The College of Arts & Letters is pleased to recognize the faculty members who recently were promoted to full professor, associate professor, or associate professor-fixed term.

Full Professor Promotions:

• Robyn Bluhm
• Teresa Dunn
• Emery Petchauer
• Robin Silbergleid

Associate Professor Promotions:

• Karthik Durvasula
• Juliet Guzzetta
• Emily Katz

Associate Professor-Fixed Term Promotions:

• Shannon Donnally Quinn
• John Grey
• Rebecca Schuiling

FULL PROFESSOR

Robyn Bluhm

Robyn Bluhm is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy with a partial appointment in Lyman Briggs College. Her research focus is the philosophy of medicine and neuroscience, with a particular emphasis on psychiatry.

As an applied bioethicist, Bluhm has focused on three primary research areas with clinical applications and has published in top journals on neuroscience in psychiatric research and practice, sex differences research in neuroscience, and neuroethics. She has made significant interventions through intellectual leadership in the field of neuroimaging by calling attention to the influence of gender stereotypes and neurosexism in studies that applied new technologies to old questions of sex differences.

Bluhm regularly publishes collaboratively and has co-edited two collections: Knowing and Acting in Medicine (2017) and The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Psychiatry (2019) as well as actively publishing pieces that are accessible to the broader public.

Bluhm served as co-PI with a colleague on a $1.4 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health/BRAIN Initiative, titled Is the treatment perceived to be worse than the disease: Ethical concerns and attitudes toward psychiatric electroceutical interventions. In Spring 2019, she received a prestigious Senior Visiting Fellowship with the Center for Mind, Brain, and Cognitive Evolution at Ruhr Universität in Bochum, Germany.

Bluhm is a recognized mentor and steward of her department and to her broader profession. She has contributed to significant innovation to the undergraduate curriculum in Bioethics and is a recognized exemplary teacher in both colleges. Further, she has mentored multiple early career scholars through the NeuroGenderings Network. Equally significant is her service to the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry where she has served on the Executive Council for more than 10 years and is currently Vice President/President-Elect. She also co-edits the International Journal for Feminist Approaches to Bioethics.

Teresa Dunn

Teresa Dunn is a Professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design where she specializes in the areas of figure painting, portraits, and multifigure compositions that allude to European traditions and are very contemporary in their discourse, often drawing on her Mexican-American heritage.

She explores the tensions in gender, identity, and motherhood foregrounding aspects of race, culture, and belonging in everyday experience. These are exemplified in, for example, her use of the Tondo form, a circular work of art in painting or sculpture, and in the series “Suspended Between the American Dream and American Reality” which foregrounds race.

Her work has an unusual impact, having been displayed in 12 solo exhibitions as well as 30 group exhibitions in regional, national, and international venues. It has appeared regularly in a well-known artist-run gallery in New York City and has been reviewed by highly respected art magazines such as Art New England. 

Dunn’s significant intellectual leadership includes regular mentorship and teaching commitments of both undergraduate and graduate courses in Studio Art. These include successive levels of courses in painting and drawing as well as study abroad courses to Italy. Students praise her student-centered pedagogical practices that build a foundation of mutual trust, which enables greater creativity and development of personal vision and understanding of links across form, media, and content. 

Committed to stewardship in her department and in the surrounding arts community, Dunn regularly serves on jury panels for various regional events, including in the City of East Lansing. She also has given several public workshops and has served on panels in K-12 education. 

Emery Petchauer

Emery Petchauer is a Professor in the Department of English and holds a partial appointment in the Department of Teacher Education in the College of Education and has served as the Coordinator of the English Teacher Education Program since 2016.

Petchauer is a self-described “engaged scholar-artist” who seeks to “wrap teaching and scholarship around the priorities of schools and communities.” He also is an artist whose early scholarly work focused on the tradition of Black/hip hop sound curation and hip-hop aesthetics in education. A strong advocate of collaboration, he writes that he “curates connections among scholars, educators, youth, and artists” to be “smarter and bolder together.”  

Petchauer’s intellectual leadership is demonstrated through both his public and traditional scholarship, particularly on teacher identity and racial equity in teacher education and licensure, which is the topic of his most recent monograph, Navigating Teacher Licensure Exams: Success and Self-Discovery on the High-Stakes Path to the Classroom (Routledge, 2019). 

His co-edited collection Teacher education across minority serving institutions (Rutgers UP, 2017) won the 2018 Exemplary Research in Teaching and Teacher Education Award from the American Educational Research Association’s Division K (Teaching and Teacher Education). He also shares knowledge regularly in both peer-reviewed academic and public venues.

Petchauer’s body of work was recognized by the 2018 Innovation in Research on Equity and Social Justice in Teacher Education Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Division K (Teaching and Teacher Education). In 2021, he was awarded a grant from the Spencer Foundation with Co-PI and African American and African Studies Department Chair Ruth Nicole Brown for the project: Forms of Freedom: The Art and Design of Black and Indigenous Creative Public Pedagogies. 

He is a devoted teacher-scholar who focuses on creating opportunities for his students to learn how to design “anti-oppressive learning environments to help bring about a more equitable world.” A committed steward of his profession, he was recognized with the 2018 Outstanding Service Award by the journal Urban Education. 

Robin Silbergleid

Robin Silbergleid is a Professor in the Department of English and has served in an administrative capacity as the Director of the Department’s Creative Writing Program. Her field is motherhood studies, 20th-century and contemporary American literature, and creative writing, specifically poetry and creative non-fiction with the self-described premise: “academic knowledge production is inseparable from the personal and underwritten by domestic labor.”

In her works, Silbergleid explores topics of gender and reproductive labor, the female body, its vulnerability, and place, while centering care-work, mothering, infertility, and domesticity topics. She has established herself as an intellectual leader in her field through the unusual combination of both creative and scholarly publications. These include the co-edited collection Reading and Writing Experimental Texts: Critical Innovations (Palgrave 2017), the memoir Texas Girl: A Memoir (Demeter Press 2014) on single motherhood, and the collection The Baby Book: Poems (CavanKerry Press 2015).

In addition, she has published in multiple genres including a number of other poems and creative works, two limited-edition chapbooks, two book chapters, and four peer-reviewed essays on female experimental writers. Her reach as public intellectual is also strong through magazine publications and pieces in some of the best prose and poetry journal venues including Spoon River Poetry Review, Entropy, Rattle and Crab Orchard Review. Her innovative public initiative embodied in “The Art of Infertility” project includes community blogs, pop-up art exhibits on campus, in libraries, at academic conferences, and writing and art workshops. She describes it as “an art, oral history, and portraiture project devoted to infertility education and advocacy.” 

Praised highly by both students and colleagues, Silbergleid is a highly self-reflective professor whose innovative pedagogy is constantly evolving and is centered on a workshop approach. She characterizes her pedagogy to be rooted in student “critical and creative practices” that are “fundamentally linked forms of knowledge production and vital to informed citizenship.” 

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

Karthik Durvasula

Karthik Durvasula is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures (LiLaC). He is a highly productive and successful intellectual leader in the study of phonetics and laboratory phonology, specifically in the subareas of speech perception of non-native consonant sequences (including the neurophysical applications) and speech production and is one of the leading scholars in the country working in this area.

He has published 10 co-authored, peer-reviewed articles in top-ranked journals, as well as four in peer-reviewed conference proceedings. He also is a speaker in high demand. Following a collaborative work ethic that simultaneously shares knowledge, expands opportunities, and offers mentorship, he regularly co-publishes together with his graduate students and colleagues.

Durvasula is the coordinator of the Linguistics Program in LiLaC, directs the Phonetics Lab, and is co-director of the Phonology and Phonetics Group at MSU along with colleague Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures Chair Yen-Hwei Lin. 

Durvasula’s work explores multiple languages including Arabic, Icelandic, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, and U.S. English, among others. One of his most influential collaborative articles, Probing Syllable Structure Through Acoustic Methods: Case-studies on American English and Jazani Arabic (Phonology 2021), provides a comparison of word-initial consonant sequences in U.S. English and Jazani Arabic (Saudia Arabia). He also employs a variety of experimental techniques and does interdisciplinary research as evidenced in the co-authored article Neurobiological evidence for voicing under-specification in English that brings Linguistics together with Neuroscience. 

Respected by students and colleagues alike, Durvasula teaches in the Linguistics undergraduate and graduate degree programs and carries a heavy mentoring/advising load. He has contributed significantly to the Linguistics program curriculum through the addition of courses in qualitative data analysis, graduate phonetics, and undergraduate lab phonetics. He also remains committed to stewardship both in his department and in the broader profession. His Bias in Linguistics project tracks inequities in gender representation in linguistics departments, publications, and conferences. 

Juliet Guzzetta

Juliet Guzzetta is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, where she is the primary faculty member in Contemporary Theatre Studies with specialties in Performance Studies and Theatre History, Women and Gender Studies, Italian Studies, and Creative Writing.  She also teaches courses in Italian Language, Literature, and Culture for the Department of Romance and Classical Studies (RCS) where she holds a 25% appointment. Her courses also contribute to the Women and Gender Studies offerings. 

Her outstanding research portfolio focuses on contemporary, cutting-edge voices in the theatre at the center and periphery as well as feminist voices. In addition to a number of articles and book chapters, she has published The Theater of Narration: From the Peripheries of History to the Main Stages of Italy (2021). In the book, she explores the relationship between art and its notion of the public, examining how theatre (re)presents history to its audience while employing a feminist and historiographical approach. A translation of the book into Italian is forthcoming with Accademia University Press in Turin, Italy. It also received an honorable mention for the 2021 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association.

Guzzetta is already working on her next book project with the tentative title Franca Rame and the Labor of Female Creativity. This is an examination of the additional labor frequently involved by women in intellectual and artistic pursuits.  

Guzzetta has contributed a significant and diverse array of interdisciplinary undergraduate courses to her department, RCS, and also has sought out general education IAH (Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities) courses. She is considered to be among the department’s strongest teachers. Her innovative pedagogy has included the invitation of a contemporary Detroit playwright and subsequent linked events as well as her effective use of the workshop format in her playwriting course. She also is a dedicated steward of her departments and profession. 

Emily Katz

Emily Katz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy where she is the department’s primary faculty member in Ancient Greek Philosophy, a position that brings to life the literature, arts, history, and philosophy of the Classical world for students so they understand the substantial influence these traditions have had on thought and practices in the tradition of Western thinking.

Her research interests include ancient Greek philosophy and mathematics, particularly Aristotle’s metaphysics, epistemology, natural science, and philosophy of mathematics. She also is proficient in Ancient Greek. As an intellectual leader in her field, Katz has published one co-authored peer-reviewed article and seven single-authored articles in top journals.

Prior to coming to MSU, she received the American Philosophical Association’s Routledge, Taylor, and Francis Prize for best article by an adjunct professor for her publication Aristotle’s Critique of Platonist Mathematical Objects: Two Test Cases from Metaphysics M.2 (2013). 

Her scholarship focuses primarily on Aristotle and his Metaphysics Books M and N, which are less studied and have been deemed obscure by many scholars in the field. In particular, she is reinterpreting Aristotle’s writing on mathematics and calling for a reassessment of M and N to shed light more broadly on Aristotle’s philosophies from a mathematical perspective. It is her hope that her work will be useful to contemporary philosophers of mathematics. She is well on her way to achieving this milestone.  

Thought of highly by her colleagues and students alike, Katz contributes significantly in diverse ways to the undergraduate and graduate instruction in the department as well as general education IAH (Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities) course offerings. These include courses in Ancient Greek Philosophy, on Plato and Aristotle, as well as the history of philosophy and a graduate pedagogy course. A dedicated mentor and steward of her department and profession, she works hard to help the department to recruit, retain, and place high-quality first-generation graduate students.  

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR-FIXED TERM

Shannon Donnally Quinn

Shannon Donnally Quinn is an Associate Professor-Fixed Term in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures and is a key faculty member in the department’s Russian Studies program.

In the area of curriculum development, she is widely known as a national leader in the integration of technology into the second language classroom. She has undertaken countless curriculum development projects with multiple collaborators. For example, she developed all the online and hybrid course materials that have transformed the Russian Studies program and have developed modules that have been adapted by other language program colleagues. Of particular note are the study abroad materials, “Real life Russia,” that prepare students for their study abroad experience and reduce culture shock. For this work, she received MSU’s 2016 AT&T Award in Instructional Technology, Best Course in Technology-Enhanced Learning Innovation.

Her curriculum development work has extended to the role of lead designer on two large grant-funded projects for the Middlebury College Kathryn Wasserman Davis School of Russian. This has led to web-based materials that are now used by a number of Russian programs in the country. Further, Quinn was a major contributor to the Russian Advanced Interactive Listening Series (RAILS) while a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin and with the University of Arizona’s Title VI Language Center (the LLC Commons), which was one of the first major large-scale online resources for teachers and students of Russian.

In 2008, Quinn won the AATSEEL (American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages) Book Prize for Best Contribution to Language Pedagogy for the RAILS project. She also received the OER Leadership Award from the Associated Students of Michigan State University and, most significantly, the President’s Award from the International Association for Language Learning Technology (IALLT) in recognition of her years of important service to that organization.  

Quinn also has an extensive record of publications as well as mentorship and stewardship. She embodies collaboration in everything she does. She recently co-edited a special issue, entitled COVID-19 and Online Teaching Pedagogy in the Times of a Global Crisis: Research, Practices, and Solutions, that is forthcoming in the Russian Language Journal. Perhaps most impressive is her current position as editor-in-chief of IALLT’s online Foreign Language Teaching Magazine (FLTMAG) to which she has also contributed numerous essays. She is an intellectual leader nationally having held multiple positions in professional organizations, including President/Past President of the MidWest Association for Language Learning Technology (MWALLT) and Secretary for its national organization (IALLT). 

John Grey

John Grey is an Academic Specialist with Continuing Status in the Department of Philosophy. His expertise lies in the areas of metaphysics and epistemology and the history of philosophy. He is a teacher-scholar who, in his own words, wishes to “spark” the “intellectual curiosity” of his students and to help them to “recognize that deep philosophical waters lie beneath the calm surface of our most ordinary assumptions about ourselves and the world.”

He regularly teaches a broad diversity of classes, including a non-major course, a popular gateway course to the major and a popular senior-level course. These include an Introduction to Logic, Paradoxes, Modern Philosophy, and Metaphysics among others.

Well thought of by his students and his colleagues, Grey’s talents lie in a keen ability to design courses that integrate close readings of primary texts and relate them to a broader worldview. In addition, he has worked to diversify the content of his classes, revising the readings, for instance, in his Modern Philosophy course to include multiple female authors as well as an early African philosopher. 

Beyond the classroom, Grey is an active scholar as well and has contributed in significant ways to current debates on Spinoza and Descartes. He has published a substantial amount in this area, including four book chapters and six peer-reviewed articles since 2013 with two more forthcoming. He also has given a number of invited talks in prestigious venues and multiple conference presentations.

His scholarship has focused on neglected women philosophers with a book chapter on the work of Anne Conway (1631-1979). He also has co-authored an article on modern philosophical dietetics. In addition, his forthcoming article, The Metaphysics of Natural Right in Spinoza, in the journal Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy was awarded the 2018 Sanders Prize in Early Modern Philosophy. In connection with his inclusive course content above, he is co-authoring a related book, entitled Early Modern Philosophy: An Inclusive Approach, with Readings, that is under contract with Bloomsbury Press. He also remains active in service to the broader profession and until recently convened the MSU Faculty Metaphysics Reading Group. 

Rebecca Schuiling 

Rebecca Schuiling is an Academic Specialist with Continuing Status in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design. Her expertise is in the area of textile design. She is a long-serving, highly valued intellectual leader in the department. Since 2020, she has served as the Undergraduate Degree Program Coordinator for Apparel and Textile Design (ATD). 

Schuiling is a teacher-scholar who writes that she “seeks to provide insight and understanding into dress, often knitwear, through the lens of popular culture, matriculture, and the makers at the intersection of art and craft, by examining the complex and complicated roles of dress within fashion, art, and society.”

She describes her inclusive ways of sharing knowledge as “grounded in fostering curiosity and resilience, respecting multiple modes of learning, and recognizing and validating each individual’s experience.” This approach is particularly important in ATD given the diversity of the students it serves.

Her teaching and course development have included a wide range of undergraduate courses with some graduate committee service as well. She routinely teaches courses such as Explorations in Apparel and Textile Design (ATD 121), Knitwear Design (ATD 427), and Design Studio (ATD 428), among others. She is highly valued as a dedicated instructor by both colleagues and students, having mentored a number of undergraduate honors projects and served on graduate committees. That she is a successful mentor is also exemplified in the fact that 14 award-winning designs have been created by students in her courses since 2011. She also serves regularly as a faculty mentor for student exhibitions, fashion shows, networking events, and fashion competitions. 

Beyond teaching, Schuiling’s most impactful ways of expanding the opportunities of her students include the launching in 2017 of the IMG Fashion Design Competition which allows students from MSU to attend fashion industry events during New York Fashion Week. In 2019, she co-organized the study away program to New York City that not only introduces students to the fashion industry with networking opportunities but also gives them a chance to explore the city.

During the initial COVID months, she helped to spearhead mask-making efforts at the university and created a “how-to” video on cloth mask-making near the start of the pandemic. Schuiling also contributes as a scholar. In addition to a co-authored book chapter, one of her peer-reviewed articles discusses fashion during the pandemic quarantine, while another under review focuses on the importance of knitwear to David Bowie’s stage persona.