Meet the Instructors

The instructors for our courses include current and retired Wesleyan faculty members who live in the Middletown area, alumni/ae,  and local professionals—artists, clergy, curators, scholars, scientists, writers, and other experts—who have no formal affiliation with Wesleyan but are pleased to share their knowledge, experience, and perspectives with our students.

  • Neely Bruce

    Neely Bruce is an American composer, conductor, pianist, and scholar of American music. He is the composer of over 800 works including three full-length operas. Currently, he is John Spencer Camp Professor of Music and American Studies at Wesleyan University, where he has taught since 1974. 

  • Richard Friswell

    Richard J. Friswell is an author and cultural historian dedicated to bringing the untold stories of 19th-century America to life. He holds an M.Phil. in Liberal Studies from Wesleyan, where he is a Visiting Scholar and Co-director of the Wasch Seminars. He serves on the Middlesex County Historical Society’s Board of Directors. His writings connect historical research with modern readers’ interests. His historical fiction includes Merchants of Deceit (2nd edition 2024) and Beware the Sleeping Tiger (forthcoming in 2026), which delve into the complexities of the China Trade from the perspective of the Middletown merchant Samuel Russell. In Hudson River Chronicles (2019) he portrays the dramatic career of the landscape painter Thomas Cole.

  • Corrie Folsom-O'Keefe

    Corrie Folsom-O’Keefe is the Bird Conservation Program Manager for Audubon Connecticut, the state office of the National Audubon Society. In this position she leads the Audubon Alliance for Coastal Waterbirds, which assists the CT Dept. of Energy and Environmental Protection’s Wildlife Division with the management of the Piping Plover and other beach-nesting birds. Corrie also partners with federal and state agencies as well as local conservation groups to identify, protect, and enhance Important Bird Areas, blocks of habitat critical to bird species of conservation concern. Corrie also assists with Audubon’s Forest Bird Initiative which provides technical assistance, via Habitat Assessments, to landowners, land managers, and communities who wish to protect and enhance habitat for breeding forest birds on the properties they own and/or manage. Corrie completed her Master’s degree at Connecticut College. She gained significant experience as an educator while employed at The Children’s Museum and enjoys flying airplanes and playing mandolin. 

  • Giulio Gallarotti

    Giulio M. Gallarotti is Professor of Government and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. He has also been a Visiting Professor in the Department of Economic Theory at the University of Rome. He is editor of the book series Social and Political Power at Manchester University Press and is the Chairman of the Research Group on Political Power in the International Political Science Association.

  • Rhea Higgins

    Rhea Higgins was an adjunct professor in the art history department in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Hartford. She taught at Wesleyan in Graduate Liberal Studies from 1986 to 2002. She has taught for the Wasch Center almost every year since its courses were inaugurated. Thanks to her extraordinary range of interests and expertise and her skill as a presenter, she has a devoted group of followers who sign up for every course she offers. Her area of expertise is 19th-century European painting, with an emphasis on post-Impressionist artists. 

  • Marc Longenecker

    Marc Longenecker is a film studies instructor as well as the programming and technical director of Wesleyan University's College of Film & the Moving Image. He teaches classes on Martin Scorsese, Elia Kazan, and Television Aesthetics, among other topics and guest lectures. He advises the student programming committee for the Wesleyan Film Series, and he hosts the annual Summer Film Series held at Wesleyan.

  • Victoria McCarthy

    Victoria McCarthy is a licensed arborist, advanced master gardener, beekeeper, and cultural historian. She has taught previous courses for Wesleyan on medieval herbal lore and William Gillette’s embodiment of Sherlock Holmes and the oak trees on his Connecticut estate that provided the wood used in his castle. She offers instruction on garden design to groups and individuals, emphasing sustainable and eco-friendly practices and designs gardens for clients adapted to the topography, soils, existing vegetation, and other features of their properties.

  • Sari Rosenblatt

    Sari Rosenblatt has published stories in the Iowa Review and has won individual short story awards from Glimmer Train, New Millennium Writings, Ms Magazine, and Nimrod International Journal of Poetry and Prose. She holds an MFA from The Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches fiction writing at the Educational Center for the Arts in New Haven, Connecticut. She lives in Middletown, Connecticut.

  • Gretchen Sorin

    Dr. Gretchen Sorin is director and distinguished service professor at the Cooperstown Graduate Program/ SUNY Oneonta. Sorin received a bachelor’s degree in American studies from Rutgers University, a master’s degree in museum studies from the Cooperstown Graduate Program, and a PhD in American history from the University at Albany. She has worked with more than 250 museums over three decades as an exhibition curator and education, programming, interpretive planning, and strategic planning consultant. Her most recent book is Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights (2020). She is also cowriter and senior historian with filmmaker Ric Burns on the documentary film Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility (2020). 

  • Andrew Szegedy-Maszak

    Andrew Szegedy-Maszak earned his B.A. in Classics at the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. at Princeton University. Since 1973 he has been on the faculty at Wesleyan University, where he is now Professor of Classical Studies and Jane A. Seney Professor of Greek. He has also held visiting professorships at UCLA, Dartmouth and the Yale School of Drama. He has been a guest scholar in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. He has won the American Philological Association's award for excellence in the teaching of Classics, as well as the Wesleyan University award for teaching excellence. In 1998-99 he was the "250th Anniversary Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching" at Princeton. In 2012-13 he was Wesleyan’s first Distinguished Teaching Fellow.

  • Richard Voigt

    Richard Voigt is a graduate of Wesleyan University and the Law School of the University of Virginia (“Mr. Jefferson’s University”). He served in the Office of the Solicitor, U.S. Department of Labor in Washington, D.C., before entering private law practice in Connecticut where he became a partner in the firm of McCarter & English, LLC. He also serves as a para-judicial officer for the U.S. District Court for Connecticut, and has been recognized for his work, including in Best Lawyers in America. He frequently lectures on American history and culture. 

  • Robert Wolff

    Dr. Wolff earned a B.A. in Political Science with a minor in history from the Honors Program of Swarthmore College. He later received an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. He joined the faculty at Central in 1997 as an assistant professor in the Department of History and was subsequently promoted to associate professor and professor. He has served as chair of the Department of History, acting chair of the Department of Theatre, and in numerous faculty leadership roles. Dr. Wolff studies the confluence of history, memory, and the legacies of African enslavement in the Americas.