Master of Liberal Arts
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Program Chair

P. Kyle McCarter William Foxwell Albright Chair in Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, has chaired the MLA Program since 2003. His research and teaching interest include Biblical Studies, Northwest Semitic philology, and Dead Sea scrolls. Dr. McCarter also teaches course in the MLA Program including King Arthur, Lost Books of the Bible, and Ancient Medicine, and Dead Sea Scrolls.

Associate Program Chairs

Melissa Hilbish Director, Center for Liberal Arts in AAP, and the Associate Program Chair for the MLA Program. Her Masters and PhD are in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park (1990). Prior to coming to Johns Hopkins in 2000, Hilbish worked as a Project Archivist at The National Trust for Historic Preservation Library Collection, as Assistant Director for Research at the American Studies Association, as a Staff Historian/Archivist at The History Factor, and as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her teaching and research interests include Film and Culture, interdisciplinary studies, and cultural history. Courses taught in the MLA program include: Film and Public Memory, Science Fiction Film in the 20th Century, Cultural Eras: The 1950s, Cultural Eras: The 1960s, Space and the American Imagination, and Exploring the Liberal Arts.

Faculty Members

Phyllis Berger received an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. A practicing Fine Arts Photographyer, Berger supervises the Photography program at Johns Hopkins University School of Arts and Sciences as well as being a fulltime instructor in wet and digital darkroom. She teachesinterdiciplinary courses at JHU including Writing Seminars, Museum Studies and History of Science. She is an instructor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Division of Continuing Studies, and an instructor JHU Summer Abroad program at the Burren College of Art County Clare, Ireland. Berger is a recipient of artist residency in Rochefort en Terre, Brittany, France and has been awarded numerous teaching grants through JHU (Arthur Vining Davis, Arts Innovation).

Leonard Bowman holds a Ph.D. in Religion from Fordham University, and has taught college courses in philosophy and religion for over thirty years. One of Dr. Bowman’s teachers was Professor Huston Smith.

William Evitts earned his doctorate in American History at Johns Hopkins under the tutelage of pre-eminent Lincoln scholar David Herbert Donald. His research and teaching interests center on 19th century America, the Civil War, the South, slavery, Lincoln, and Maryland. He has published three books (two of them for young people), edited others, written numerous articles, and served on the faculties of Hopkins, Hollins University, State University of New York at Buffalo, MICA and Towson University.

George Fisher Emeritus Professor of Geology at Johns Hopkins University, where he taught in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences from 1966 to 2005, and served as Dean of Arts and Sciences from 1983 to 1987. For the past fifteen years, his interests have shifted to questions of how humans can live fruitfully and responsibly in our increasingly crowded world, and how science and religious thought can shape answers to that question. He now teaches at the Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary’s Seminary and University as well as in the Johns Hopkins MLA program.

Forrest Hall , a physicist, currently with the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, is located at the Goddard Space Flight Center, in the GSFC/UMBC Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology. Dr. Hall was hired by NASA in 1963 and served there until his retirement in 1999. For the past 26 years Dr. Hall has been active in global change research using earth-observing satellites to monitor human-induced and natural changes to the earth’s land ecosystems and the effects those changes have had on the earth’s climate.   He has authored more than 40 scientific papers and remains engaged in research to understand the earth’s global carbon cycle and its relationship to climate change. Dr. Hall’s early work was in quantum theory. In 1977, Dr. Hall began lecturing on the connections between science, spirituality and ecology, and has given talks on this subject in a number of venues, including churches, universities, high and middle schools. Dr. Hall has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas, and an MS and PhD in Physics from the University of Houston.

Richard Henry is a Professor in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University , where he is also Director of Maryland Space Grant Consortium, and Member of the Principal Professional Staff, Applied Physics Laboratory. From 1998 until July 2000, Dick Henry was Chair of the National Council of Space Grant Directors, and he has also served as Board Member and Treasurer of the National Space Grant Foundation. From 1976 to 1978 he was Deputy Director of the Astrophysics Division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA. He is a past Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow. He was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1940, and he became a U. S. citizen in 1973.

Amy Landau recently joined the Walter’s Art Museum as Assistant Curator in the Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books, where she oversees the Islamic and Armenian codices and single pages. Landau received her PhD from the Department of Islamic Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford, in 2007. She was formerly the Wallis Annenberg Curatorial Fellowship, in the Art of the Middle East, at the Los Angeles County Museum and Research Assistant to the Chief Curator at the Smithsonian¹s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Dr. Landau is working on a book project entitled Global Visions in Early Modern Iran: Art and Culture during the Epoch of Shah Sulayman (1666-1694).Amy likes hiking and yoga.

Susan Langley is the Maryland State Underwater Archaeologist. She has worked in diverse locations such as the iceberg filled waters of Labrador on the San Juan, a Basque whaling galleon sunk in 1565, in Red Bay, and in the mountain lakes of western Canada where she relocated and studied the remains of Project Habbakuk, a secret World War II vessel prototype. She spent a couple of years teaching underwater archaeology in Thailand for a consortium of Asian nations through UNESCO. Thirteen years ago Dr. Langley accepted the position of State Underwater Archaeologist for Maryland. The opening of the Historic Shipwreck Preserve focusing on the German Submarine, U-1105, was her first project. She works with both federal and State agencies on the submerged aspects of Maryland’s role in the War of 1812 and Revolutionary War. Currently, she is involved in surveying the Atlantic coast in partnership with other State and federal agencies.

P. Kyle McCarter William Foxwell Albright Chair in Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, has chaired the MLA Program since 2003. His research and teaching interest include Biblical Studies, Northwest Semitic philology, and Dead Sea scrolls. Dr. McCarter also teaches course in the MLA Program including King Arthur, Lost Books of the Bible, and Ancient Medicine, and Dead Sea Scrolls.

Susan McCarter earned her A.B. in British Area Studies from Barnard College in 1967 and her PhD in Mediterranean Studies (Prehistoric Archaeology) in 1977.  Her dissertation was titled The Bronze Age Necropolis of Ayia Paraskevi (Nicosia):  Unpublished Tombs in the Cyprus Museum. From 1974 to 1984 she taught for the University of Maryland University College in Italy, Germany, Turkey, Korea and Japan.  From 1981 to 1984 she served in Japan as Assistant Director for the Asian Division of the institution.  In 1984 she returned to the United States and spent the next 12 years as Executive Director for such academic organizations as the American Schools of Research and the Society of Architectural Historians. She continued to teach part-time, first at the University of Maryland, and then at Johns Hopkins, where she has been an adjunct professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies since 1988.  In 1998 she joined the adjunct faculty at York College of Pennsylvania, and she continues to teach undergraduate art history and archaeology there today.Her most recent publication, an introduction to the Neolithic period, was released in September, 2007.

William Noel is Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books at The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, a position he took up in 1997. He received his Ph.D in 1993 from Cambridge University England.  Among the Positions he has held are Director of Studies in the History of Art, Downing College, Cambridge University and Assistant Curator of Manuscripts, The J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. He¹s written several books, and curated several exhibitions. Dr Noel has taught and lectured widely. Dr Noel is on the Faculty of Rare Book School, University of Virginia, and he is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of History of Art, Johns Hopkins University. Will likes reading and sailing.

Nancy Norris-Kniffin received her B.A. from Wellesley College and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to the American short story, topics for her courses include Faulkner's fiction, evil in literature, Southern women writers, and modern Irish literature. She also teaches in non-credit programs at Hopkins and the Chautauqua Institution, where she and her husband vacation every August.

Edward Papenfuse has held the positions of Maryland State Archivist and Commissioner of Land Patents since 1975. As director of the extensive activities of the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis, Dr. Papenfuse is responsible for the Archives' vast collection of government and private materials. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including In Pursuit of Profit: The Annapolis Merchants in the Era of the American Revolution (1975) and, with Joseph M. Coale, The Hammond-Harwood House Atlas of Historical Maps of Maryland, 1608-1908 (1982). Dr. Papenfuse received his undergraduate degree from the American University, an M.A. from the University of Colorado, and his Ph.D. in history from The Johns Hopkins University

Jonathan Pevsner is a faculty member in the Department of Neurology at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. He received his bachelor's degree in psychology from Haverford College and his Ph.D. in Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He pursued postdoctoral training at the Stanford University School of Medicine and joined the faculty of Kennedy Krieger Institute in 1995. Dr. Pevsner also holds a primary faculty appointment in the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Dianne Scheper holds a Master’s degree in literature from the University of Maryland and a doctorate in Religious Studies from Catholic University, where she wrote her dissertation on the experience of the sacred in nature, focusing specifically on the writings of Annie Dillard. While at Montgomery College –where she made her home for many years—she also directed the Honors Program and founded the award-winning Montgomery Scholars Program. During the 1990’s, she was a regular columnist for Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, and for almost a decade, she worked at Baltimore’s CenterStage as Co-moderator for the Sunday Matinee Humanities Panel Discussions, Her research interests have focused on the interplay of religious and cultural values in contemporary world literature.

In her personal life, Dr. Scheper is a huge fan of books, theater, NPR, hiking in the woods, and ‘full catastrophe living.’ But she still finds few things more stimulating than a classroom of lively, informed readers dedicating to making meaning out of a text—and she knows first hand that there are few programs more congenial to this pursuit than Hopkins’ MLA Program. She can testify from both sides of the room, since she earned an MLA degree in the late 70’s –a degree and an intellectual experience she has long cherished. Professor Scheper is proud to have received the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Advanced Academic Programs for 2007-08.

George Scheper teaches for both the Odyssey Program and the MLA. Primary affiliation is with Humanities, Community College of Baltimore County-Essex; directs Mesoamerican Institutes for the regularly directs National Endowment for the Humanities; author of numerous scholarly articles on religion and culture; regularly directs National Endowment for the Humanities Institutes on cultural studies. MLA Program – Mayan Culture, MesoAmerica; SPSBE - Native American Cultures speaker series in Odyssey.

Linda Skalet is a Johns Hopkins trained art historian who specializes in 19th Century American and European art and culture. She has taught at Hopkins for the last 15 years and is a frequent lecturer at the Smithsonian and others museums around the country. Her publications include numerous essays on art collecting and the art market in 19th century America.

Gary Vikan assumed the Directorship of the Walters Art Gallery in April, 1994, after serving as Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Medieval Art at the Walters since 1985.  He has participated in scholarly conferences worldwide, and has published and lectured extensively on topics ranging from early Christian pilgrimages, to icons, to medicine and magic, to Elvis Presley. He is Adjunct Professor at The Johns Hopkins University. He is an internationally known scholar and has curated many of the most significant exhibitions in the history of the Walters, including Silver Treasure from Early Byzantium, Holy Image, Holy Space: Icons and Frescoes from Greece, Gates of Mystery: The Art of Holy Russia, and African Zion: The Sacred Art of Ethiopia.

Ronald Walters , Professor of History, has been at the Johns Hopkins University since 1970. His publications include The Antislavery Impulse: American Abolitionism after 1830 (1976, 1984), and American Reformers (1978; revised edition, 1997), and three edited works as well as numerous articles and book reviews in scholarly journals. His present work divides between his interest in radical reform movements and research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American commercial popular culture. Dr. Walters has been on the MLA Advisory Board since 1999.

Susan Zimmerman is Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY (recently retired), and co-editor of the annual journal, Shakespeare Studies. She is author of The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre as well as numerous articles, editor of several collections of essays, and most recently guest editor of the fall 2008 issue of The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Duke University Press), entitled Premodern Disease: Ideology and Representation.

Nancy Zinn Associate Director for Collections and Exhibitions The Walters Art Museum A native of Minnesota, Nancy Zinn received her B.A. in Microbiology and Art History from the University of Minnesota in 1980. Following a successful career in transplant immunology research, she received her M.A. and Ph.D. in History of Art from The Ohio State University in 1997, with a specialty in Northern Renaissance Art. After holding positions in the curatorial and education departments of the Columbus Museum of Art, and the National Galley of Art, Dr. Zinn joined the curatorial staff of the Walters Art Museum in 1998. As Associate Director for Collections and Exhibitions, she oversees all aspects of the museum’s exhibition program and collection’s management activities, and provides administration, advocacy, and budgetary support to the museum’s Curatorial, Conservation, and International Curatorial Relations Divisions. Dr. Zinn currently serves as President of the International Council of Museums’ International Committee on Exhibitions and Exchange.