the Evolution of American General Education. His writings have been published in various journals including the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, Suffolk University Law Review, Rutgers Law Review and The New Criterion. In his law practice, Justin specializes in the representation of tax-exempt organizations. His advises a range of public charities and private foundations, including universities, cultural institutions, and other tax-exempt entities on a variety of matters including corporate governance and restructuring, charitable giving, program-related investing, international grantmaking, commercially driven mission activities, and other state and federal regulatory matters. From 2010 to 2011, Mr. Zaremby served as a Law Clerk to the Hon. José A. Cabranes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Prior to joining Patterson Belknap, Justin advised for-profit companies on complex commercial transactions and corporate governance matters.
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