“I’ve always been interested in how race and gender structure American life,” says Lisa Hall, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies. Hall began approaching the ideas of race and gender as an undergraduate at Yale, where she was a women’s studies major. She went on to earn her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to coming to Wells two years ago, Hall taught at DePaul and Oberlin.

Hall is interested in “the concept of intersectionality—the way that each of these categories of race and gender can’t be read in isolation from the others.” One example that Hall points to is the issue of reproductive rights. “When we look at the issue,” Hall explains, “we’re talking about more than the right to choose. There are others issues—who can have children, whose families are supported, subtle issues in terms of healthcare, pregnancy prevention, or how to support pregnancy. It’s important to think about the broadest way that an issue can be framed and, depending on where you are in the social strata, how that issue might affect you differently.” 

Dr. Hall teaches all of the core classes in the Women’s Studies program. She is currently working on two different research projects. “One,” she says, “is a history of the way that the women in the print movement provided a space in terms of feminist publishing—small press, book stores, magazines, journals—that created a kind of space outside of the university for critical and artistic productions.” Hall finds herself in a great location for her research. 

“I’m lucky,” she says, “that the Cornell library has the entire holdings of Nancy Bereano’s Firebrand press, which was a one-woman, extremely influential lesbian feminist press.” Firebrand was started in 1984, in Ithaca, NY, and is perhaps best known for publishing the early work of the critically-acclaimed author Dorothy Allison, including the 1988 novel, Trash.

The other project Hall is working on is, as she explains it, “thinking about Hawaii and looking at Hawaii as a site of how to think about what’s missing in certain kinds of discussions around race, around colonialism and empire, around gender and sexuality.” 

An excerpt of Hall’s writing on the subject was published last June in American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association. And parts of her project are forthcoming in American Indian Studies Journal. 

When asked about the atmosphere at Wells, Hall talks about the kind of students with whom she enjoys working. “I think that the students here are really hungry for certain kinds of knowledge, so that makes them very interested in their class work.”

In her seminars, Hall encourages her students to ask questions. “The writer Cynthia Enloe is a proponent of what she calls ‘feminist curiosity,’” Hall explains. “It asks, how do things come to be?  Not accepting an event, or an artifact, or a moment in history, but asking, how did this come to be? What are the things that shaped this?”

“The other thing that is important to me,” says Hall, “is that we try to cultivate an interest and tolerance in other people’s points of view, in different points of view as something that is interesting and valuable.”
 

Theodore Lossowski
Professor of Art

From his very earliest years, Associate Professor of Fine Arts Theodore Lossowski was interested in working with his hands. “As a boy,” he says, “I loved going into my father’s workshop and just making things—sawing up boards and whacking nails.” 

As an undergraduate at Brockport State College, Lossowski studied multiple arts, receiving his B.S. in Studio Art with a concentration in ceramics and minors in photography and art history in 1975. He then earned a Masters of Fine Arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology, with a degree in ceramic sculpture and a minor in glass blowing. 

When asked about artistic influences, Lossowski has a difficult time winnowing down the long list of artists he admires. “I feel influenced by a number of American artists from the latter half of the twentieth century, even if the influence is not immediately visible in my work. Abstract expressionist artists from the so-called ‘New York’ school— Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock. And more immediately, in terms of sculpture, an artist I admire tremendously is the minimalist sculptor Isamu Noguchi.”

As a student at Brockport, Lossowski studied with two internationally-acclaimed artists—the furniture designer Wendell Castle and the metal sculptor Albert Paley. “They were very important to my thinking about art and technique,” Lossowski says. “Wendell Castle’s work is wonderful. It’s very sculptural. He’s considered by many as the best woodworker in the world.”

One of Lossowski’s main goals when teaching fine arts is conveying the idea of sculpture as the making of objects that are more than simply functional forms. “Sculptures,” Lossowki says,” are three-dimensional creations that are not utilitarian, which hopefully express thoughts, ideas, and moods. And they evoke an emotional response—through literal representation or metaphorical implication.”

While Lossowski counts many artists as influences and makes sure that his students have a working definition of art, his concept of fine art is broad and inclusive. “I show students what I do,” Lossowski says, “but mostly I try to teach them skills so they can manipulate the materials to discover what they want to pursue. The skills are merely a set of tools.”

At Wells Lossowski teaches pottery, ceramics, and three-dimensional design. “I like to have exercises that employ different types of techniques—pinching, coiling, working with slabs, working on the potter’s wheel. I want students to become accustomed to all of these different methodologies. And then I ask them to use those skills to provide solutions for different artistic projects. Hopefully what happens is that they can express who and what they are through the medium.”
 

Susan J. Tabrizi
Assistant Professor of Political Science

If I had to choose my favorite thing about teaching at Wells, it’s my ability to work in depth, one on one, with students,” says Susan Tabrizi, Assistant Professor of Political Science. Professor Tabrizi began teaching at Wells in 2007. She earned her B.A. from Utica College, her M.A. from the University of South Carolina, and her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Before coming to Wells, she taught at Bucknell University for several years.

Tabrizi specializes in American politics, political methodology, and political psychology. When asked how she became interested in her field, she pauses for a moment. “I’ve always been interested in politics,” she says. “One of my first memories is sitting on my father’s lap when Jimmy Carter won the election in 1976. I can remember when that happened and I was watching the news with my dad, so I’ve always been kind of hardwired to be interested in that kind of thing.”

For Tabrizi, the “hardwired” interest in the dynamics of political thought and action in American life is a natural reaction to a world where, as she understands it, politics plays a part in almost every facet of our social and personal lives. “You know, Aristotle called politics the master science,” she says. “I see politics everywhere, and it’s exciting to me.”

Tabrizi currently teaches a variety of political science classes, from introductory courses like “Government and Politics Today,” to a senior seminar on “Public Policy: Problems and Solutions.” 

Whatever the class, Tabrizi has the same underlying pedagogical aims. “The main thing is to get them [students] to ask questions, and to be critical—but not cynical in their search for understanding and explanation,” she says. “I go out of my way to not instill in my students any particular ideological orientation. That’s not my gig. I don’t care about where they are on the partisan or ideological map. What I care about is that they can ask and answer questions about politics and their world in ways that allow them to get beyond blind rhetoric and make them thinkers.”

“I’m interested in the concept of equality, and what it means,” Tabrizi says. Her current scholarship focuses on the relationship between political ideology and personal value systems. “My research,” she explains, “looks at how people use political values to formulate their attitudes about political topics.”

Equality, Tabrizi explains, is more complicated than it might appear at first blush. “I’ve been really interested in the idea that equality has multiple meanings and that they can be contradictory sometimes. They can also reflect a hierarchy of meanings. For example, equality of opportunity seems to be the meaning that sucks up all the air, or sucks up all the power, in the United States, but people still recognize and think about the idea of equality of results or outcomes, even if they may reject that idea more often than not. And there are other meanings of equality—moral equality, equality of life, racial equality, gender equality, and so on. I’ve been really interested in coming up with ways to assess and measure these multiple meanings.” 

Tabrizi is happy that she has found at Wells an inviting place to teach and explore her research. “I feel valued here, which might seem like an off-the-cuff thing to say, but when you compare it to some other big huge institutions where you are tenth door on the right, that’s not necessarily the case, and so that’s one of the things that I think makes me feel good about Wells. I feel valued.”
 

A Thomas Vawter
Professor of Biology

Professor Tom Vawter is the Herbert E. Ives Professor of Science and Chair of the Biological and Chemical Sciences department at Wells. He grew up on the beaches of California and took a slightly circuitous path to Aurora. After high school and an initial foray into college, he worked in Tanzania as part of the American Friends Service Committee’s Voluntary International Service Assignments (VISA), returning to California to finish his undergraduate work in biology.  

His doctoral work at Cornell brought him to central New York, and, after a post-doctoral research position at UCLA, Vawter returned to the Finger Lakes to teach biology and environmental sciences at Wells.

Through travel and his love of the natural world, Vawter has developed an understanding of place—its inhabitants, watersheds, and interdependent systems—that is interdisciplinary in scope yet grounded in scientific methodology.

Vawter has developed over the years (and in collaboration with colleagues) a set of three questions that frame the issue of how to manage our environment: What kind of world do we have? What kind of world do we want? What kind of world can we get?

This dialectical model approaches problem solving by first drawing from the strength of scientific observation and research (the world we have). To that it adds a metaphysical inquiry (the world we want), and attempts to resolve the disparity between the two with sociological insight (the world we can get).

A big thinker who insists on teaching students the basics of analytical inquiry, Vawter makes the local environment his classroom. “Perspectives and values are very important,” he explains.”But those things are played out in the real world, a physical world. I do a lot of my labs in local streams.”

Professor Vawter, with help from his colleague, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Niamh O’ Leary, has helped connect Wells students with their regional community and environment. One of the great successes of Vawter’s involvement within the regional community is The Cayuga Lake Floating Classroom Project and its centerpiece, the Haendell, a 43-foot steel boat. The Haendel makes Cayuga Lake a living lab for Wells students. 

In addition to his work at Wells, Professor Vawter has also taught at Cornell University, Northwestern University, and Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. At Wells he teaches a wide range of courses, from first-year interdisciplinary seminars to Advanced Ecology.
 

Previous Faculty Profiles