Gerald Butters
Gerald Butters is a historian of film specializing in the intersection of race and gender in motion pictures. A Fulbright scholar, Butters has lectured on film in Romania, Luxembourg, France and Canada and at many American universities. His books include Black Manhood on the Silent Screen, Banned in Kansas: Motion Picture Censorship, 1915–1966, and the upcoming From Sweetback to Superfly: Race and Film Audiences in Chicago's Loop. He is editor of an anthology on Blaxploitation films. Butters received his Phd in History from the University of Kansas.
Caitlyn Doyle
Caitlyn Doyle is a Visiting Assistant Professor of French. Her research is situated at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, focusing in particular on the temporality of art’s politics. Currently, she is working on a project that considers literary and filmic representations of the fugitive as both a political figure and an aesthetic category. The project considers what it means to escape, rather than solicit recognition, challenging the tendency to rely on mutual recognition or achieving visibility as indispensable to political subject formation. She teaches in the fields of literature, film, and critical theory and is the recipient of a teaching award from Western University.
Scott Durham
Scott Durham, associate professor of French, is the faculty director for the MALit program and chair of the French and Italian department at Northwestern. He has taught both graduate and undergraduate courses in French and comparative literature since 1994, with a primary focus on 20th-century literature, film and the relationship between literature and philosophy. His scholarly publications since he completed his doctorate at Yale include Phantom Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism (Stanford University Press), Jean Genet: In the Language of the Enemy (a special number he edited for Yale French Studies) and numerous articles. He is completing work on a book with the working title The Archive and the Monad: Deleuze and the Resistance to Postmodernism.Durham earned his Phd from Yale University.
Kasey Evans
Kasey Evans, Faculty Director and associate professor of English at Northwestern, teaches and writes about medieval and Renaissance literature. Her book Colonial Virtue: The Mobility of Temperance in Renaissance England (University of Toronto Press, 2012) argues that the virtue of temperance underwent a semantic sea-change during the English Renaissance, evolving from a paradigm of self-discipline and moderation into a value of time-management, efficiency, and colonial aggression. Areas of particular interest include English Renaissance adaptations of Italian poetry (Dante, Ariosto, Tasso); ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality as they shape Renaissance English literature; and literary and critical theory, from medieval exegetes through postmodern philosophers. Evans received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
David Faller
David Faller has extensive experience in applying the theories of monetary economics and international trade to the solution of real-life issues arising in international business and financial markets. Having started his career as a financial markets trader in Europe, Faller has created and managed derivatives market making businesses, high frequency proprietary trading teams and provided advice on currency exposure management issues to multi-national corporations and governmental bodies in Europe, Asia and the Americas. While leading the global treasury activities of a NASDAQ listed technology company, he was responsible for opening branches in a number of emerging countries where his knowledge of cultural diversity, trade and tariff regulations and international tax regimes were critical in the country location process. He has been teaching courses on international business and capital markets to under-graduate and graduate levels students since 2003. Faller holds an MBA from the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management and did graduate studies at the Europa Instituut, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands, specializing in the economic and legal issues facing member states in economically and politically integrated sovereign areas.
Angela Fontes is vice president in the Economics, Justice, and Society Department, and director of the Behavioral and Economic Analysis and Decision-making (BEAD) program at NORC at the University of Chicago. At NORC, Fontes oversees research focused on household finance and investor decision-making, with a specific focus on the financial well-being of African American and Hispanic/Latino families. Using both traditional economic methods, as well as methods from behavioral science and marketing, Fontes delivers actionable insights for a diverse set of stakeholders.
A nationally-recognized expert in household finance, Fontes is regularly quoted in national and trade press and is a frequent speaker on topics related to financial wellbeing. She is the Principal Investigator on several projects, including work with the Securities and Exchange Commission to conduct investor protection research, and NORC’s ongoing collaboration with the FINRA Investor Education Foundation. Her research can be found in journals such as the Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of Family and Economic Issues, the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy, and Financial Counseling and Planning.
Prior to NORC, Fontes worked in business and market research consulting with Chamberlain Research Consultants and Leo Burnett. She is adjunct faculty at Northwestern University where she was recently awarded a Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award. At Northwestern, Fontes teaches graduate courses in behavioral economics and public policy, and program evaluation. Fontes is incoming President of the American Council on Consumer Interests, and on the Board of Directors of the Northwest Side Housing Center. Fontes holds a PhD in consumer behavior and family economics with a minor in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP®).
David Noffs
Dr. David Noffs has spent over 10 years as an Instructional Technologist and Designer in the Center for Innovation and Teaching Excellence at Columbia College Chicago where he oversaw the development of online interactive tools and the use of Learning Management Systems (LMS’s). In this capacity, he supervised the installation of a campus-wide Moodle (Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) LMS in 2008 and development of training programs for students, faculty and staff. Noffs’ work grew to include not only teaching faculty and staff ways to use technology in the classroom, but also oversight of the creation of faculty led virtual learning communities, and non-stop facilitated online courses for faculty and staff development. In addition, he helped develop and teach workshops for mobile app development, online coursework development (instructional design), grade book design, portfolio design, and an array of online teaching tools, including integration of social media into virtual learning communities. Noffs joined Northwestern University School of Professional Studies in 2015. His doctoral dissertation in Adult and Continuing Education from National Louis University is entitled, Resonating Frequencies of a Virtual Learning Community: An Ethnographic Case Study of Online Faculty Development at Columbia College Chicago. Noffs also teaches courses in Sound Design, Web Design and iOS, C# and C++ Programming at Columbia’s department of Interactive Arts and Media.
Domietta Torlasco
Domietta Torlasco works at the intersection of film theory and practice. After receiving a PhD from the department of Rhetoric and Film Studies at Berkeley, she completed an MFA in Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 2003 to 2007 she was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago.
Torlasco’s research and teaching interests include critical theory, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, as well as Italian and French cinema, the SF and noir genres, and time-based media arts. She is the author of three books: The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film (Stanford University Press, 2008), The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and The Rhythm of Images: Cinema Beyond Measure (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). Her video essays, which explore questions of domestic labor, borders, surveillance, and debt, have screened at national and international venues, including the Galerie Campagne Première in Berlin, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Felicity Vabulas is a political scientist whose research focuses on international organizations, international political economy, international law, human rights and foreign policy. She is also a post-doctoral lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy where she has taught classes in political economy, American political institutions, international organizations and writing for public policy. She also helped lead the Harris School’s international policy practicums to Jordan and Israel, Turkey, Cambodia and Rwanda and Madagascar. Vabulas has ongoing research projects that focus on the effects of foreign lobbying on US foreign policy, the implications of suspensions from international organizations and the increasing use of informal international organizations such as the various G-groups. She has worked as a consultant at Accenture and researcher for the Central Intelligence Agency. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago.