Professors in Residence

Paul J. Young is an Associate Professor of French. He earned his B.A. at the University of Steubenville, and his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a specialist in eighteenth-century French literature. At Georgetown University, he has taught a variety of courses focusing on French literature, French culture, as well as French language courses. He has published several articles and one book focused eighteenth-century French literature, and he is currently working on a new book that looks at the importance of four eighteenth-century French women writers. His course "The Other Italy: Italian Women Writers, Artists, and Filmmakers from the Early-Modern Period through the Present Day," allows him to explore his interest in women writers, as well as his expertise in the Early-Modern period. The course will focus on the contributions that women writers and artist have made to the cultural development of Italy, in the past as well as in the present.

Anne Sullivan is a Senior Associate Dean in Georgetown College. She earned her Bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College, and an M.A.T. degree from Harvard University Graduate School of Education. She also earned an M.A. in English Literature from Georgetown University. Her first job brought her to Washington, D.C. to teach in the DC Public Schools as an intern in the Urban Teacher Corps (quite similar to Teach for America today in design). She works in the College Dean's Office doing academic advising and administrative work in support of students' success in the classroom. She has taught classes in English, and in Women's and Gender Studies, and has tutored in subjects across the general education curriculum of the College. Her intellectual interests are grounded in the great Victorian novels - in the Christian Humanism therein - and in the critique that feminism brings to social structures and one's world view. She is teaching a class that focuses on education, "Schools Matter." The course will combine selected topics in the history of education (with an emphasis on Italian contributions to that history) with exercises that challenge students to think about their own education in the here and now.

Professor Xenakis is an Adjunct Lecturer in Studio Art in the Department of Art and Art History. He has taught Drawing I: Visual language since 2002. He has taught a variety of painting, drawing, and design courses at the Corcoran School of Art and Design and Marymount University in the Washington Metro area. Professor Xenakis earned an M.A. in the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine, at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Additionally, he has an M.F.A. in Painting from the Hoffberger School of Painting, The Maryland Institute College of Art. He has been awarded two Senior Fulbright Fellowships in research and artist-in-residences to Greece. He has exhibited his art nationally and internationally and maintains an art studio in DC. His works can be viewed at his website at www.xenakisarts.com. His Spring 2010 studio visual arts course is designed for all skill levels and is entitled: Italian Visual Language: The Italian Sketchbook. The Villa Le Balze and environs will provide students with a unique opportunity to visually and creatively document their study abroad experience.

Professor Astarita is a native of Naples Italy.  He came to the US in 1983 to pursue his graduate studies and has taught at Georgetown since 1989.  He is currently Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the History Department.  He still has family in Naples.  His research area is southern Italy in the early modern period (roughly 1500-1800), and he teaches the European Civ survey, plus courses on the Renaissance, the ancient Mediterranean, Italian and Spanish history, and seminars on historiography and autobiography.  At Villa le Balze in Fall 2009 he will teach HIST 130, The Mediterranean World in Antiquity.

Professor Fisher is an Associate Professor in the Department of English. She is a former chair of the department and was the first Director (and co-Founder) of the Women's and Gender Studies Program. She teaches courses in children's literature and culture, feminism, narrative theory, Victorian nonfiction and fiction, and Charles Dickens. Her publications focus primarily on children's texts and Victorian topics. Professor Fisher earned the Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of California Santa Barbara in Victorian Literature and an A.B. from Stanford University in American Literature. Her Spring 2009 English course at Villa Le Balze is entitled "Images of Italy and Italians in Anglophone Literature."

Dean Andretta is a cultural anthropologist who received a B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She has done fieldwork among the Amhara of Ethiopia and the Murle of the Southern Sudan. Her research interests center on issues of social organization and ethnicity among East African pastoralists. Dr. Andretta teaches a Culture and Politics course entitled "Museums and the Construction of Knowledge" during the Fall 2008 Semester.