Faculty

All MLAS courses are taught by current Vanderbilt faculty members or, on occasion, emeritus faculty. All instructors are selected for their recognized abilities as teachers and their special interest in MLAS students and the MLAS program. By any measure, be it their publications, teaching awards, community involvement, academic background, and scholarly honors, Vanderbilt’s faculty is one of the most distinguished in the nation. Above their many honors, they are committed and eager to share their knowledge with the remarkable students in this program. They, too, are energetic and enthusiastic lifelong learners who value the MLAS experience.

Here are some of the acclaimed Vanderbilt professors who have recently taught in the program:

Michael Aurbach, Professor of Art, Emeritus
“Found and Fabricated: Sculpture”

Robert Barsky , Professor of French and Comparative Literature; Professor of Law; Director of the W.T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies
"What if Alice Were a Refugee in Wonderland?"

Gregory F. Barz , Professor of Ethnomusicology
“Music and Global Health”

Brandon R. Byrd , Assistant Professor of History
"History and Biography"

Katherine Blue Carroll , Assistant Professor of Political Science; Associate Director of Public Policy Studies
"Middle East Politics"

Celso Castilho , Associate Professor of History
"The Global Circulation of Uncle Tom's Cabin"

Kate Daniels, Professor of English
“Reading and Writing Women's Autobiography"
"Life Writing/Writing Life: The Art of Autobiography"

Leonard Folgarait, Distinguished Professor of History of Art
“20th- and 21st-Century Art and Politics”
“The Meaning of Modern Art"

Edward H. Friedman , Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Spanish,
Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus
“Don Quixote”
“Modern American Drama”

Vivien Green Fryd , Professor of History of Art, Emerita
"American Icons and Monuments"

Megan Gallagher , Lecturer of American Studies
"Democracy and Race in America"

Sam B. Girgus , Professor of English
"The Films of Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen"

Michael P. Hodges , Professor of Philosophy
“Concepts of God”
"The Political, Ancient and Modern"

Mark Hosford , Associate Professor of Art
"Printmaking 101: Delving Deep into the Matrix"

Christopher M.S. Johns , Professor of History of Art; Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Chair in the History of Art
"Art and Visual Culture in the Age of the French Revolution, 1785-1815"

Judy Klass , Senior Lecturer of English and Jewish Studies
"Jewish Humor"

Lutz Koepnick , Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of German and Cinema and Media Arts
"Genre Cinema"

Stanley B. Link , Associate Professor of the Composition, Philosophy, and Analysis of Music
"Music, Art, and Disability"
"Listening to Film"
"Music in Contemporary Fiction"

Lorraine López , Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English
“Fiction Writing Workshop”
"Imaginative Writing in Four Genres"

Melanie Lowe , Associate Professor of Musicology
"Music, Gender, and Sexuality"

Holly J. McCammon , Professor of Sociology; Professor of Law
"Women and Social Activism" 

Adam S. Meyer , Associate Professor of Jewish Studies
"American Southern Jews in Life, Literature, and Film" 

Paul B. Miller , Associate Professor of French
"Nobel Laureates in Literature from Latin America and the Caribbean"

Kevin D. Murphy , Professor of History of Art; Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities
"Impressionism"

Bill Purcell, Adjunct Professor of Public Policy Studies; former Mayor of Nashville
"American Urban Policy"

W. Frank Robinson , Assistant Professor of History
“Cuba and the United States: Past and Future Relations"

Norbert Ross , Associate Professor of Anthropology
"Food, Identity, and Culture"
"Kurdistan and the Middle East"

Alexandra A. Sargent , Senior Lecturer of Theatre
"Project Runway: Fashion History, Theory, Design, and Fabrication"

Mark Schoenfield , Professor of English
"Capstone Workshop"

Thomas Alan Schwartz , Professor of History
“The United States and the Vietnam War”

Charles Scott , Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus
“Human Existence, Faith, and the Questions of Ethics"

Sheri F. Shaneyfelt , Principal Senior Lecturer of History of Art
"Early Renaissance Florence"
"Michelangelo's Life and Works"

Michael Slayton, Associate Professor of Composition and Theory
"Music of the Outliers"

Robert Talisse , W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy
"Ethics"

Garrett W. Tate , Senior Lecturer and Research Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences
"Understanding Natural Disasters"

Cecelia Tichi , William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English
“From Flood to Drought: Facts and Fables of Water in the 20th Century"
"Capstone Workshop"

Frank Wcislo , Associate Professor of History; Associate Professor of German, Russian, and East European Studies
"(Soviet) Russia: 1917 to Now"

David Weintraub, Professor of Astronomy
"New Questions and Discoveries in Planetary Astronomy"

Mark Wollaeger , Professor of English
"Modernist Experimentation in Literature and Painting"

Andrés Zamora , Professor of Spanish
“Representations of Women, Images of the Nation: The Case of Spanish Cinema”