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.

  • AJ Alanson

    AJ Alanson is a former dark-matter physicist turned full-time author with ten titles published in a twelve-book series of “cozy mysteries,” the Admiral Inn Mysteries and Adventures. She is currently working on projects in high and urban fantasy, non-fiction, and audio-book narration, pre-production podcast scripting, as well as 2D and 3D artworks, as well as vocals for an original movie soundtrack and songwriters’ demos. She also sculpts, paints, and blogs. She received  B.A.s in Fine Arts and History and in Environmental Physical Science from Black Hills State University in South Dakota. She did graduate studies in Geological Engineering and Hydrology at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and received a Master’s in Experimental Nuclear and Particle Physics from theUniversity of South Dakota in Vermillion.

  • Talia Andrei

    Talia Andrei is an assistant professor of art history at Wesleyan. She received her B.A. from Rutgers and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia. She specializes in medieval and early modern Japanese painting. Her dissertation focused on a genre of painting known as sankei mandara or “pilgrimage mandalas,” which are portable representations of sacred sites, carried around the country by monks and nuns for use in fundraising. She is currently developing a book project based on this research. She has published articles in Cross Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, in Kokka, and in Art Bulletin.

  • Ken Elkins

    Ken Elkins is the recently apppointed Director of Education and Partnerships at the Catherine Violet Hubbard Animal Sanctuary in Newtown, bringing over two decades of leadership in environmental education and conservation to its mission. Ken has held prominent roles at several Audubon centers, most recently as the Director of the Coastal Center at Milford Point. Ken’s deep commitment to connecting people with nature has taken him across the United States and around the world, leading ecotourism and conservation trips. Ken is a past president of the Connecticut Ornithological Association.

  • 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.

  • Katherine A. Hermes

    Katherine A. Hermes is professor emerita of history at CCSU. She received her A.B. in history, cum laude, from the UC Irvine, her M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Yale University. She also holds a J.D. from Duke University’s School of Law. She became the publisher and editor of Connecticut Explored in 2022. At CCSU, she served as interim department chair (Fall 2001, 2021) and interim coordinator of Polish Studies (2001–2002). She co-coordinated the program on Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from 2005 to 2007 and chaired CCSU’s History Department from 2012 to 2018. Her teaching and scholarship focused on on Anglo-American legal history, Native Americans of the Eastern Woodlands, and the American Revolution, as well as early American history.In 2010 she was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow in the American Maritime History workshop at the Munson Institute, Mystic Seaport,. In 2012 the Max Planck Institute for Legal History in Frankfurt, Germany, invited her to speak at the LOEWE Research Focus workshop on “Justice without the State.” She is also a fellow of the American Bar Foundation. In 2013, Dr. Hermes was elected as a Fellow to the International Academy on Workplace Bullying for her work as a volunteer pushing for legislation to protect the targets of workplace abuse.

  • William Johnston

    William Johnston is the John E. Andrus Professor of History, emeritus at Wesleyan. He was affiliated with the Science in Society Program and the College of East Asian Studies. He grew up in Wyoming and received his B.A. from Elmira College and his Ph.D. from Harvard. He also studied at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan, Nagoya University, and Tokyo University, and held positions as a research scholar at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies and at Kyoto University. He had an appointment as the Edwin O. Reischauer Visiting Professor of History at Harvard. A practitioner and student of Zen Buddhism since his teens, he formally enrolled in training as a Soto monk in 2018. A photographer as well as a historian specializing in infectious diseases and a Zen practitioner, he has worked closely with the dancer Eiko Otake, with whom he published A Body in Fukushima (Wesleyan University Press).

  • Richard Little

    Richard Little is Professor emeritus of geology at Greenfield (MA) Community College and an inductee into the Massachusetts Science Educator Hall of Fame. He also taught at the Antioch New England Graduate School in Keene, NH. Educated at Clark University and UCLA, he has been a geology instructor at Deerfield Academy, where he has also taught Elderhostel courses in geology. He has served three terms as president of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers. For six years he chaired the Franklin County Solid Waste Management District, a 20-town cooperative dealing with local waste-disposal issues. His previous course in the Wasch Seminar series dealt with unique geological features of the Connecticut River Valley in Western Massachusetts, including the phenomenon of “armored mudballs.”

  • 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.

  • Marlon Millner

    Marlon Millner is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Religion and African American Studies at Wesleyan. He earned  his B.A. from Morehouse College, his M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School, and his Ph.D. from Northwestern University. He works at the intersection of critical social theory, Black studies, religious studies, and political philosophy, examining the intertwined relationship of Christianity and colonialism in forging modernity and racial hierarchy. He is currently working on two book projects: Without the Body, Within the Flesh: Biopolitics, Blackness, and the Birth of Pentecostalism, and Pentecostalism as Black Diaspora—An Africana Argument. His work has been published by The Syndicate Network, Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, and The Journal of Black Religious Thought. He serves as the co-chair of the Religion, Colonialism and Postcolonialism Program Unit of the American Academy of Religion. He formerly served as Director of the Center for Black Studies at Northern Illinois University, and as instructor in the School of Professional Studies at Northwestern.

  • Jesse Nasta

    Jesse Nasta is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in African American Studies at Wesleyan. He received his B.A .from Wesleyan and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Northwestern. He specializes in the history of slavery, emancipation, and their aftermaths, with a particular emphasis on New England, and in local LGBTQ history. Since 2020 he has been the Executive Director of the Middlesex County Historical Society in Middletown. He served as a principal investigator for the three-year Mellon Foundation-funded Carceral Connecticut Project (carceralconnecticut.com) and has directed Wesleyan’s High School Humanities Program. His current project, which began as his undergraduate honors thesis, focuses on the Beman Triangle, Middletown, Connecticut’s 19th-century African American neighborhood, and its connections to regional, national, and global Black community and antislavery networks. Working closely with descendant communities and the larger public, Dr. Nasta’s teaching combines and informs scholarship with service learning, community-building, and the presence of the past in our everyday local, community, and family lives. 

  • Andrew Quintman

    Andrew Quintman is Associate Professor of Religion at Wesleyan. He is also affiliated with the Center for East Asian Studies and the Program in Global South Indian Studies.

    He received his BA from Hampshire College and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. For seven years he served as Academic Director of the School for International Training’s Tibetan Studies program based in Kathmandu. Between 2001 and 2007 he also designed and led a summer program inTibetan Studies for the University of Michigan that took place in Tibet. Before coming to Wesleyan, he taught at Princeton, where he held the Cotsen-Mellon Fellowship in the History of the Book in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, and at Yale University. His book, The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’s Great Saint Milarepa (Columbia University Press 2014), won the American Academy of Religion’s 2014 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion and the 2015 Heyman Prize for outstanding scholarship from Yale University, and received honorable mention for the 2016 E. Gene Smith Book Prize conferred by the Association of Asian Studies. In 2010 his new English translation of the Life of Milarepa was published by Penguin Classics. He is currently working on two new projects, one exploring Buddhist religious and literary culture in the borderlands of Tibet and Nepal, and the other examining the life of the Buddha through visual and literary materials associated with the seventeenth-century Jonang Monastery in western Tibet.

  • Natalie Semmel

    Natalie Semmel is the Woodbridge Fellow in the Department of Community Engagement and University Archives at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. She recently graduated from Yale College with distinction in Intensive Film and Media Studies, completing two full-length theses, an essay on American and Indian home movies in the Yale Film Archives and a screenplay. She will host the visit to the Beinecke.