Instructors & Staff

Students in Understanding the Arab World are supervised and accompanied by instructors from the program, including Site Director Erika Dyson (biography below), and a staff of resident advisers. Resident advisers have completed an intensive two-week training program and, in most cases, have spent several summers working as resident advisers in the New York program.

Courses are taught by scholars devoted to the highest standards of research and teaching and to creating a rich academic experience while the program is in New York and at King's Academy in Jordan.

Instructors

Erika W. Dyson, Site Director
Erika W. Dyson has taught in the New York summer high school program for two years. She developed and taught Narrative and Religion: The World of Religious Narrative in New York and Deity, Darwin, and Intelligent Design: an Historical Survey of Religion and Science in America to rising juniors and seniors from all over the world. She currently is an assistant professor of religious studies at Harvey Mudd College, in Claremont, California.  She will receive her doctorate from Columbia University in spring 2010 and is a recent American Fellow for the American Association of University Women. At Columbia, she taught writing and academic research skills for the University Writing Program and courses for Barnard College and Columbia's School of Continuing Education. She is a prize-winning poet, and, before starting her academic career, was a costumer for theater and opera.

Rosemary Hicks
Rosemary Hicks holds two Masters degrees in American religious history (the first from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and the second from Columbia University ) and is finishing her doctorate in Columbia University 's Department of Religion. She specializes in the histories and practices of Islam in North America, was previously an American Fellow with the American Association of University Women, and is currently a Mellon Fellow at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. She has published in The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, American Quarterly, Comparative Islamic Studies, and other venues; has taught courses in philosophy and political theory, as well as in Islam and gender studies; and has delivered guest lectures on these topics at various universities, institutes, and academic conferences. She is a three-time recipient of the Foreign Language and Areas Studies Fellowship for Arabic, has traveled widely in the Middle East and other regions, and prior to moving to New York City taught snowboarding in Lake Tahoe, California.

Bram Hubbell
Bram Hubbell has an M.A. in history from UCLA. He teaches Modern World History and Modern Middle Eastern History at Friends Seminary, a private high school in New York City. Over the past five years, he has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East and North Africa. He has worked with teachers around New York on teaching Islam and the Middle East. He has also published articles about the teaching of world history. As an independent consultant to the College Board, he is a member of a committee that is developing teacher education materials and workshops for the new Advanced Placement World History curriculum.

Resident Advisers

Jeffrey Norquist
Jeffrey Norquist has worked as a resident adviser for the Summer Program for High School Students since 2002. For the past three summers he has been the head resident adviser for the New York program. As such, last summer he supervised 90 RAs and looked after the safety and well-being of 1,600 students. He holds a B.A. in English literature from the University of Massachusetts-Boston, with concentrations in women's studies and creative writing.

Michaela Porubanova
Michaela Porubanova has been a resident adviser for the Summer Program for High School Students for the past two years. Last summer she was a senior resident adviser for the New York program—she supervised approximately 10 RAs and the hundred or so students in their charge. She earned her M.A. in psychology from Masaryk University, Czech Republic. She will begin her Ph.D. candidacy in cognitive psychology in February 2009, as a member of the Academy of Science of the Czech Republic.