Weinberg College
of Arts & Sciences

Brian Bouldrey

Associate Professor of Instruction

• MFA Institution: Warren Wilson College
• Home Department: English
• Profile

Brian Bouldrey is the author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently Good in Bed: A Life of Queer Sex, Politics, and Religion (ReQueered, 2023).  ReQueered has also published classic editions of his first three novels.  He has also edited eight anthologies, including Inspired Journeys: Travel Writers in Search of the Muse (University of Wisconsin, 2017). Recent work appears in Air/Light, Blackbird, Tikkun, LitHub, and the International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage. Current research interests include active work with William & Mary’s Institute for Pilgrimage Studies, focusing on sacred and secular pilgrimage in the United States.  He has received fellowships from Brush Creek, The Eastern Frontier Society, and Yaddo, and a recipient of a Joseph Henry Jackson Award from The San Francisco Foundation.

He currently serves on the Undergraduate Research Committee, advises the undergraduate arts magazine Helicon, and taught courses for the Environmental Policy & Culture Program. He has served as Master of the Humanities Residential College and as a Fellow for Elder Hall. He has also served as North American Editor of the Gemma Open Door Literacy book series.

Rosemary Bush

Associate Professor of Instruction

• PhD Institution: Northwestern University
• Home Units: OUSA and Earth and Planetary Sciences
• Profile

Rosemary Bush is a Weinberg College Academic Adviser and Associate Professor of Instruction in Earth and Planetary Sciences. She received her BA in Environmental Biology from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and her MS in Plant Biology and Conservation and PhD in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Northwestern University.

She teaches topics across the environmental and Earth sciences.  As both an instructor and adviser, Rosemary’s goal is guiding students in critically understanding the landscapes they navigate, whether that involves the network of resources across Northwestern’s campus or the changing physical environment of a planet in the middle of a climate crisis. As part of her work to make geoscience open to and inclusive of everyone, she currently directs the NU-GEOPaths summer program, in which high school students are paired with graduate students in individually mentored research projects, and she won the 2024 Canvas Hall of Fame award for Excellence in DEI and Accessibility.

Her research background is in the reconstruction of ancient ecosystems and paleoclimates from plant fossils using proxy tools developed through the study of living plants.

Maria Nastasescu

Associate Professor of Instruction

• PhD Institution: Caltech
• Home Department: Mathematics
• Profile

Maria Nastasescu earned her bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Princeton University and her PhD in Mathematics from Caltech. Before joining Northwestern in 2019, she was a Tamarkin Assistant Professor at Brown University. At Northwestern, Maria has taught a variety of undergraduate courses. In her role as the Math Department TA coordinator, she provides pedagogical training to new teaching assistants. Maria is also a co-director of NESP, a program designed to encourage the pursuit of mathematics among students from underrepresented groups. Maria has been a member of the Northwestern HHMI Inclusive Excellence (IE)3 Initiative since 2023.

Maria’s research is in Number Theory, where she is particularly interested in the analytic aspects of L-functions. She has supervised student summer research and senior theses. Her professional interests also include developing new curriculum within the Mathematics Department. In 2023, she spearheaded the effort to create a new course titled “Math 365: Computational Methods in Mathematics.”

Daniela Pozzi Pavan

Associate Professor of Instruction

• MA Institution: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan
• Home Department: French and Italian
• Profile

Daniela Pozzi Pavan, Associate Professor of Instruction at the Department of French and Italian, graduated in Law from the University of Milan, Italy. She completed a Master’s Degree in Teaching Italian as a Foreign Language at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan with a final dissertation entitled “Beauty and Creativity in an Italian Language and Culture Course.”

Daniela currently serves as the Director of the Italian Language Program and coordinates and teaches the Elementary Italian sequence and the Intensive Italian course. She has also taught a wide range of courses at different levels of language instruction, coordinated the Intermediate Italian sequence, and designed an upper-division language and culture course in Business Italian.

In 2023, Daniela received the Council on Language Instruction Award for Excellence in Foreign Language Teaching.

Her interests lie in Foreign Language Pedagogy and Second Language Acquisition, with particular attention to content-based instruction and curriculum development aimed at enhancing students' involvement, motivation, and lifelong learning. Thanks to a grant she received in 2024, she is currently working on developing an OER grammar resource for the Intermediate and Intensive Italian courses.

She is an active member of the Council on Language Instruction (CLI) and serves as the CLI Advisory Board Representative for the French and Italian Department. As co-chair of the Meeting and Orientation Committee, she oversees the annual organization of several workshops for all Northwestern language faculty.  

Robert Ryder

Associate Professor of Instruction

• PhD Institution: Northwestern University
• Home Department: German
• Profile

Professor Ryder is the German Study Abroad advisor and advisor of the Minor in Business German. Previous positions included Director of the Basic Language Program in the Germanic studies department at UIC (2014-2017), postdoctoral Research Fellow at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), and Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. He completed his PhD in German and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University in 2009.

Published in March 2022, his first book, The Acoustical Unconscious: from Walter Benjamin to Alexander Kluge, explores the psychological, media-historical and theoretical implications of the acoustical unconscious, which he extrapolates from both Walter Benjamin’s “optical unconscious” and his theory of language. He is currently working on the semantic and paronymic relations of certain words in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” as well as an edited volume on Walter Benjamin and music.

While his teaching is currently focused on the Business German sequence, he has also taught German courses on the German radio play and graphic novel, a freshman seminar on the intersection of man and technology (“Human and Machine”), and a course on both Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (“Clockwork Ode: from Schiller to Kubrick”) and hell (“Comparative Narratives of Descent”).

Michał Wilczewski

Associate Professor of Instruction

• PhD Institution: University of Illinois Chicago
• Home Department: Slavic Languages and Literatures
• Profile

Michał J. Wilczewski is Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures with an affiliation in the Department of History. A historian of modern East-Central Europe, he specializes in the history and culture of modern Poland. At Northwestern, he teaches Polish language, literature, history, and film, and courses on gender and sexuality in East-Central Europe. He also serves as Slavic’s Director of Undergraduate Studies. Wilczewski’s research focuses on telling the stories of ordinary people and marginalized populations in their quest to gain recognition and access to state power. He has written on rural communities in interwar Poland and is currently at work on a history of pornography and morality in the Polish lands from the 1880s to the 1930s. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois Chicago.

María Barros García

Professor of Instruction

• PhD Institution: University of Granada, Spain
• Home Department: Spanish and Portuguese
• Profile

María J. Barros García is a Professor of Instruction in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Director of the Spanish Language Program at Northwestern University. She holds an M.A. in Teaching Spanish as a Second Language and a doctoral degree with Honors in Spanish Linguistics from the University of Granada, with postdoctoral research conducted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her primary areas of interest are intercultural pragmatics, politeness theory, and second language acquisition. Dr. Barros has authored over thirty publications on these topics and has presented at both national and international conferences.

Her undergraduate teaching experience includes courses on linguistics, literature, culture, border studies, language pedagogy, film, Spanish as a heritage language, Spanish for specific purposes, community-based learning, and all levels of Spanish as a second/foreign language. At the graduate level, she teaches courses on curriculum development and assessment, methods for teaching Spanish as a second language, intercultural communication, the development of pragmatic competence, and integrating culture into the Spanish second language classroom.

Dr. Barros serves on several committees across Northwestern University, is a member of the Council on Language Instruction, and is a certified OPI and DELE (Diploma de Español como Lengua Extranjera) tester. She is also a member of various professional organizations, including the Modern Language Association, the American Council of the Teaching of Foreign Languages, the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, and the American Association of University Supervisors, Coordinators, and Directors.

Patricia Beddows

Professor of Instruction

• PhD Institution: University of Bristol
• Home Department: Earth and Planetary Sciences
• Profile

Patricia (Trish) Beddows is the Director of the Environmental Sciences Program, Assistant Chair and Professor of Instruction in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences.

Her teaching employs problem-based learning (PBL) techniques, and experiential education including with national and international field trips. She aims to grow curiosity through open-ended challenges, coupled with building the skills for students to gain independence as scientists.  She is invested in helping students be citizens of the Earth, tackling the great problems in sustainability, equity, and health.  Recent awards include: WCAS Community Building Award (2024), NU Phi Beta Kappa Award for Advocacy and Mentorship – Inaugural awardee (2023), Women Divers Hall of Fame (2021).

As an earth and environmental scientist, she focusses on caves and karst systems which provide 25% of the worlds drinking water.  As a citizen scientist, she aims to democratize science by breaking down technological and financial barriers by providing open-source robust data logger system for environmental monitoring, with the “Cave Pearl Project”.

Peter Locke

Professor of Instruction

• PhD Institution: Princeton University
• Home Unit: Global Health Studies
• Profile

Peter Locke is a cultural and medical anthropologist focused on bringing ethnographic evidence to the comparative study of global health and humanitarian intervention in post-conflict societies. His field research, writing, and teaching all explore the intersection of humanitarian work, reigning modes of evidence production, and local struggles for health and healing in the wake of war. At Northwestern, Professor Locke teaches courses on the social determinants of health, war and humanitarianism, and trauma and mental health. He helped to establish and direct the Global Learning Office’s summer study abroad program, Comparative Public Health: Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which has been a popular opportunity for global health students since 2016. As a Fulbright Specialist, he taught qualitative and ethnographic research methods to doctoral students at the University of Belgrade’s Faculty of Political Sciences in Spring 2022.

Locke’s doctoral research in Bosnia-Herzegovina examined how the urban poor cope with traumatic histories and rebuild their lives in a new post-war state and economy. Working closely with mental health caregivers and their beneficiaries, Dr. Locke charted the impact and sustainability of humanitarian psychiatry and psychosocial support services for war survivors in Sarajevo. Locke’s dissertation (under revision as a book manuscript) aims to illustrate how anthropological evidence can help to ground debates about international humanitarianism and democracy-building, enrich social scientific and clinical approaches to trauma, and imagine alternative approaches to post-war social repair that better incorporate the values, needs, and desires of survivors.

Locke also accompanied small undergraduate teams to pre-Ebola Sierra Leone to conduct ethnographic research on global health and humanitarian projects and encounters. He worked together with students and the leaders, caregivers, and beneficiaries of a small American-funded medical humanitarian organization to address the challenges of healthcare delivery across steep economic, cultural, and political divides.

Prior to joining Northwestern’s faculty, Locke served as a postdoctoral research associate and then as a lecturer for Princeton University’s Program in Global Health and Health Policy.

Scott Ogawa

Professor of Instruction

• PhD Institution: Northwestern University
• Home Department: Economics
• Profile

I am a Professor of Instruction in the Department of Economics. I earned my PhD in Economics from Northwestern in 2013 (and attended Stanford University as an undergraduate). Prior to my PhD, I taught math at a high school in Seattle. For my graduate work I focused on the economics of education, writing a dissertation that explored the link between what students pay (in dollars) and how much effort they put forth (in short, there is no clear link). Since joining the teaching faculty full time I have taught Intro and Intermediate Microeconomics, as well as the Economics of Education and Experimental Economics (a course I proposed and developed). I have also taught masters courses in Kellogg, McCormick, and SESP.

During this time I have been able to contribute exercises and supplemental material to introductory economics textbooks. More recently I have helped write and edit questions for the College Board as part of the AP Microeconomics Development Committee.

I am also proud to have helped incoming first-year students as part of the Bridge program for first generation students interested in studying economics at Northwestern. I have also advised many students over the summer (as part of the Posner program for rising sophomores) and during the year (Econ and MMSS students writing senior theses). I have also enjoyed reading many books as part of the One Book One Northwestern selection committee.