Global Virtual Faculty: 2001

INDIA - Dr. Nilufer Bharucha is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Mumbai, India. She holds a Ph.D. from University of Bombay (Mumbai). Dr. Bharucha is a leading Indian critic in the field of post-colonial literature. She sits on the Awards Committee of the Commonwealth Prize in Literature and is the author of tens of articles and papers on post-colonial issues; a translation from the Urdu of the Dharampur Saga; five-book length critical studies in English and her own short stories. She has taught at universities in England, Germany, Spain and India.

MALAYSIA - Dr. Cheng Ming Yu is the Head of the Economics Unit of the Faculty of Management at the Multimedia University in Malaysia. She holds a Ph.D. from University Putra Malaysia. Dr. Cheng specializes in Econometrics, Development Economics, and ASEAN studies. She has published six books in England and Malaysia on economic crises in Asia, K-economy and emerging Asian markets.

CHILE - Dr. Tomas Chuaqui is a political scientist currently working as a Professor at the Instituto de Ciencia Politica of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. He holds a Ph.D., M.A. in Politics from Princeton University. Dr. Chuaqui is a published political scientist whose area of interest is political ethics.

ROMANIA - Dr. Viorela D. Ciucur is an Assistant Professor of Piano Accompaniment Dept at the Music Academy in Bucharest. Dr. Ciucur performed over 200 piano and chamber music recitals in Romania and toured Europe, United States and Canada. She participated in many international festivals in Europe. Her music was recorded for Radio Romania, Radio Moldova and Sudwesfunk, Germany. Dr. Ciucur issued one LP and one CD with arias and canzonettas for voice and piano. She won ten first prizes as a pianist and chamber music groups member; was a finalist in Marsala, Italy in 1985 and won first prize in Stresa, Italy in 1983. She published two books on music and is a weekly contributor to Ecart (cultural publication). She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from the Music Academy of Bucharest, Romania.

SLOVENIA - Dr. Ales Debeljak is a social scientist and cultural anthropologist. He holds a Ph.D. in Social Theory from Syracuse University. Dr. Debeljak has published widely both in Europe and the U.S. His work is in the area of cultural criticism. He is also a well known poet in Slovenia and other Balkan states. His poetry was published in the U.S., Italy, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, France, Croatia, Austria and Yugoslavia.

BELGIUM/EU - Mr. Ben Duncan is a European liaison Officer of the British Medical Association in Brussels. He is an EU lobbyist whose major lobbying campaigns over the past years have been raising EU minimum training requirements for general medical practitioners to three years and directive on labeling presentation and content of tobacco products. His responsibilities within the BMA and EU range from inputting BMA policy to the EU institutions and advising elected members and senior management on EU policy developments to developing policy and position papers and letters. Mr. Duncan holds a LL.M, specializing in EC Law from the University of Edinburgh.

JAMAICA - Dr. Norval Edwards is a Lecturer at the Department of Literatures in English at the University of West Indies in Jamaica. He holds a Ph.D. from York University, Canada. Dr. Edwards is particularly interested in post-colonial literatures, literary theory, popular culture and nationalism, and contemporary poetry. His two books on Caribbean Poetics and Culture are forthcoming from the Indiana University Press. Dr. Edwards has written numerous articles on Caribbean literature, culture, economy and society.

ISRAEL - Dr. Chanoch Jacobsen is a sociologist. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology, Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Before retirement, Dr. Jacobsen was an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion, Haifa. He is currently working on three projects. Dr. Jacobsen published extensively in Israel and the U.S.

INDIA - Dr. Narendra Jadhav is an Advisor to Executive Director for India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Bhutan at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Washington, D.C. He started his career in State bank of India; joined the Reserve Bank of India as a research officer and worked as a deputy director and director of the department of Economic Analysis and Policy. His international career took him to Ethiopia where he worked as advisor to the governor, National Bank of Ethiopia, to Malaysia and Sigapore and Middle East where he studied Hawala Market. He published four books in India and U.S. Dr. Jadhav holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Indiana University.

INDIA - Mr. Kumar Ketkar is an Indian journalist. He is a senior political columnist for the Times of India. He has served as a special correspondent, resident editor and editor of the Economic Times, the Observer and Maharashtra Times. His specialization is international affairs. In his 30-year career as a journalist, Mr. Ketkar covered four US presidential elections, two British elections, served as a reporter from Bejing, Shanghai and Guongdong covering the economic transformation of China. He also covered Hong Kong's reintegration with the Mainland China (from Hong Kong), collapse of the Soviet Union (from Moscow), and the unification of Germany. Mr. Ketkar was invited by Israel for a lecture assignment during Israel's 50th anniversary and served as a delegate at the NGO Peace Conference in Geneva. He is a regular visiting lecturer at the University of Mumbai, University of Pune, both in India. He also served as a visiting lecturer at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

UNITED KINGDOM - Dr. John Lennard is a freelance academic and writer who lives in Cambridge, UK. Educated in Bristol, Oxford, and St Louis, MO, he worked within the academic system for ten years, including seven as Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, but eventually found it too stifling and bureaucratic. As well as on-line teaching for FDU, he is presently Dean of the Shakespeare Programme of the British-American Drama Academy, a small London-based conservatoire, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Notre Dame's London campus. He also teaches poetry and drama for various Cambridge colleges.

John's doctoral thesis was in the history of punctuation, and became But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). He has continued to publish on punctuation history and theory, including material for the mass-market Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms, and has also produced two best-selling textbooks, The Poetry Handbook: A Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism (Oxford: OUP, 1996), and with Mary Luckhurst The Drama Handbook: A Guide to Reading Plays (Oxford: OUP, 2002). A Prose Handbook is in the works. Another book called The Case of Ronald Merrick: Class, Moral Judgement, and the Raj, about Paul Scott's epic Raj Quartet (televised as The Jewel in the Crown) and the domestic reception of his insistence on British imperial failure, is so long no-one has yet been willing to publish it. Shorter work includes the current essays on Paul Scott, Derek Walcott, R.K.Narayan, Reginald Hill, and Ian Rankin for the Scribners British Writers and World Writers series.

ISRAEL - Dr. Jacob Lomranz is an Israeli Psychologist currently teaching at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Tel Aviv. He holds a Ph.D. from Duke in Clinical Psychology. Dr. Lomranz specializes in gerontology and is the President of the Israeli Gerontological Society. He is also the founder and director of the Herzog Institute on Aging. Dr. Lomranz has published extensively on the topic of aging and mental health. He is also actively involved at the Center for Psychological Support of Holocaust survivors.

KOREA - Dr. Philip Lyon is an educator working at the Payap University in Thailand. Mr. Lyon holds a Ph.D. in Exceptional Children from the Ohio State University. He is currently working as the Director of International Programs at the Payap University. From 1989 to 1995 Dr. Lyon was an Associate Dean of Edward Williams College at FDU as well as Dean of Students at the Rutherford campus. Dr. Lyon taught at the College of Micronesia (Thailand), the Hong Kong Institute of Education (Hong Kong) and FDU. He currently serves on the editorial board of Scholar and Educator, San Juan, PR. He is a well published author in Hong Kong and Asia. Some of his books include: Technology in Teaching: Partners in Growth, Honk Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong, 1998; School Based Research: Partnership in Professional Development, Department of Special Education HKIED, Hong Kong, 1998, etc.

JAMAICA - Dr. Velma Pollard is a Caribbean writer and poet. She has published three volumes of short stories, and poetry and essays in a number of journals and literary reviews and anthologies of Caribbean poetry. She is a former lecturer at the University of West Indies. Her interests include Caribbean women's writing, the language of Caribbean literature and Creole languages of the Anglophone Caribbean. Most recently she has been a visiting Professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia.

ISRAEL - Dr. Ami Shak'ed is a psychologist /sexologist. Dr. Shak'ed holds a Ph.D. in Rehabilitation Counseling Psychology from University of Wisconsin at Madison. He has been teaching for the past 20 years at the Sackler School of Medicine of the Tel Aviv University in Israel. He was a Professor of Psychology and a Chair of the Psychology Program at FDU's Israel Campus from 1996 to 1999. Dr. Shak'ed published extensively on topics such as: Human Sexuality in Physical and Mental Illness and Disabilities and Human Sexuality in Rehabilitation Medicine.

INDIA - Dr. Shridhar Shrimali is an Indian economist and a political scientist. He is currently a Director of the Academic Staff College of the University of Mumbai. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL. Dr. Shrimali worked as a warden of an International Students' House of the University of Mumbai; a reader at the Center for Soviet Studies at the University of Mumbai and as a Lecturer at the Department of Economics at the University of Hyderabad. Dr. Shrimali has lectured and written extensively about politics and economics of the former Soviet Union.

HUNGARY - Dr. Anna Varkonyi is a Hungarian environmentalist. She holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Economics from Budapest University, an M.A. in Political Sciences and Sociology and an M.Sc. in Chemical Engineering. Dr. Varkonyi has served as a researcher with the Hungarian Commission on Sustainable Development and as a representative of the Hungarian government at the 5th Session of Commission on Sustainable Development and the UN General Assembly Special Session. Dr. Varkonyi was a visiting scholar for Science and Environment at the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in Brussels and at the PANOS Institute in London (International Institute for Environment and Development and Reuters). She is currently in New Jersey.