News

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y., May 20, 2010 — This morning, the Wagner College Board of Trustees approved a roster of faculty members submitted for tenure and promotion. Congratulations to the following faculty members:

• Erica Johnson, tenure and promotion to associate professor
• Wendy deProphetis Driscoll, tenure and promotion to associate professor
• Janice Buddensick, promotion to associate professor
• Jennifer Lauria, promotion to associate professor
• Bill Murphy, promotion to professor

Associate Professor ERICA JOHNSON (English)
Education: B.A., Carleton College; M.A., University of Washington; Ph.D., University of California, Davis

Academic interests: post-colonial literature and theory, transnational modernism, Caribbean literature, comparative literature

Courses taught: Modernism, Post-Colonial Literature, World Literature, Literary Migrations

Service: director of the Honors Program, adviser to the Honors Living and Learning Residential Community, adviser to the student book club, adviser to a student theater club, member of the Teaching Matters Learning Community, and Rhodes Scholars coordinator

Distinctions: 2009 Outstanding Teacher Award

Book publications:

• “Caribbean Ghostwriting” (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009) addresses a question central to the fields of postcolonial, feminist, and African diasporic studies: How are we to know the colonial past when the lives of colonized and enslaved people were largely written out of history? Caribbean authors Michelle Cliff, Maryse Conde and Dionne Brand address the silences and gaps of historiography by fleshing out overlooked historical figures in literary form. These authors do not simply reconstruct lost lives; they foreground the tension between the real, material traces of people’s lives and the fact of their erasure. In novels that are at once historical, biographical and artistic, they portray real but sparsely documented — and therefore haunting — histories through a strategy identifiable as “ghostwriting.” Erica Johnson defines ghostwriting as an important genre of Caribbean literature through which authors literally ghostwrite stories for lost historical figures even while they poetically preserve the unspeakable nature of the archival lacunae their novels engage.
• “Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell'Oro” (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003) is a comparative study of the highly problematic concept of “home” in works by authors born and raised in colonial contexts and repatriated as young adults to European “homelands” which they had never before seen. They write at an angle to nationalist or imperialist constructions of home and create “terragraphica,” or a place from which to write.

Associate Professor WENDY dePROPHETIS DRISCOLL (Chemistry)
Education: B.A., University of Pennsylvania; Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison

Classes: Organic Chemistry, General Chemistry, Senior Reflective Tutorial

Research: develop educational materials to introduce nanotechnology to the public; develop an organic synthesis of a cyclacene (a piece of a carbon nanotube)

Service: co-chair of Pre-Health Advisory Program

Distinctions: 2007 Outstanding Scholar Award

Associate Professor JANICE BUDDENSICK (Business Administration)
Education: B.B.A., Pace University; M.B.A., Pace University; C.P.A.

Academic interests: Financial Accounting, Managerial Accounting, Financial Management, Business History

Service: director of undergraduate business studies

Publications

• Buddensick, Janice, and Mary Lo Re. “A Civic Engagement Model for Business Disciplines.” Dublin, Ireland: Campus Engage International Conference Book of Abstracts, pages 93-94. (Abstract) (June 2009)
• Buddensick, Janice, and Mary Lo Re. “Measuring the Effect of Service Learning on Civic Awareness.” The Review of Business Research (EBSCO Publishing & Gale Group/Thompson Publishing)

Associate Professor JENNIFER LAURIA (Education)
Highest degree: Ed.D.

Specialties: childhood education; teaching and learning styles theory and practice; educational technology; individualized instruction

Research areas: childhood education, teaching and learning styles theory and practice, educational technology, differentiated instruction

Service: Academic Policy Committee; Technology Advisory Council; Department of Education undergraduate program coordinator; faculty adviser, Kappa Delta Pi International Honor Society in Education; faculty adviser, Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development; Editorial Review Board, Excelsior: Leadership in Teaching and Learning; trustee, Staten Island Children's Museum; trustee, Snug Harbor Cultural Center

Distinctions: Kappa Delta Pi International Honor Society in Education, Pi Gamma chapter; 2006 Outstanding Teacher Award; 2009 Outstanding Service Award

Publications:

• Lauria, J. (In press). Empowering middle school students to teach themselves through differentiation based on individualized homework prescriptions. Kappa Delta Pi Record.
• Minotti, Jennifer Lauria (March 2005). Individualizing instruction through the use of learning-style based homework prescriptions. National Association of Secondary School Principals Bulletin, 89 (643), 67-89.

Education: Murphy studied art at Brooklyn College, the School of Visual Arts (where he earned his BFA) and the Art Students League — “though my real education was to occur later in the watermark course, ‘Survival in a Ruthless World: How to Handle Success and Failure as an Artist and a Person,’ taught on the streets and in the exhibition halls of New York,” he wrote in his 2003 book, “Nothing But a Burning Light.” In 1994, he earned his MFA from Vermont College.

Service: chairman, Art Department; Wagner College Gallery director; portraits of Wagner historical figures and trustees

Distinctions: 2008 Outstanding Scholar Award; named “Staten Island’s Best Visual Artist” in the 2007 Staten Island Advance reader’s poll; first place in the American Artist magazine’s 2007 printmaking competition for his etching, “Eulogy for Kreischerville.”