FOUNDATIONS FACULTY

Joining with the faculty in this integrated study of Western Civilization ensures that you acquire excellent habits of inquiry, analysis and writing. The Program gives you the opportunity to be thoughtful about the issues and complexities educated people must address. It increases your self-understanding and allows you to appropriate the excellence you study.

Foundations of Western Civilization Program Faculty

Geoffrey M. Vaughan (Director): Associate Professor of Political Science. D.Phil., Oxford University. Prof. Vaughan has published on Early Modern, Modern, and Contemporary political philosophy and teaches classes on the history of political philosophy from Plato to the present. His special interests include citizenship in the modern world, civic education, and the political consequences of the interaction between reason and revelation.

Paul Ady: Associate Professor of English. Ph.D., University of Toronto. Modernism, 1890-1940; James Joyce, Romanticism, and Media Studies. Favorite interests include anything intelligible about Joyce's Finnegans Wake, anything Italian, and the relationship between media and politic/economics.

Barbara Apelian Beall: Associate Professor of Art History. Ph.D., Brown University. Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Art and Architecture. Special interest in sites where different cultures intersect and the effect of this on the site's art and architecture.

Patrick Corrigan: Associate Professor of Philosophy. Ph.D., Catholic University of America. Augustine, Plato, Aristotle and Hume. Special interests include liberal education; the relations among philosophy, art, science and Christianity in the Italian Renaissance; and accounts of human excellence and standards for the goals of human activities.

Sr. Nuala Cotter, R.A: Assistant Professor of English & Theology. PhD., (English), University of Pennsylvania. Advanced Study: L'Institut d'Étude Théologiques, Brussels. Medieval and Renaissance English literature. Special interest in the problems of belief in contemporary culture; Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Lance Lazar: Assistant Professor of History. Ph.D. Harvard University. Baroque Rome.

Marc LePain: Professor of Theology. Ph.D., Fordham University. Advanced Study: University of Paris (Sorbonne), Columbia University, University of Iowa, Dartmouth College. The Bible; Dante, Augustine, Francis Bacon; the Arabian Knights; and the relations among literature, philosophy and theology.

Nicholas Opanasets: Lecturer in Political Science. Ph.D., Boston College. Political Philosophy and American Political Thought. Special interest in Shakespeare, Politics and Literature, and Christianity and Politics.

Rachel Ramsey:Assistant Professor of English. Ph.D., West Virginia University. 18th Century British Novel. Special interests include the Great Fire of London; Literature and Economics; and Literary Theory.

Did you Know?

More than 40% of Assumption undergraduates eventually go on to graduate school.