Office and People Directory

Jonathan Banfill

Biography

Dr. Jonathan Banfill is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Core Division at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, where he also directs the Global Studies Minor and the Freeman Foundation Asia Grant. Jonathan’s academic background is in Comparative and International Education, where he holds a PhD from UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies. He also holds an MA in Comparative International Politics from American University in Washington, D.C. and a BA in Comparative History from University of Washington, Seattle.

Jonathan’s research and pedagogical practice is engaged in creating interdisciplinary interconnections between new trends in the humanities, social research on global and urban issues, and creative practices from art and design, via place-based and experiential education. He has a long-term interest in thinking about these issues specifically within the context of a transnational Asia-Pacific, but is expanding in more directions since relocating to Vermont. At Champlain, this means creating courses and pedagogical spaces that can combine students’ professional knowledge with a humanistic perspective that can address future changes and global challenges. Jonathan has lived, worked, and taught in places as diverse as Los Angeles, Beijing, Belfast, Pyongyang, Mexico City, Shanghai, Cape Town, and Tokyo.

Jonathan is a graduate of the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative, an interdisciplinary research and training program funded by the Mellon Foundation that brings together humanities scholars, architects, and urban planners to study 21st century issues in cities in the Asia Pacific. He also served as a research and teaching fellow for the program and at cityLAB, an urban research think tank in the UCLA department of Architecture and Urban Design. More recently Jonathan is a co-founder of the Urban Humanities Network, which is supporting a new generation of Urban Humanities scholars and practitioners around the world.

At Champlain, Jonathan is Primary Investigator for a Champlain College subaward grant that is part of a larger Vermont EPSCoR proposal organized by The Vermont Complex Systems Center at the University of Vermont. This project, called The Study of Online, Collective Knowledge, and Stories (SOCKS), examines social narratives using Big Data and computational tools. Champlain College’s project focuses on the way that the soundscape has changed in Vermont and how Vermonters have talked about those changes over the last 150 years. Jonathan is a contributing faculty member for a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement (DHAG) grant that will be used to build infrastructure and contribute to faculty’s professional development for Digital Humanities tools. Finally he is a contributing faculty member to an ongoing multi-media research project funded by the Council of Independent Colleges Humanities Research for the Public Good grant that is investigating the history of Urban Renewal in the city of Burlington.

Jonathan is presently helping develop the new major in Digital Humanities at Champlain that will start in fall 2024.

Publications & Abstracts

Urban Humanities Pedagogy (2016) 

Favorite Quote

“If a scholar stays only in one place, then he or she will know no more than one song, their mind poor and pathetic. He ought to travel widely, observe how people live and how things work, understand customs and cultures across regions, learn of mountains, waters, and meteorology (cosmology), in order to extend their knowhow. This is how scholars are benefited from their experiences.”

—Hu Yuan (993-1059), Northern Song Dynasty Educator speaking about what we would now call interdisciplinary education. I am a descendent of Hu and try to put his ideas into practice in my teaching. Original Chinese quote translated by Dr. Weiling Deng.

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Charles Bashaw

Biography

Charles “Chuck” Bashaw received a BA in Comparative Literature from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, an MA in History from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and a Joint PhD in History and History of Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His scholarly interests all center on questions about how we know things and how much confidence we can have in what we think we know.

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Kelly Bowen

Biography

Kelly A. Bowen is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Core Division. Before Champlain College, Kelly worked in global trade assisting companies to identify opportunities and expand in emerging markets. As an International Trade Director for The Massachusetts Port Authority, she also led delegations of American manufacturers on Gubernatorial Trade Missions. Kelly managed offices in Jerusalem, Berlin, Derry, and Warsaw.

Time abroad fostered a love of the arts. Switching to the right brain, Kelly left business to pursue creative writing. She earned an M.F.A. at Goddard College.

Kelly champions experiential learning within an interdisciplinary framework. Her passion is empowering students (or clients) to uncover personal strengths and recognize their potential:

“Only after examining the self can we place ourselves in the context of a wider world. Critical thinkers evolve through this self-examination and encouragement.”

A Pushcart Prize-nominated writer, her work has been featured in Creative Nonfiction Magazine, The Huffington Post, Healthy Women, The Fiction Advocate, Vermont Digger, USA Today, and others. Her recent poem Dress Code was published in the Military Review Poetry Reader: Global War on Terrorism, 2001-2021 Anthology. Her essay Mystic Trinities received a notable mention in the 2022 edition of Best American Essays.

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Cyndi Brandenburg

Biography

Dr. Brandenburg is a trained neuroscientist who began teaching traditional lab science courses at Champlain College in 1999. With the initiation of Champlain’s Interdisciplinary Core in 2007, she shifted roles and started teaching an array of integrated and inquiry-based courses that are arguably quite different from her more traditional academic roots. As a result, she became particularly interested in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in general, and Interdisciplinarity and Integration in particular, with an eye towards fusing such seemingly disparate fields as the Sciences and the Humanities. She is a strong advocate for the importance of scientific literacy to society, and believes that the phrase “scientific literacy” needs to be understood in far more culturally nuanced and contextually meaningful ways than it typically has been in the past. Her current career focus includes how to make science skills more applicable and accessible to a broad range of students through hands-on, interdisciplinary, and inclusive pedagogies and curricular innovation. Most recently, she helped co-design a new degree program offered by the Degree Design Lab that is interdisciplinary, customizable, and predicated on experiential and project-based learning, and she is currently collaborating on the development of more innovative science-focused degree options for Champlain.

Distinctions & Awards

Edward Phelps Lyman Professorship Award

Publications & Abstracts

• Integration as the New (General Education)
• Scientific Literacy Redefined

Curriculum Vitae

READ MY CV

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Kristian Brevik

Biography

Kristian Brevik is an artist, scientist, and educator, who works to bring together artistic practice, ecology+evolutionary science, and the environmental humanities into collaborative research and art exploring the ways the lives of humans and other beings are entangled. They research relationships between humans and insects using genetics and computational biology, teach science, art and the humanities in academic and community classes, write on the theory and practice of building kinship with other species, and create artwork in the form of large interactive installations, collaborative performance, and short zines on relationships between humans and others in the community of life. They seek to find ways that art and life can help to foster a sense of deep connectedness with the nonhuman kin with whom we share the world. Their large, participatory art installations are rooted in the places and ecologies they represent.

Publications & Abstracts

PUBLICATIONS & ABSTRACTS

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• BCA Artist Studio Tour: Kristian Brevik
• @kbrevil_whalefall on Instagram

Favorite Quote

Malheur Maar: A hole in black ground. Steep cliff walls round. A ring of tall green reeds under the walls around the water. Some small people sit here and there silently on the cliffs among rabbitbrush and sagebrush. Some small people silently climb up my pants leg. In the round water are the reeds and the walls and some of the people and the wind moving and the silence.

—Ursula K. LeGuin

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Ciaran Buckley

Biography

Originally from Ireland Prof. Buckley lived in Germany for 30 years before coming to Champlain College. He studied Law at Bonn University and was admitted to the German Bar in Düsseldorf. He completed a post graduate degree in Real Estate Economics Immobilienoekoenom ebs at the European Business School. He taught previously at Hampden Sydney College in Virginia.

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Ariel Burgess

Biography

Ariel K. McKnight Burgess’ interests revolve around how we foster relationships between humans and the more-than-human world that are rooted in care, justice, and mutual responsibility. Through her research on the psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the climate and ecological crises, Ariel aims to nurture transformational change. With a specialty in climate and ecological psychology, recently she has been thinking a lot about eco-empathy, ecological mourning, and resilience.

At Champlain, Ariel teaches interdisciplinary ecologically-oriented courses where she explores with her students how topics like science, justice, policy, history, art, economics, social change, worldviews, and ethics are interwoven.

Outside of Champlain, Ariel facilitates eco-grief and eco-empathy workshops, and hosts monthly Eco-Resiliency Gatherings, which are always free and open to all who are interested. Ariel is earning a doctorate in ecopsychology with a specialization in climate response and resilience. She holds a bachelor’s in environmental studies and studio art, and a master’s in international environmental policy.

Research

Distinctions & Awards

Publications & Abstracts

Burgess, A. K. McK. expected 2023. “Eco Empathy.” In Ecological Feelings: A Rhetorical Compendium, edited by Joshua Barnett. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Favorite Quote

“The way out is in.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

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Veruska Cantelli

Biography

Veruska Cantelli received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Before joining the Core Division at Champlain College, she was an Assistant Professor at the Center for Global Communication Strategies at the University of Tokyo. Veruska is a writer, a translator, and a scholar with a focus on Transnational Feminist Studies and Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies. Among her works are the two volumes Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (UpSet Press, 2018) and Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Zubaan Books in 2023). As a Senior Editor for Warscapes Magazine she curated several retrospectives with particular attention to decoloniality, migration, and food and activism. She studied modern and contemporary dance at the Mary Anthony Dance Studio and the Trisha Brown Dance Studio in New York and has performed with the Human Kinetics Movement Arts. She is serious about Lazio, the soccer team that brought football to the city of Rome in 1900.

Publications & Abstracts

BOOKS AND BOOK CHAPTERS
2023 (Forthcoming) Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War. Zubaan Books (Co-editor)

2021 – Lettere Rivoluzionarie. Diane di Prima, Le Lettere, Translator and Editor

2020 – “Resistant Recipes: Food, Gender and Translation in Migrant and Refugee, Narratives” in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism. Eds. Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian, Routledge, (Co-writer)

2018 – Mediterranean, Warscapes and UpSet Press, (Co-editor)

2011 – In Danger, San Francisco: City Lights Books. Ed. Jack Hirschman Translator of literary essays by Pier Paolo Pasolini

ARTICLES
2020 – “The Dance of Bones: Tomioka Taeko’s Stage of Reprobates”Otherness: Essays and Studies, Centre for Studies in Otherness, Aarhus University

2017 – “The Maternal Lineage: Orality and Language in Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Sayings” Journal of International Women’s Studies, Volume 18, Issue 1

2016 – “Student-Centered Teaching: Writing Through Passion” Komaba Journal of English Education, Volume 7, University of Tokyo, co-author

2015 – “The New Paladins of the Humanities: A Warning” Warscapes, June 28th

2015 – “The Bundle on my Back” in Warscapes an in-depth conversation with writer Cristina Ali Farah. January 2015

2013 – Editor and Translator of “Narrating Absences, Narrating History” on the photographs of desaparecidos by Argentinian artist Gustavo Germano, Warscapes, August 2013

2013 – Curator of the Retrospective Food on hierarchy of taste and consumption of “otherness,” Warscapes, June 2013

2013 – Curator of the Retrospective Visas on migration, surveillance and militarization of space, Warscapes, March 2013

2013 – “Eye on Honduras” a conversation with historian Dana Frank on the human rights crisis after the coup, Warscapes, January 2013

2012 – Curator of the Retrospective Uncertain Borders on the work of Gloria Anzaldùa, Warscapes, October 2012.

2012 – “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Poetics of Borders” Warscapes, October 2012 issue

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Weiling Deng

Biography

Dr. Weiling Deng is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Champlain College. She currently serves as the Core Division’s Third Year Faculty Lead and helps develop the new curriculum of Digital Humanities. Weiling received her Ph.D. in Social Sciences and Comparative Education from UCLA. Her research and teaching interests centrally address “a world in flux,” the ever-lasting, AI-infiltrated reality in which education, art, technology, and relationship are embedded. Weiling writes and teaches about Global Asias, Urban Humanities, panoramic and immersive media, generative education, higher education organizational change, gender and feminist studies, technology and race. Drawing from theorists like John Dewey and Paulo Freire, Weiling is dedicated to place-based international education through experiences of immigration, diaspora, border, and urban space.

Weiling is currently working on her first book project, titled Illuminating the Shadows of the Undead: Panoramic Fabulation of Transpacific Chinese Scenes. The book focuses on the speculative cinematic connections between Hollywood and Shanghai, Shenyang, and Beijing by way of Los Angeles’ DIY artist-built folk-art scenes. Built around the immersive art programs of a Los Angeles-based non-profit museum devoted to the illustrious history of proto-cinematic technologies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the book adopts multiple media—including 360-degree panorama, diorama, peepshow, shadow projection performance, crankie, theater, walk-in archival installation, photography, garden, and film—to re-enliven the alien/ated “China” stories on the geographical and cultural edge of Hollywood.

Weiling’s articles have appeared in Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Panoramic and Immersive Media Studies, in South Asian Review, Museological Review, Critical Digital Humanities Cookbook, Los Angeles Review of Books, and academic anthologies including Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice.

Weiling spends a lot of her time reading, writing, and traveling globally. She loves cities with well-curated bookstores and museums, cool architecture and art scenes, expansive public transportation, and grassroots immigrant neighborhoods — in particular Montreal, Dublin, Los Angeles, and Seattle where she continues to build professional connections and engage in community works. As an amateur photographer, she documents the intersection of urban life and urban ruins. She sees ruins — in higher education, industry, and the environment — as generative sites where relations are revolutionized, reimagined, and rebuilt.

Publications & Abstracts

Deng, Weiling. 2025. “Speculative Wuhan Panorama: Scaling Hydro-Urbanism from the Hankou Water Tower.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias, vol. 11, no. 2, special issue The Asian Century: Idea, Method, and Media, edited by Christopher T. Fan, Paul Nadal, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Tina Chen, 43-53.

“A Classroom Camera Obscura.” International Panorama Council Newsletter no. 48. June 2025, pp. 38-41.

Deng, Weiling, Sara Velas, Ruby Carlson, and Jonathan Banfill. 2024 “Relocating Shengjing: Traveling Panorama as Theory.” In Panoramic and Immersive Media Studies Yearbook Vol. 1, edited by Molly Briggs, Thorsten Logge, and Nicholas Lowe. Berlin: De Gruyter, 25-54.

Deng, Weiling, Sara Velas, Ruby Carlson, and Jonathan Banfill. 2024. “The Feral Garden of the More-than-Panorama Museum.” Museological Review, issue 27, Museums as Spaces of Rootedness and Response-ability, 136-155.

Deng, Weiling. 2023. “Death and Life in the Bordersand–Remembering the Chance of Living during Partition through Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand.” South Asian Review, vol. 45, no. 1-2, special issue Partition: 75 Years and Beyond, edited by Debali Mookerjea-Leonard and Nalini Iyer.

“The Chinese Restaurant on Main Street, U.S.A. – Review of From Chinatown to Every Town by Zai Liang.” Los Angeles Review of Books. September 2023.

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing)
• The Intimacies of Four Continents (Lisa Lowe)
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (Saidiya Hartman)

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Erik Esckilsen

Biography

Erik Esckilsen came to Champlain College from the publishing industry, where he worked as a writer and editor. Today he teaches writing-intensive courses in a range of subjects, emphasizing art and digital culture, and remains active as an essayist, fiction writer, journalist, and scholar.

Curriculum Vitae

READ MY CV

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David Gilbert

Biography

David Gilbert has been living in Montreal off and on since 2006. He studied history at Concordia University at the undergraduate and graduate level with a focus on popular music and society. He worked as a vinyl record and music researcher and appraiser for one of the biggest independent record stores in Canada and as a museum curator/exhibitor in Saskatchewan.

David has been writing and recording music since he was fifteen and has toured across Canada and the United States many times. He also writes a music blog and is currently writing a book on the rise of spirituality and vegetarianism in New York punk rock and hip hop in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Aside from music, David is an avid trail and ultrarunner and is a brand ambassador for Inherit the Earth running apparel.

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Jeffrey Haig

Biography

Jeff Haig was born in the United States, but grew up in England. He attended Manchester University and Yale. He worked in radio, advertising, television and movie production before becoming a teacher. He specializes in courses on semiotics, art and censorship.

Curriculum Vitae

READ MY CV

Favorite Quote

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”

—Neil Postman

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Rachel Healy

Biography

Dr. Rachel Healy has a PhD, MA & BA from University College Dublin in Art History, with a focus on sixteenth-century Venetian portraiture. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and a Research Ireland Fellow. Healy was previously awarded the Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship and has lectured in University College Dublin, University College Cork, and the Red Door Gallery.

Distinctions & Awards

Research Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship, Trinity College Dublin; Irish Research Council Scholar Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship; Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Venetian Research Program; Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust Award (2023 & 2020); University College Dublin School of Art History and Cultural Policy Travel Awards for Postgraduate Research; Winner of University College Dublin Visual Your Thesis Competition; University College Dublin School of Art History and Cultural Policy Alumni Research Support Award; University College Dublin College of Arts and Humanities Graduate School Board Travel Grant (2023, 2022, 2021, 2020 & 2019)

Publications & Abstracts

• https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rest.12989

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Amy Howe

Biography

Amy Howe has been an interdisciplinary educator for 20+ years. Her experience includes designing and teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in gender studies, general education, critical theory, American studies, and the study of religion at Harvard, Brown, Middlebury, Smith, and now at Champlain College. Before her graduate studies and teaching career, she held a nonprofit career managing California- and nationally-based youth-led community organizing projects for underrepresented communities. In 2019, she earned her doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in the study of religion (religion, gender, culture). She also serves as the Academic Director of Women, Gender, and Representation for Smith’s summer Precollege Programs.

Over the last five years at Champlain, Amy Howe has taught widely across the Core Division. Her leadership in innovative curricula and classroom design and leadership, student support, and involvement in diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice issues earned her the Francine Page Teaching Excellence in 2021. Centered on experiential learning techniques, she regularly engages students in community partnerships in rural humanities, digital humanities, and racial and gender social justice issues.

Amy Howe not only remains incredibly proud of being the first in her family to pursue higher education, but she is also a relentless advocate for students who navigate first-generation lives. In her free time, Howe loves spending time with her two dogs, growing house plants (too many these days), crafting, exploring new outdoor spaces, and enjoying circus arts.

Favorite Quote

“The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which one is being educated.”

—James Baldwin

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Erik Kaarla

Biography

Erik Kaarla has been a lifelong educator who started from doing professional writing within a nonfiction context in the Boston area to becoming a writing educator with a special emphasis on rhetoric and composition and business communication. Erik has also remained an avid music and tennis educator. He has provided writing and research instruction at a number of New England colleges including the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Pine Manor College, Mass Bay Community College, Burlington College, Saint Michael’s College, Community College of Vermont and here at Champlain College. Erik considers himself to be a constructivist teacher placing a persistent emphasis on the compilation and exploration of new knowledge within the classroom. He is also licensed in English 7-12 in Vermont and in all states that support reciprocity in high school credentialing.

Erik’s research interests include the study of practices and methodologies that lead to success in the writing process. He is also active in applying cutting edge music theory applications within classrooms that involve exploration and movement through music curricula.

Erik is a native Finnish speaker and he has also performed translation work and given language lessons for extensive periods of time. He continues to offer instruction in bass and guitar applications.

Favorite Quote

Wherever you go, there you are.

~ Thomas à Kempis, a precursor appeared in a spiritual work composed by Kempis in the 1400s. This comical saying was circulating by 1955 when it was attributed to Jim Russell within a student publication at Pennsylvania State University in Hazleton, Pennsylvania.

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