Meet Chapin's Wonderful 2009 - 2010 Chapin Master Staff

Master - Brian Bouldrey

Professor Brian Bouldrey, Master, lived in Chapin when he was a Northwestern student, in 1965. Times were rough for an orphaned Lithuanian immigrant, but Brian was able to earn money to buy books by delivering cheese to various local businesses. When he found, upon graduating, that there were few careers for professional cat trainers, he began writing. Since that certainly does not pay, he began teaching. He is the author of the nonfiction books Honorable Bandit: A Walk Across Corsica (University of Wisconsin Press, September, 2007), Monster: Adventures in American Machismo (Council Oak Books), and The Autobiography Box (Chronicle Books); as well as three novels, The Genius of Desire (Ballantine), Love, the Magician (Harrington Park), and The Boom Economy (University of Wisconsin Press). He has edited several anthologies. He is recipient of Fellowships from Yaddo and Eastern Frontier Society, and the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Western Regional Magazine Award. Professor Bouldrey teaches fiction and creative nonfiction.

Assistant to the Master - Britt Peterson

Greetings new Chapinos!

My name is Britt Petersen and I am Chapin's ever-devoted Assistant Master. I'm kind of a cross between a social planner and an academic resource at HRC, which basically means I divide my time between nagging students to come on cultural outings in Chicago with me and nagging them to become History majors. Indeed, come September you can expect to find your inboxes quickly saturated with emails from me about everything from, say, Cubs tickets to the historical significance of Wrigley Field. I love Chicago and revel in its history, but most of all I love that I have the opportunity to take it all in with some of the coolest, quirkiest students at NU. Go Chapin!

Speaking of history (ahem) I am a grad student in the History Department (in case you didn't already guess), and I'm currently in the throes of writing my dissertation on memoirs of the French Revolution. Truly I think my propensity to terrorize students who don't pay me on time stems from the fact that I spend my days immersed in tales of death and dismemberment, madness and mayhem, and, of course, sensational beheadings. There's nothing I love more than to chat with Chapinos during office hours or at Willard dining hall on the mechanics of the guillotine or the horrors of the Terror. As I'm sure yo're already just dying to know more about this delightfully 'juicy' era of European history, I'll be offering a fireside (complete with gory pictures, of course) sometime during Fall Quarter, so watch for the email!

With that, I would like to join Master Brian and Associate Master Garth in welcoming you to Chapin. We are an amazing little community remarkable for both its intellectual diversity and cultural cohesiveness, a quality that is perhaps best reflected in the make-up of your Master Staff. Indeed, like the rag-tag bunch of pilgrims in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Brian the bawdy-but-brilliant writer, Garth the intrepid neurobiologist, and me, historian of the morbid, have all come together in a common mission: to help make your journey as Chapinos here at Northwestern as fun and intellectually stimulating as we can. We look forward to meeting you all in September!

Cheers,

Britt

Associate Master - Garth Fowler

Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch

Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch, Acting Director of the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities, teaches classes on 19th-century American writers and 20th-century American and Europeanexperimental fiction. She has published articles and book chapters on nineteenth-century American fiction, on aspects of the classical tradition in the United States, and on postmodern literature. She is currently working on the use of classical mythology in American fiction, a book-length project that stems from a post doctoral fellowship at Harvard.  EFP is Polish by birth, a Cancer with two sons (one is graduating from Grinnell College, the other just about to enter middle school) and a husband who is an avant-garde classical saxophonist, musicologist, and opera buff.  She enjoys reading mystery novels, exploring Chicago and the North Shore, and-- given the chance--mountain hiking. Movies and travel are two other favorite pastimes, as well as going on Residential College outings to Chicago theatres, opera, and museums--you too should definitely try that, as it's a lot of fun.

Jeff Garrett

Jeff Garrett was born a few blocks from Northwestern, at Evanston Hospital, while his parents were still Northwestern undergraduates.  This was in 1949. His earliest memories of Northwestern were from  when he was 3, being carted around campus by his father, whose first job out of college was filling vending machines in Tech. Dad went on to make a million as a vending machine mogul and the family moved to a prosperous part of Wilmette. Jeff went to high school at New Trier and then spent two years at Princeton before joining the army and going to Germany. There he became a sergeant, learned German, and served as battalion interpreter for a year, mainly sorting out brawls involving GIs with the Frankfurt police department. When he was discharged, he bought a bike and rode all over Europe, from Greece, across what was then Yugoslavia, through Hungary, Austria, Germany, and France--back to Germany. He moved to Munich, graduated from the university there with high honors in linguistics and history, and began teaching for an American Junior Year Abroad program. That's how he met his wife, Carol. In 1988 his young family left. Germany so that he could go to grad school at Berkeley, where he was named a Regents Fellow. He came to Purdue as the librarian responsible for the humanities--which he says felt like being in charge of the lingerie department at a hardware store. In 1995 he came (back) to Northwestern, and since 2001 has been responsible for managing Northwestern's budget and strategy for acquiring library materials. He continues to research in his chosen areas, namely German and Austrian library history and international children's literature. Publications include articles in Library Quarterly, Eighteenth Century Studies, Celtic Studies Newsletter, and The Journal of Electronic Publishing. Details available at his German Department website at http://www.german.northwestern.edu/faculty/garrett.html or from http://www.geocities.com/gotefridus/.

Bill Heyck

Bill Heyck:  Professor of modern British and Irish history.  I'm in  my last year at Northwestern before retirement.  I'm happy to say that I'm one of the Founding Fathers (and Mothers) of Chapin, having been part of the outfit since the organizational meetings back in 1976 or 1977 and a Fellow ever since.  I also served as Master from 1984 to 1988.  Before that, I was Master for a year of the predecessor of Chapin, the Philosophy and Religion Residential College, which was housed in the miserable Foster-Walker Complex.  I have many a great memory of Chapinos and my colleagues among the Fellows--and many a story to tell, some of them actually fit for public consumption.

Allen V. Lentino

Senior Associate Director of Admission and Financial Aid
13th year at Northwestern, and 3rd as a Chapin Fellow.
Even if you haven’t met him, it’s likely that Allen, or one of his colleagues, had something to do with you being at Northwestern.  As a member of the staff of the Office of Undergraduate Admission, Allen has the distinct pleasure of reading a few thousand admission files each year and making decisions about who will be offered a place in the freshmen class.  Prior to coming to Northwestern in 1994, he did the same at his alma mater, Loyola University Chicago (B.A Political Science, M.Ed Student Personnel, Ph.D. Higher Ed Administration), for a number of years, where he served as Director of Undergraduate Admission.  It’s a job that he truly enjoys, but the real joy comes in getting to know students personally and seeing them thrive and succeed as they move through their undergrad years. One of Allen’s other jobs in Admission is as Director of the Northwestern Alumni Admission Council, a volunteer corps of 4000 alums who assist the Office of Undergraduate Admission in a variety of recruitment activities. So, for Allen, it comes full circle, working with students as prospects, through the admission decision, as NU students and as alumni/ae after they graduate.  In fall 2006, Allen will become an elected member of the Board of Directors for the National Association for College Admission Counseling, based in Alexandria, VA. He is a Past President of the Illinois Association for College Admission Counseling. A lifelong Chicagoan, Allen loves the city and takes full advantage of all it has to offer, particularly theatre, ethnic foods, cycling along the lakefront.  He is a political junkie, and has been very active in government relations activities related to admission and higher ed.  He also is actively involved in theatre, as an audience member and currently as a student at The Victory Gardens Theater Training Center in Chicago. And don’t be surprised if you see him running a marathon or half-marathon some day, that’s his next goal.

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, in what was then the Soviet Union, to a family of Jewish intellectuals who thought they were the crème de la crème of Russian intelligentsia.  Because of his hardly concealed skepticism regarding the bright communist future promised to the Soviet people, Yohanan was the last in his high school class to become a member of the Young Communist league, the Komsomol.  Later, instead of becoming a student of engineering or Russian philology as all normal Jewish kids did in the USSR of the 1970s,  he chose the career of a student of Spanish and Latin American Literature, a fact that shows his bad taste and early propensity to go against the stream. Growing up in a country of militant atheism, Yohanan has practiced Zen, Russian/Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglo-Catholicism, and a number of other weird religious beliefs before he defended his dissertation on Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Moscow University in 1988. He taught comparative literature at Kyiv University for five years and started to get used to his growing reputation as a literary scholar with some sixty publications in the field. Yet in January 1993, and other sources claim as early as December 1992, he lost his mind, abandoned his successful career as a university scholar, cut himself off once and for all from his literary endeavors and decided to become an observant Jew. Dry words of a short bio fail to convey the distress of his family and the sorrow of his students. To add insult to a wound, Yohanan turned to moldy Hebrew manuscripts of the 17th and 18th centuries, recovered from the declassified Soviet archives. Nobody was interested in these reeking manuscripts except for Yohanan himself and the Rothchild Foundation which for some murky reasons made him a Fellow and brought him to Hebrew University just to prove that he was a complete ignoramus, something Yohanan discovered only in 1995. From Jerusalem Yohanan was catapulted to Brandeis University where the best scholars in Modern Jewish History grudgingly read his dull dissertation on Jews who were lucky to serve Russian tsars in the Russian army between 1827 and 1914. Even more grudgingly, in 2001, after lengthy hesitation, Brandeis awarded him his PhD, gave him the Nahum Glatzer prize for his dissertation to make sure he used the money to get as far from Boston as possible, and sighed with relief when in 2003 Yohanan got his Assistant Professorship in the much acclaimed History Department at Northwestern University. CTEC’s have proved so far that Yohanan is a mediocre teacher and a slow-thinking scholar tolerated by his students and colleagues only for his remarkable ability to create the impression that he is always busy. Suffice it to mention that no residential college except Chapin Hall invited Yohanan to become a fellow. The only positive quality discovered so far by his interlocutors over lunch is that he attentively listens to students’ complaints of the quality of Chapin Hall cuisine, approvingly nods, and never comments. Why should he—he dines there solely once a week, on Thursdays! Come join him at the table.

Liz Fekete Trubey

Liz Trubey is a WCAS Adviser and a Lecturer in the English Department, where she teaches classes on early American novels, American women's fiction, and representing the Holocaust, among other topics.  She is currently working on a research project about women and slavery in the South.  She has a longstanding passion for bad movies, especially The Scarlet Letter, and will happily explain to you the many merits of the film.  She is also a huge, very opinionated sports fan, particularly of college and pro football and basketball.  In fact, she prides herself on being the only Fellow in Chapin who can explain the difference between the nickel and dime defensive packages while also explaining the point of Moby-Dick.  She spends every spare minute she has with her adorable daughter, Megan (born in Oct 2005), and her husband.  They are training Megan up to be a good sports fan.