Our Organizing Committee represents some of the top liberal arts colleges in the world, and are leaders in advancing global liberal arts.
The Committee includes:
Dr. Jane Edwards, Dean of International and Professional Experience; Senior Associate Dean, Yale College, Yale University
Jane Edwards has served at Yale since 2006, most recently as Senior Associate Dean and Dean of International and Professional Experience. Prior to coming to Yale she was Director of International Studies at Harvard, and before that served in a similar position at Wesleyan University, where she also taught for the department of Romance Languages. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Studies in International Education and has served nationally on the Boards of NAFSA, CIEE, The Fund for Education Abroad, World Learning, and on the Schools Board of Overseers at Middlebury College. She holds a B.A and M.A from Cambridge University, and her Ph.D is in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania.
Tamar (Timi) Mayer, Middlebury College Director of the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs (RCGA)
Tamar (Timi) Mayer, is a political geographer, the director of the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs and the Program in International and Global Studies at Middlebury College. She graduated from University of Haifa in Israel (AB), and received her master’s and doctorate from University of Wisconsin in Madison. Her research interests focus on the interplay among nationalism, landscape and memory as it pertains to stateless ethnic nations, specifically Jewish and Palestinians in Israel and the Palestinian occupied West Bank. Her more recent work has focused on the ethno-cultural identities of Uighurs in Xinjiang, China.
Mayer is the editor or co-editor of five books that focus on different dimensions of international and global issues: Women and the Israeli Occupation (Routledge 1994), Gender Ironies of Nationalism (Routledge 2000), Jerusalem: Idea and Reality (Routledge 2008), The Politics of Fresh Water (Routledge 2017), and The Crisis in Global Youth Unemployment (Routledge, forthcoming in 2018).
Scott Carpenter, Carleton College, Director of the Center for Global and Regional Studies
Scott Carpenter, the Marjorie Crabb Garbisch Professor of French and the Liberal Arts, is the director of Carleton College’s Center for Global and Regional Studies. He teaches courses in literature, creative writing, and cross-cultural studies. His research interests include political discourse, travel writing, 19th-century literature, literary theory, and literary frauds and hoaxes. Among his books are Acts of Fiction, The Aesthetics of Fraudulence in Nineteenth-Century France, Theory of Remainders, and This Jealous Earth.
Bryan Penprase, Soka University of America, Dean of Faculty, Undergraduate Program
Dr. Bryan Penprase is Dean of Faculty for the undergraduate program at Soka University of America, where he works to advance the innovative undergraduate liberal arts curriculum and to develop and expand the Soka University faculty as it develops a new Concentration in Life Science. He previously was a Professor of Science and founding Director of the Teaching and Learning Center at Yale-NUS College, and for 20 years was the Frank P. Brackett Professor of Astronomy at Pomona College. Bryan received both a BS in Physics and an MS in Applied Physics from Stanford University, and a PhD from the University of Chicago in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Bryan’s research includes nearly all aspects of observational astrophysics, from photometric observations of nearby asteroids to spectroscopic studies of element formation in the Early Universe, using telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Telescope in Hawaii. He is the author of The Power of Stars – How Celestial Observations Have Shaped Civilization, published by Springer, Inc., and has lectured across the world about the intersections between culture and astronomy, and about innovative STEM education in a global context. He has organized or co-organized conferences in liberal arts and STEM education at Yale University, Yale-NUS College, and in India, and is leading the organizing committee for this Globalizing the Liberal Arts conference.
Mary Coffey, Pomona College, Associate Dean, and Director for International Initiatives
Mary Coffey is an expert on 19th- and early 20th-century Spanish literature, in particular the work of Benito Pérez Galdós and his contemporaries. Her published work explores the traditions of nineteenth-century Spanish narrative (historical novels, realist novels) as well as early 19th-century periodical literature (costumbrismo). She is currently completing a book entitled The Ghosts of Colonies Past and Present: Spanish Imperialism in the Early Fiction of Benito Pérez Galdós. From 2011 to 2014 she served as President of the Asociación Internacional de Galdosistas. In addition to courses in Spanish literature, Coffey also teaches courses in Spanish cultural studies.
Michael Weiner, Soka University of America, Associate Dean and Professor of Professor of East Asian History
Michael Weiner is Associate Dean of Faculty, and Professor of East Asian History and International Studies at Soka University of America. Among his major publications are: The Internationalization of Japan (1992); Race and Migration in Imperial Japan (1994); Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity (1997, 2009); Race, Ethnicity and Migration in Modern Japan (2004) and; The Pacific Basin: An Introduction (2017). He has recently been commissioned to edit a comprehensive survey of race and ethnicity in Asia, and is a “Featured Author” at Taylor & Francis, Routledge.
Kara A. Godwin, Global Education Consultant; Research Fellow, Boston College Center for International Higher Education
Kara Godwin is a higher education consultant for governments, universities, and NGOs. She is also a Research Fellow at the Boston College Center for International Higher Education and founder of the Global Liberal Education Collaboratory, an emerging international association of liberal arts programs. Her work focuses on curriculum, learning/teaching, strategic planning, policy, and internationalization. A forthcoming book, Changing Tides: The Global Rise of Liberal Education, analyzes the growing global interest in liberal arts education. Kara previously worked at the Northwestern University Center for Learning and Teaching. She has been a visiting scholar at Amsterdam University College, a US policy analyst, and a consultant for projects on faculty development, curriculum assessment, study abroad, international development, and liberal arts education in China. In her former career, Kara was an IT analyst and project manager in the US and UK.