SUMMER SESSION FACULTY & ACADEMIC PROGRAM STAFF
Summer Session Faculty
Frèdèrique Apffel-Marglin
Frèdèrique Apffel-Marglin is Professor of Anthropology at Smith College. She has lived and done research in India since the late 1960's. She first was a student of Indian Classical Dance (Orissi style) and later did her first field research among the temple dancers of Jagannath temple in Orissa in the mid 70s. Her later field research was among subsistence agricultural communities of coastal Orissa. Since 1994, she has collaborated with indigenous non-governmental organizations in Peru and Bolivia. She currently is a visiting professor in graduate courses that those organizations teach. This collaboration is part of her activities as the coordinator of Centers for Mutual Learning in Peru and Bolivia. This project was funded by a MacArthur grant. With the Peruvian NGO PRATEC, she has created a Research & Community Center in the Peruvian High Amazon where she has started a Program in Biocultural Diversity.
She is the author of two books, the co-editor of five more books, and the author of more than forty articles and book chapters. Her interests cover ritual and myth, gender, political ecology, critiques of development, science studies; her areas of specialization are South Asia and the Andes. She is currently writing a book based on her collaboration with several Peruvian organizations, in particular nine years of lecturing in the PRATEC graduate program.
Frèdèrique is the Summer Session’s faculty host at Smith College. She is on the guiding team of the CILA Institute (Community for Integrative Learning and Action), a network of faculty, staff, and students in the Five Colleges (Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Hampshire, Amherst, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst) and beyond, that develops integrative approaches to learning, life and work.
Andrea Olsen
Andrea Olsen, a professor of dance at Middlebury College, has taught anatomy and kinesiology since 1972 in workshops and colleges, and is the author of Bodystories: A Guide to Experiential Anatomy, written in collaboration with Caryn McHose. As a dancer, Olsen has choreographed more than 80 works and toured internationally with Dance Gallery, The Dance Company of Middlebury, and as a solo artist.
Her interest in authentic movement is reflected in "Being Seen, Being Moved: Authentic Movement in Performance," published in The Contact Quarterly. Professor Olsen's book, Body and Earth, An Experiential Guide, explores the many ways in which our relationship to our bodies affects our attitudes toward the world around us. She is a 1998 recipient of the Contemplative Practice Fellowship Award.
Mary Rose O’Reilley
Mary Rose O’Reilley is Professor of English at the University of Saint Thomas (Minnesota), where she has taught since 1978. Her books include The Peaceable Classroom; Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice (both from Heinemann) and The Barn at the End of the World: the Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd (Milkweed Editions). Her collection of poetry, Half Wild, was recently selected by Mary Oliver as the winner of the 2005 Walt Whitman Award of the National Academy of American Poets and will be forthcoming in April 2006, from Louisiana State University Press.
Recent awards include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Bush Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation; several grants from the Loft Literary Center for poetry and literary nonfiction; the Sears Roebuck Foundation Award for Campus Leadership and Excellence in Teaching; the Helen Hole Fellowship for Quaker Educators; and the University of St. Thomas’s University Scholars Grant.
A specialist in International Modernism, O’Reilley has written and taught about subjects as diverse as Virginia Woolf, environmental literature, spiritual autobiography, the ecosystem of the English department, and sustainable agriculture. A continuing theme in all her writing has been the discipline of the pacifist, contemplative life, a topic to which she turns with the comic perspective of one who admits to frequent pratfalls on the spiritual path. She is active in Quaker ministry, and, in 1995, took Buddhist precepts at Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastery, Plum Village, Duras, France. She is a 2000 recipient of the Contemplative Practice Fellowship Award.
Hal Roth
Hal Roth is professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies at Brown University, where he has taught since 1985. A scholar of the history and religious philosophy of the early Taoist tradition in China, he has brought its foundational mystical practices and ideas into clear focus through a number of books and scholarly articles. Foremost among these is Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-yeh) and The Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (Columbia University Press, 1999). The past recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, Roth has developed courses on Buddhist and Taoist mysticism that combine traditional critical analysis with direct first-hand experience. He is a 2005 recipient of a Contemplative Program Development Fellowship to establish a concentration in Contemplative Studies at Brown University; he also received a Contemplative Practice Fellowship Award in 1998.
Ed Sarath
Ed Sarath is Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation Studies at The University of Michigan.
Recent educational initiatives he has spearheaded include the BFA in Jazz and Contemplative Studies curriculum at The University of Michigan, a degree program which includes meditation and related studies in addition to jazz training; and the Faculty Network for Creativity and Consciousness Studies, which brings faculty together from all fields to probe the transpersonal core of the creative process. He is the founder of STATE: Students, Teachers, and Administrators for Transpersonal Education; and ISIM: The International Society for Improvised Music. He is a member of Ken Wilber's Integral Institute (Integral Art group), and Robert Forman's Forge Institute.
Ed Sarath has presented at Harvard Business School, Brown University, The University of Michigan Business School and elsewhere his ideas on creativity and consciousness. His formats involve hands-on practices involving (rhythm, meditation and improvisational games) and theoretical models of the creative process that are applicable to all fields. He is a 1997 recipient of the Contemplative Practice Fellowship Award.
Peter Schneider
Peter Schneider was born and educated in South Africa, where he taught and practiced architecture before moving to the United States in 1977. He has taught architecture and directed graduate and undergraduate architecture programs in Alabama, Louisiana, and Colorado. He currently teaches architectural history, theory and design at the Boulder and Denver campuses of the University of Colorado. His scholarly and research interests have been focused on the history of the architect: on the architect's mind, methods and manners as these have occurred in history, and in the way that the interactions between these three forces have shaped the discipline's traditions. He, like Louis Kahn, loves beginnings, and so his particular focus has been on exploring and understanding the forces that shaped the origin of the architectural tradition, and on the persistent influence those original ideas have had in shaping and forming the persona of the architect. His writings on the history of the architect and the architect's methods and practices have been widely published, and he has lectured on the topic extensively. He is currently exploring and writing about the connections that exist between the myths of architecture's archaic origins and the traditions embedded in its first, archetypal artifacts. He is a 1997 recipient of the Contemplative Practice Fellowship Award.
Arthur Zajonc
Academic Program Director, The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
Arthur Zajonc is professor of physics at Amherst College, where he has taught since 1978. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Michigan. He has been visiting professor and research scientist at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, and was Fulbright professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. His research has included studies in parity violation in atoms, the experimental foundations of quantum physics, and the relationship between sciences, the humanities and spirituality. He is author of the book Catching the Light, co-author of The Quantum Challenge, and co-editor of Goethe's Way of Science. In 1997 he served as scientific coordinator for the Mind and Life dialogue with H.H. the Dalai Lama published as The New Physics and Cosmology: Dialogues with the Dalai Lama (Oxford 2004). He again organized the 2002 dialogue with the Dalai Lama,“The Nature of Matter, the Nature of Life,” and acted as moderator at MIT for the “Investigating the Mind” dialogue in 2003.
The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
Academic Program Staff
Jennifer Akey
Assistant to the Executive Director
Jen Akey is a 2002 graduate of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where she majored in Anthropology and studied Art and Art History. At the Center she works primarily with the Executive Director, Mirabai Bush, and the Academic Program.
She began exploring contemplative practices in high school, where she began her inquiry into Eastern religious philosophies; formerly an athlete, she used meditative visualization for practice and game preparations. She continues to meditate and finds kayaking to be a contemplative process.
Mirabai Bush
Executive Director
As Director of the Center, Mirabai brings a unique background of organizational management, teaching, and spiritual practice. A founding board member of the Seva Foundation, an international public health organization, she directed the Seva Guatemala Project, which supports sustainable agriculture and integrated community development. Also at Seva, she co-developed Sustaining Compassion, Sustaining the Earth, a series of retreats and events for grassroots environmental activists on the interconnection of spirit and action. She is co-author, with Ram Dass, of Compassion in Action: Setting Out on the Path of Service, published by Random House. Mirabai has organized, facilitated, and taught workshops, weekends, and courses on spirit and action for more than 20 years at institutions including Omega Institute, Naropa Institute, Findhorne, Zen Mountain Monastery, University of Massachusetts, San Francisco Zen Center, Buddhist Study Center at Barre, MA, Insight Meditation Society, and the Lama Foundation. She has a special interest in the uncovering and recovery of women's spiritual wisdom to inform work for social change. She has taught women's groups with Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Sharon Salzberg, Joan Halifax, Margo Adler, Starhawk, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Vicky Noble, and other leaders.
Her spiritual studies include meditation study at the Burmese Vihara in Bodh Gaya, India, with Shri S.N. Goenka and Anagarika Munindra; bhakti yoga with Hindu teacher Neemkaroli Baba; and studies with Tibetan lamas Kalu Rinpoche, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Kyabje Gehlek Rinpoche, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, and others. She also did five years of intensive practice in Iyengar yoga and five years of Aikido with Kanai Sensei. Her earlier religious study included 20 years of Catholic schooling, ending with Georgetown University graduate study in medieval literature. She holds an ABD in American literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Sunanda Markus
Academic Program Coordinator
Sunanda Markus took her first course in meditation in 1972 in India with the Theravadan Buddhist Vipassana teacher S.N. Goenka. More recently, she has been studying Dzogchen meditation with a Tibetan teacher, Tsoknyi Rinpoche. She began studying hatha yoga intensively in 1994. She is the coordinator of the Contemplative Practice Fellowship Program and frequently teaches yoga at meetings and retreats hosted by the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society.