Honors College Advisory Committee

The Honors College at CSULA benefits from consultation with and advice from an advisory committee made up of faculty drawn from the colleges and library and key administrators drawn from the university's administrative units.

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Faculty for 2011-2012

	Kevin Baaske— Kevin Baaske earned a Ph.D. at the University of Southern California after receiving his MA and BA from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He has been on the CSULA faculty since 1986. His teaching and research interests lie in Argumentation and Rhetorical Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy. His inquiries specifically focus on how people argue over social issues and political campaigns. He is the former Director of Forensics at CSULA and a former winner of the GE Honors Outstanding Professor Award. Dr. Baaske currently serves as one of two CSULA senators on the statewide academic senate. He was recently elected Secretary of that body. He also serves on, and is the former Chair of, the Chancellor's General Education Advisory Committee.
	Christopher Endy— A professor in CSULA's History Department since 2000, Chris Endy teaches classes on U.S. international relations and on popular culture. He believes that history revolves around interpretation and debate--not memorization--and that the past matters most when it shines light on today's problems. Dr. Endy's research examines globalization and foreign policy. His first book, Cold War Holidays, explored the rise of international tourism after World War II. He is currently at work on a book about multinational corporations. Before moving to Los Angeles, he received his B.A. from Duke University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His non-academic interests include cooking, learning the German language, and downloading music from murky corners of the internet.
Photo Credit: Oscar Castillo	Dionne Espinoza—Dionne Espinoza was born in Los Angeles and raised in the San Gabriel Valley cities of Alhambra and El Monte. She received her B.A. at UC Berkeley and her M.A. and Ph.D. at Cornell University in English. She has been a faculty member at CSULA since 2002. She teaches interdisciplinary courses that center on issues of class, race, gender, sexuality and social justice. Her research is based in the recovery of the voices of women of color in the 60s & 70s as participants in the social movements of that era. She is enthusiastic about training new generations of scholars in oral history methods and archival document analysis. In 2009, she coordinated "Las Grandes de East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights," a pilot oral history project and video anthology through a grant from the California Council for Humanities. In her spare time, she likes to watch 19c costume dramas and to read pop culture tabloid magazines.
	Allison Fuligni—Dr. Fuligni received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan, and Bachelors Degrees in Cognitive Science and Psychology from Brown University. Her research focuses on how children's experiences influence their development, particularly the language, cognitive, and social development of young children with different experiences in child care and preschool, and the effects of family poverty, being a dual language learner, and the influences of various types of parenting. She spent 12 years as a researcher at Columbia University and UCLA before joining the faculty of Cal State LA in 2008. Dr. Fuligni enjoys sharing with students the fascinating ways that children learn and develop, as well as the importance of understanding research methods and how they are used to enhance our knowledge about development.
	Linda Margarita Greenberg—Dr. Greenberg joined the CSULA faculty in 2009 after earning her Ph.D. in English from UCLA; she specializes in U.S. Ethnic Literature and Women's Studies. Passionate about teaching, Dr. Greenberg is dedicated to fostering curious, thoughtful and dynamic student communities that promote intellectual growth inside and outside the classroom. She is also interested in interdisciplinary teaching approaches that enable students to make substantive connections between the literature they read and the historical, social, economic, and cultural context of that literature. Drawing from the teacher-scholar model, Dr. Greenberg's teaching and research interests complement and reinforce each other: she is currently working on a book-in-progress that examines the connection between literary genres, violence and justice in Chicana and Asian American Women's Literature; she is also beginning a second book project on the Chicana author, Helena María Viramontes. In the future, Dr. Greenberg would like to undertake a historical account of racial and gendered narratives about undocumented immigrants to the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present, examining how those narratives complicate the contours of citizen and nation.
	Catherine Haras—Catherine Haras has been a member of the University Library faculty since 2005. She received her BS from Boston University and an MLIS from the Information School at the University of Washington. As a research librarian she is preoccupied with the following questions: How do we identify and understand information needs? How do people learn using technology? What are the social, cultural, and political aspects of information technology? What does it mean to be information literate? She has taught courses for the Honors College, the University Library, and the College of Engineering, Computer Science and Technology. She also works with faculty across campus building information literacy into their courses and programs and teaches search for the departments of Political Science, Anthropology, and the Charter College of Education's EdD program. Professor Haras also mentors 12 undergraduate and graduate student assistants who are trained as peer tutors for the library. She has published on information literacy, including information education policy; and human information behavior, including the information seeking of undergraduates.
	Steve La Dochy—
	William M. London— Dr. London is a professor in the Department of Public Health and a specialist in the study of health-related superstition, pseudoscience, sensationalism, schemes, scams, frauds, deception, and misperception. He is also associate editor of the free weekly e-newsletter Consumer Health Digest, co-author of the college textbook Consumer Health: A Guide to Intelligent Decisions, co-host of the Credential Watch Web site, a founding fellow of the Institute for Science in Medicine, an advisor to Quackwatch.org, and a consultant to the Committee on Skeptical Inquiry. He enjoys helping students to conduct investigations about the validity of different types of information offered to consumers in the health marketplace.
	David Olsen—David S. Olsen received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University, his MA from University of Virginia and has been a faculty member at CSULA since 1993. He teaches courses in Rhetorical Theory and Criticism, Public Address and Performance Studies. He has published work on the 1988-1992 controversy over the National Endowment for the Arts, religion in the classroom, performance in the classroom, and "nuclear education," and has co-edited special editions of the Journal of Film and Video and the American Communication Journal. He has received an innovative instruction award, and has twice received the GE Honors Outstanding Professor Award. Since 1993, Dr. Olsen has mentored over fifty students to present their written work at local, regional, national and international conferences. He believes every Honors student is a scholar, with the potential to contribute greatly to the academic conversation.
	Veena Prabhu—Dr. Veena P. Prabhu is an Assistant Professor at the California State University, Los Angeles. Her academic career spans a wide spectrum of scholarships, beginning with undergraduate degrees in chemistry (B.Sc.) and law (L.L.B.), an MBA in marketing, M.S. in human resource management (HRM), and a PhD. in organizational change and human resource management (HRM). She currently teaches general management, HRM, and organizational behavior. Her research interests include change management, creativity, entrepreneurship, international HRM and executive leadership and management. She has published in the areas of creativity, entrepreneurship and management, and has presented her work at several national and international conferences. Dr. Prabhu mentors both graduate and undergraduate students to conduct research and present their work in the form of thesis and/or at various academic conferences.
	Bidhan Roy— Dr. Bidhan Roy is an Associate Professor in the English Department at CSULA. He teaches classes in twentieth century British and Anglophone literature and postcolonial theory. Born in England, Dr. Roy received his PhD from the University of London where his research analyzed the contemporary South Asian diasporic novel in light of recent theories of globalization. He has published widely in his field, including articles and book chapters on Hanif Kureishi, Muslim identity and literature, Buddhism and the novel, Christopher Isherwood, literary representations of South Asian ethnicity and the travel writing of V.S. Naipaul. He is currently working on a book examining the relationships between globalization and the contemporary Anglophone novel and looks forward to sharing the global outlook of his research with honors college students.
	Mike Shim—Mike Shim received his BA in philosophy from Vassar College and MA and PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He specializes in 20th century Continental Philosophy, with an emphasis on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl; he also has research interests in the history of early modern philosophy, especially in the works of Leibniz and Kant. He has published numerous articles in these areas. His extra-professional interests include films, walking, and eating.
	Mark Wild—Mark Wild was hired as a specialist on the history of Los Angeles (even though he's from San Francisco) at CSULA ten years ago. Since then he's taught classes on a lot of other subjects, but he especially likes to study the economic, religious, and urban histories of the modern United States. In his honors courses he looks forward to exploring with his students the unexpected connections among disparate elements of the urban experience, in how, for instance, a map might tell you something about the poem you just read, and how that poem might help you design a planning document for a local community. His first book, Street Meeting, explores relationships among different ethnic communities in early twentieth century L.A. These days he's working on a new project examining efforts by Protestant missionaries to create more "city-friendly" churches after World War II.