Faculty In Orvieto

Matthew Doll (MFA Cranbrook Academy) is a painter and graphic designer, and the newly appointed administrator of the Orvieto Semester program, following six years in Jerusalem, Israel, where he taught drawing at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Matthew is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied on RISD's European Honors Program in Rome. He studied in Jerusalem on a Fulbright Fellowship, and subsequently earned an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. He taught drawing, painting and design at Gordon College in 2001-2002, and drawing at Orvieto in Fall 2007. During his years in Jerusalem, he worked as a graphic designer for many of the international organizations and ministries that serve the diverse population of Israel and the West Bank. His current position in Orvieto allows him to reconnect the points of contact between Jerusalem and Rome, themes which echo in the pursuits of his studio practice.

Andrea K. Frankwitz is chair of the English department at Gordon College. She earned her BA from Evangel College, her MA from the University of Northern Iowa, and her PhD from Oklahoma State University. Her principal area of teaching is in American literature, with special interest in nineteenth-century American slave narratives and Christological imagery in American poetry, and in the strong pull of Italy felt by so many American and British literary figures especially in the 19th Century. She has led a number of groups of students (and friends) on cultural tours of Europe.

Bruce Herman is a painter living and working in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He completed both undergraduate and graduate fine arts degrees at Boston University School for the Arts, studying under Philip Guston, James Weeks, David Aronson, Reed Kay, and Arthur Polonsky.  Having served for many years as the chair of the Art department at Gordon College, Herman is currently Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts. Herman lectures widely and has had work published in many books, journals, and popular magazines. His artwork has been exhibited in over 100 exhibitions in eleven major cities and five countries, including Boston, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles; England, Italy, Canada, and Israel. His work is housed in many public and private collections including the Vatican Museum of Modern Religious Art in Rome; the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts; and the Armand Hammer Grunewald Print Collection at Los Angeles County Museum. Two large Marian-themed triptychs, product of several years’ work, were installed in June 2009 in the chapel of monastery San Paolo in Orvieto, the seat of the Gordon-in-Orvieto program.  For more information visit his web site: http://bruceherman.com/

Jennifer L. Hevelone-Harper is chair of the History department at Gordon College. She completed her BA at Gordon, an MA at the University of Chicago, and an MA and PhD at Princeton University. Her research explores Christian spirituality in the Mediterranean and Middle East during late antiquity. She is passionate about introducing students to early and medieval Christianity and challenging them to ask critical questions about the connections between faith and culture. Many of her classes incorporate an art historical approach and sometimes require students to pick up a paintbrush or sketchbook. She was a Center for Christian Studies Fellow from 2003-2005 and currently serves on the board of the Conference on Faith and History, a professional organization for Christian historians, and the advisory board for the magazine, Christian History and Biography. The author of Disciples of the Desert: Monks, Laity, and Spiritual Authority in Sixth-Century Gaza (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), she is currently writing a book for a popular lay audience on the development of Christian doctrine and the spirituality of medieval Christians.

Julia Spicher Kasdorf was born in Lewistown, Pennsylvania, in 1962 and educated at Goshen College and New York University. She directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at Penn State University, where she came after teaching at Messiah College, the University of Pittsburgh, and New York University. Kasdorf's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Poetry, as well as numerous anthologies, including the 2003 Pushcart collection. Her books of poetry include Eve's Striptease (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998) and Sleeping Preacher (1992), which received the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Award for New Writing in 1993. She is also the author of the biography Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American (2003) and The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, 1991-1999 (2001), which won the Book of the Year Award from the Modern Language Association's Conference on Christianity and Literature. With Michael Tyrell, she edited the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (2007).  She is the poetry editor of the journal Christianity and Literature.

Paul Mariani was born in New York City in 1940 and earned his bachelor's degree from Manhattan College, a Master's from Colgate University, and a Ph.D. from the City University of New York. He is the author of six poetry collections: Deaths & Transfigurations (Paraclete Press, 2005), The Great Wheel (W. W. Norton, 1996), Salvage Operations: New & Selected Poems (1990), Prime Mover (1985), Crossing Cocytus (1982), and Timing Devices (1979).

He has published numerous books of prose, including Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius (Viking, 2002), and God and the Imagination: On Poets, Poetry, and the Ineffable (University of Georgia Press, 2002), Signatures of Grace: Catholic Writers on the Sacraments (Dutton), as well as five biographies: The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane (W. W. Norton, 1999); Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (1994), both named New York Times Notable Books of the year; Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (1990); William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (1981), which won the New Jersey Writers Award, was short-listed for an American Book Award, and was also named a New York Times Notable Book of the year; and, most recently, a biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Viking, 2008).
 
Mariani’s honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was Distinguished University Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught from 1968 until 2000, and currently holds a Chair in Poetry at Boston College. Mariani and his wife, Eileen, have three grown sons and live in western Massachusetts.

Marie-Dominique Miserez was born in 1969 in Saignelégier, Switzerland, and educated in the visual arts at the Collège de Saussure, Geneva and the Fine Art School of Geneva. She has done specialized study in medieval illumination, fresco painting and restoration, and Byzantine iconography. For ten years from 1990-2000 she lived in the Dominican community at the monastery of Notre Dame of Escayrac, France. Her spiritual discipline as a pilgrim has inspired many pilgrimages on foot, including ones from Switzerland the whole way to Jerusalem (2007), from Florence to Assisi and onto Rome (2005), from Switzerland to Chartres and to Le Puy en Velays, France (2004, 2003), and from Switzerland to Santiago de Compostella in northwestern Spain (1990). Her paintings have been commissioned by and exhibited in churches throughout Switzerland, including the basilica of Notre Dame in Geneva. Her work has been used for a number of liturgical calendars as well as in “Joy, Passion, Glory,” three booklets published in collaboration with the Dominican sisters of Estavayer le Lac. 

Michelle Arnold Paine is a painter living in Massachusetts and Adjunct Lecturer in Painting and Drawing at Chester College of New England. She received a MFA degree in Painting at University of New Hampshire and a BA from Gordon College in Art and English.  Her work is heavily influenced by the several years she spent living and working in Orvieto, first as a student on the inaugural Orvieto semester in 1998 and later as the resident assistant and program coordinator from 2001-03. She is only the second program alumnus to be invited to return as a teacher. Her artwork can be viewed at http://www.michellepaine.com

Peggy (Margaret) Adams Parker is a printmaker and sculptor whose work often deals with religious and social justice themes.  Parker created 20 woodcuts for Ellen Davis’ new translation, Who Are You, My Daughter? Reading Ruth through Image and Text (Westminster John Knox, 2003.) Her woodcut, African Exodus, appears as the frontispiece to Refugee Children, published by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. WOMEN, her suite of 15 woodcuts depicting women’s beauty and strength, is in the collection of the Library of Congress. Her sculpture, Reconciliation, on the parable of the prodigal son, was commissioned by Duke Divinity School, and her sculpture of Mary is installed at Washington National Cathedral’s Cathedral College and at churches across the country. She is completing a commission for St. Agnes Catholic Church, Shepherdstown, WV: life-sized figures representing the Communion of Saints which will be etched onto a 30 ft-wide wall of glass panels. She is also working on illustrations for Augsburg Fortress Press’s lectionary-based art library. She contributed essays to two recently published books, Scrolls of Love – Ruth and the Song of Songs (Fordham University Press) and Heaven (Seabury Press). And she has written a catalogue essay for Visual Exegesis (Religious Art by African American Artists), exhibited as part of Yale Divinity School’s interdisciplinary conference: Middle Passage Conversations - on Black Religion in the African Diaspora. Parker has taught on the adjunct faculty at Virginia Theological Seminary since 1992 and she teaches, writes, and lectures widely on the role of the visual arts in the church. For more information visit her web site: www.margaretadamsparker.com

John Skillen (Ph.D., Duke University) was the medieval and Renaissance specialist in the English department of Gordon College before being appointed the Program Director of the Orvieto Semester program and its related Studio for Art, Faith & History. He has served as chairman for both the English and Communication & Theatre Arts Departments, and is a veteran leader of summer seminars in Italy and the British Isles, and a number of study-tours and retreats in Italy. With his colleagues in the Art department, Dr. Skillen initiated the Orvieto Semester program in 1998. Professor Skillen's interests are broadly in the arts and cultural history, and – as the program vision indicates – he is interested in the renewed relevance of moments in early European culture for the conditions of our present "post-culture." He is editor of the Studio’s e-journal Palimpsest, and has recently translated a guide to the Last Judgment fresco cycle of the San Brizio Chapel, underlining the theological teaching that informs this masterwork of Luca Signorelli.

Liesl Smith (Ph.D. Medieval Studies, University of Toronto) is Assistant Director of Global Education at Gordon College and teaches in Gordon's history department. Having taught in both Nanchang, China and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, she believes firmly in getting students out of North America and works zealously to depopulate the Gordon campus by sending students abroad. Her scholarly research and publications focus upon Anglo-Saxon and Latin hagiography. Her poetry has been published in Canadian and British journals. She is currently working on a series of books for young adults set in the Middle Ages.