William Ganis is a classic liberal arts professor, for whom teaching, research and scholarship are intertwined and inseparable. Motivated by a sincere belief in the importance of mentoring young scholars, Ganis is a dynamic force in the renaissance of the art history program at Wells. 

Professor Ganis left a tenure-track position in the Fine Arts Department at the New York Institute of Technology to become assistant professor of art history at Wells in 2006. Why leave an institution that is near the cutting edge of contemporary art, in a city filled with some of the world’s best museums?  

“I like that the decisions about what gets taught at Wells aren’t based solely on a business model. What pulled me was seeing more freedom, more attention to the quality of education. There are different priorities here,” Ganis says. That, and a number of outstanding cultural resources, such as the Corning Museum of Glass and the Johnson Museum at Cornell University, made the move an easy one.

He was particularly pleased to come to Wells because of the opportunity to work closely with students in a setting that allows for contemplation and exploration. “I like that the students want to interact — they actually resist being lectured to. Sometimes it’s appropriate to lecture, but students would much rather talk, give voice to their own opinions. In some ways, especially in junior and senior classes, we’re providing a model that’s very much like graduate school,” he says.

Ganis is a prolific author with far-reaching interests that are often unified by an investigation of how technology and commerce influence ideas about art. His first book, Andy Warhol’s Serial Photography (Cambridge University Press, 2004), investigated themes of self-reference, materiality, and repetition, both within specific works by Warhol and within the larger frame of photographic history. 

Professor Ganis finds broad support at Wells for his many scholarly and pedagogical endeavors. “My views were valued right away. It’s amazing that though I’m still new here myself, people appreciate my opinion and want to incorporate my perspectives,” he says.

In fact, he has already created a subcommittee that will address the art objects on the Wells campus. These include prints, paintings, books, ephemera and other works of art that often grace campus halls or, occasionally, reside in store rooms. Many are in need of preservation, or simply need to be recorded in a database. 

Ganis has turned his curatorial interests into a learning opportunity for Wells students, working with two art history majors on making a digital facsimile of a large late-medieval Liber Hymnarius (a song book for use in a monastic choir) that is part of the College’s art collection. For Ganis, one of the most important things about the project is creating opportunities for students to work directly with historically significant art. “How else will an undergraduate ever get to work with these kinds of objects? Even with well-known teaching collections there’s often a distance. I try to instill respect for the object. It’s one of the things that makes Wells Wells — that students can have this kind of interaction.” 
 

Linda Lohn
Professor of English

Linda Lohn, professor of English and chair of the American Studies program, strives to create what she calls a “community of learners” in the classroom. “When I walk into the classroom, it must be a team experience,” she explains. “I tell my students that we’re all in this together. I want them to learn from one another — I learn from them. Every week, I learn from them, and I love that.” 

Professor Lohn explains that her students have always been her top priority: “I say this so often that to me it has almost become a cliché, but it’s true: In my interaction with students, there is a mutual affection and respect that I haven’t seen anywhere else.” 

She describes her teaching as a collaboration with her students: “I love diversity and enjoy seeing what different perspectives can bring to a classroom.” She points out that this is an essential component of the Wells experience. “Students here are open-minded, but they’re also individually encouraged to find their own voice.” 

Aside from their academic and intellectual development, Lohn finds that students at Wells have a sense of fun that they wouldn’t have elsewhere. “Wells is a small community,” she explains. “When students know their professors on a personal level, I think they feel more confident; they’re more willing to put themselves out there.” She thinks that this is what gives Wells its unique energy. 

Her colleagues have also played a key role in Professor Lohn’s experience at Wells. “I hang out with faculty from other departments: economics, psychology, sociology… the faculty here challenge one another to be their best. They question each other about curriculum and pedagogy. For example, they may ask me why I use a particular teaching method or why I hold a certain position on a topic. These conversations have also fostered some great cross-disciplinary discussions, which have been really inspiring.”

Given her varied interests, it’s not surprising that Lohn’s own research and publications follow an interdisciplinary approach. Her work ranges from literary criticism to examinations of contemporary culture. She explains that her most recent scholarship springs from her interest in contemporary American Studies. Currently, she is working on a long-term project that examines the concepts of privacy, celebrity, and the American identity. “I am very interested in this aspect of popular culture — who gets to have privacy, who doesn’t, and why? I’m particularly intrigued by how these notions have changed in American society.”

When asked how she plans to continue her own scholarship, she responds in her uniquely casual way: “I’m curious…I have a variety of interests and try to offer my students a variety of material. Teaching has informed my scholarship, which has informed my teaching; it’s a cyclical process.” 
 

Laura Purdy
Professor of Philosophy

In 1539, Francisco de Vitoria, a Spanish Dominican (Order of Preachers), gave a lecture on whether Spain's treatment of the Indians of the Americas was unjust. Laura Purdy was intrigued by Vitoria: his arguments constituted the first extensive “just war” theory, and he became the subject of her 1974 dissertation at Stanford University. Now, as the language of “crusade” has once again entered our lexicon, Purdy’s chapter, “Vitoria's Just War Theory: Still Relevant Today?”, published in the 2006 volume Just War and Jihad, is more relevant than ever.

As a girl, Purdy didn't see herself as a future college philosophy professor — she intended to be a ballet dancer. Her family moved around a lot, and when she was 11, they moved to Europe. At 20, Purdy quit ballet and started attending college on an army base in Germany where her father was employed. 

A post-doctoral fellowship brought her to Cornell’s Science, Technology, and Society program in 1975. “Bioethics was just emerging as a field at that time,” Purdy says. “As a post-doc, I team-taught a course on bioethics and another on environmental ethics, participated in faculty explorations on specific topics, and was expected to do lots of research. It was a wonderful start to my academic career.”

Purdy came to teach at Wells in 1979. “I was very attracted to the idea of a women's college, especially given my interests in reproductive ethics, women's issues, and feminism. My major area of interest is feminist bioethics, and my work looks especially at new technologies and issues concerning families and children. I take it for granted that a feminist perspective is necessary to do good work. I study the ethics of sexuality and reproduction; that is, moral permissibility of sexual activity with respect to preventing or encouraging conception, and questions connected with bearing and rearing children.”

In addition to working with students, one of the great benefits of being at Wells for Purdy is how the interaction with her colleagues has such a positive impact on her scholarship. “Overall we have an unusually wonderful faculty. In much larger schools, people tend to associate mainly with people in their own departments. It's an amazing experience here: you talk about something and you get another discipline's perspective, which is often enlightening.”

As a philosopher, Professor Purdy finds these relationships especially beneficial. “I think it's particularly important for philosophy because it tends to be a pretty abstract, intellectual enterprise, quite insulated from the real world. In fact, the areas in philosophy that I'm interested in are closest to the real world: bioethics, applied ethics, political philosophy. You have to know about things that are not philosophy, from a variety of fields. I have been able to do better ethics by rubbing shoulders with people in other disciplines.”
 

Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo
Professor of Political Science

Leading an independent, non-government Pan African research organization with headquarters in the Ivory Coast, serving as a visiting scholar in Japan, being on the editorial board of several social science-based journals, and editing an academic journal based in the Netherlands would be challenging for anyone. Yet Professor of Political Science Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo does all these things and finds time to work closely with his Wells students.

“Political science, international relations, international political economy — those are the subjects I love,” he says. “My classes are a combination of lecture and Socratic dialogue. I believe that in every class there is a body of information that must be produced.” said Professor Lumumba-Kasongo. 

While he has previously taught at a number of universities across America and in Africa, he says he is continually drawn to the “unique sense of dynamics” on the Wells campus. “At Wells, I am very close to my students, and that closeness helps them understand the material better. I respect my office hours. We take our time to discuss papers and exams, and that helps with their focus,” he said, adding that he believes the residential nature of Wells makes it more likely that students will make the effort to visit their professors outside of class. 

One of Lumumba-Kasongo’s most consuming endeavors these days is serving as editor-in-chief of African-Asian Studies, a quarterly social sciences journal published in the Netherlands. That position, which he has held for seven years, brings him into contact with scholars on both continents. Previously, he spent several years co-editing the International Journal of Comparative Sociology. 

“In addition to teaching, I am involved in producing knowledge. This is important because through the production of knowledge, we can change the world.” He went on to explain that he is particularly fascinated by how his work straddles the worlds of scholarship and of policy-makers — putting him into direct contact with both types of professionals.

“My work will not have an impact unless I am part of professional associations and networks,” said Lumumba-Kasongo. “Through them I present the outcomes of my research; through these networks my work is done at an international level. I have friends and colleagues around the world: Africa, Japan, the United States, Europe, and Asia.”

It is not surprising that, in his globetrotting studies, Lumumba-Kasongo has developed a love of languages. He is fluent in four (French, English, Lingala and Tetela) and has a working knowledge of several others (German, Greek, Hebrew and Kiswahili to name a few). He talks enthusiastically about how studying language is valuable for its own sake — yet an even greater benefit is how it supports his research: “The variety of my linguistic background helps me understand how it all comes together,” he said. “I encourage my students to take languages. It’s about appreciating culture and political philosophy. Learning languages is a part of building knowledge; we have to understand peoples’ cultures to understand why they behave the way they do.”

Producing knowledge and sharing it with others around the world are Lumumba-Kasongo’s lifelong passions. While “globalization” is merely a buzzword for some, he truly lives that concept, bringing it to life each semester for his students. 
 

Christina Wahl
Associate Professor of Biology

Associate Professor of Biology Christina Wahl describes her research interests as “eclectic.” Yet, there is a common thread that ties together her research projects, and that thread spools through her teaching at Wells, too: development. 

Professor Wahl is pleased about a lot of the development that she sees taking place at Wells. One tangible sign of that is the new science building. “The new facility is so thoughtfully designed,” she says. “It’s the first new building on campus in 30 years, and they put their all into figuring out how to make it beautiful and functional.” 

Wahl also observes development in her students: “One of the big plusses that Wells has offered me is the chance to help science students develop. I have a lot of contact with the science majors. That doesn’t mean I teach them every semester, but over four years, I will have them in different classes. As a department, we know our students. We know who they are and what they are doing off-campus in terms of their internship and research experiences.”

When Professor Wahl came to Wells, she realized that she would “have a chance to make a difference, both for the institution and in terms of teaching.” In the classroom, she works to develop her students’ critical and problem-based thinking skills. “As a department, we want to move away from lecturing, because that style isn’t working as well as it used to. I’ve started trying ‘case-based learning,’ that is, I’m trying to make the students really think through the problem with which they’re presented, and help them figure out how to solve it.”  

Wahl has pursued a number of research topics in her career. While they appear to be about wholly different things — eyes and eggs — they encompass the physiological mechanisms of development. “My major training and work was in vision,” she says. “I started years ago by looking at the development of the retina. I was working at the time with salamanders and back then, there didn’t seem to be anywhere obvious to go with that. My Cornell adviser was a visual ecologist and a well-trained physiologist. My doctoral work with him was to compare the eyes of two kinds of perch: the yellow perch and the walleye.” She was also involved in other research projects, including determining what causes the dormant eggs in a mammal’s ovaries to suddenly develop and how eggs are distributed throughout the ovaries.

She continues those types of projects at Wells, working with students on mouse ovaries and the development of the eye. “We’re looking at the development of the cornea,” she says. “Animals that are raised in constant light have flat eyes. What happens to cause the shape change in animals that don’t have regular intervals of darkness?”

And one of the animals that Wahl is working with now? “Salamanders,” she says. “I’m back working with salamanders.”

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