Friends and Colleagues
Ashton Applewhite
Writer and Activist, Brooklyn, New York.
Thought leader in raising awareness of ageism and how to undo it. Autodidact, solitary crank. Funny but profound.
Selected Publications: This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism (2019) and Cutting Loose: Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well (1997).
Website: www.thischairrocks.com
Candace Barrington, PhD
Professor of English, Central Connecticut State University
Thought leader in Chaucer Studies with a focus on Chaucer's global reception history. Incoming president of the New Chaucer Society, an international organization serving scholars, teachers, and students of medieval literature. Studied with Lee Patterson. When not writing or teaching she is generally occupied as a serious gardener, tenacious sentence diagrammer, and devoted grandmother.
Selected Publications: American Chaucers (2007), which jump-started the study of Chaucer's global reception. With Emily Steiner, co-edited The Letter of the Law (2002). Co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal, New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession.
Current projects: Monograph on Chaucer's translational habits and another book on non-Anglophone translations of The Canterbury Tales.
Website: https://www.ccsu.edu/person/candace-barrington
Paul Schiff Berman, JD
Walter S. Cox Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School; Theater Director with Ping Chong & Company.
Thought leader on cyberlaw (the interaction of legal systems across borders) as well as online education. Clerked for Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards, US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit (1995-96) and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court of the United States (1997-98).
Selected Publications: Global Legal Pluralism: A Jurisprudence of Law Beyond Borders (2012) and the Oxford Handbook of Global Legal Pluralism (2020).
Website: https://www.law.gwu.edu/paul-schiff-berman; Tiktok: @paulschiffberman; Twitter/X: @pschiffberman
Joan DelFattore, PhD
Professor Emerita of English and Legal Studies, University of Delaware
Thought leader in healthcare equity and accessibility. Specializes in obstacles faced by singles and others who do not occupy conventional nuclear families. First author to document the association between relationship status and cancer treatment as well as singlism pervading mainstream medical literature.
Selected Publications and Presentations: "Death by Stereotype" (New England Journal of Medicine, September 2019); TEDx talk: "Sick While Single? Don't Die of Discrimination."
Current Projects: Sick While Single: How Outdated Views of Marital Status and Social Support Drive Healthcare Inequity (working title – forthcoming from Yale University Press).
Website: https://www.joandelfattore.com
Bella DePaulo, PhD
Academic Affiliate at the Department of Psychological &
Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara
Thought leader: Social psychologist with vast knowledge of
clinical research on single life as well as life outside marriage and
other romantic partnerships. Expert on prejudice against those
without amorous companions, which pervades areas as diverse as
taxation, insurance, medical treatment, psychological studies,
hiring, and housing availability as well as informal social practices
and attitudes. Invented the term "singlism" to characterize this
form of bigotry. Described by The Atlantic as "America's foremost
thinker and writer on the single experience." Studied with Robert
Rosenthal. Project scientist, editorialist, blogger, speaker.
Selected Publications: Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom,
and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life (2023).
Current Projects: Short pieces and talks that change the
narrative about what it can mean to be single aimed at those
outside the academy. Working to make "Single at Heart" a thing
(as the kids say).
Website: https://belladepaulo.com/
John Farrell, PhD
Waldo W. Neikirk Professor of Literature, Claremont McKenna College
Thought leader in the humanities with a focus on suspicion as a modern mode of thought. Scholar of English, French, and American Literature; Literary Theory; Philosophy and Literature; and Psychoanalysis. NEH Fellowship recipient. Intellectual historian, podcaster (with Professor Alex Rajczi), raconteur.
Selected Publications: Freud's Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion (1996); Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau (2006); The Varieties of Authorial Intention: Literary Theory Beyond the Intentional Fallacy (2017); The Utopian Dilemma in the Western Political Imagination (2023).
Website: https://www.johnfarrellonline.com/
Danny Fingeroth
Pop-Culture Historian, Writer, Editor
Thought leader: expert in the history of comic books and graphic novels; leading specialist in the intersection of comics and Jewish culture. Studied formally with Ken Jacobs, Larry Gottheim, and Bernard Rosenthal – informally with Stan Lee, Louse Simonson, and Marshall "Buzz" Potamkim at Marvel Comics and other media companies.
Selected Publications: Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero (2007); Jack Ruby: The Many Faces of Oswald's Assassin (2023).
Current Projects: Going to Bed With America, a book examining the sociological effects of late night talk shows and their hosts.
Website: http://www.dannyfingeroth.com
Fiona Lowenstein
Writer, Journalist, Editor
Thought Leader in health advocacy with special focus on the illness now called Long COVID. Author of the first mainstream media article on this condition (New York Times, 2021). Studied with Bob Woodward, Bill Rankin, and Crystal Feimster. Founder of Body Politic, home of the original Long COVID Support Group and The Wayside, Los Angeles-based health justice community hub.
Selected Publications: The Long COVID Survival Guide: How to Take Care of Yourself and What Comes Next
Website: https://www.fionalowenstein.com
Katherine E. Sugg, PhD
Professor Emerita of English and Latinx Studies, Central Connecticut State University
Comparative literary and cinema studies scholar focusing on contemporary works that crystalize collective experiences of gender, race, and political economy. Coined the term "liberal apocalypse" for trends in popular culture that feature certain, often-allegorical narratives of societal annihilation, which surreptitiously endorse conventional social structures. Studied with Michael Palencia-Roth, Norma Alarcón, and Jane Gallop. When not reading, writing, or worrying, she can usually be found hiking, playing tennis, or dining with Jaclyn.
Selected Publications: Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance (2008) and Apocalypse and Heroism in Popular Culture: Allegories of White Masculinity in Crisis (2022).
Current Projects: Narrative Subjects of Gore Capitalism: Rewriting Agency and Abjection in the Americas and Myths, Tricks, or Triumphs? Tracing One Family's Frontier Legacy
Website: http://ccsu.academia.edu/KatherineSugg
Nicholas L. Syrett, PhD
Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Kansas
Leading historian of women, gender, sexuality, and childhood in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. Studied with Mary Kelley and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg.
Selected Publications: American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States (2016); An Open Secret: The Family Story of Robert and John Gregg Allerton (2021); The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America's Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime (2023).
Current Projects: With Amy Sueyoshi, Queer American History: A Reader in Documents and Essays (forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press); with Jen Manion, The Cambridge History of Sexuality in the United States (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press).