Faculty Members

Jon Anderson, Professor of Mathematics, received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota's Division of Biostatistics. He was previously a faculty member in the Statistics Department at the University of Georgia. Professor Anderson's research interests include survival analysis, design and analysis of medical studies, and sample surveys. He is currently an Associate Editor for the journal Biometrics.

Tammy Berberi joined the French Discipline and was named Director of the Language Teaching Center at UMM in the fall of 2002. She earned a B.A. from Colorado College, an M.A. in Romance Languages from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Ph.D. in French Literature from Indiana University.

Tammy has long been involved in disability rights, and is particularly interested in improving the representation and success of students with disabilities on American college campuses. She served as the first graduate student member to the Modern Language Association Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession, and currently serves on the executive committee for the MLA Disability Studies Discussion Group. She has also been moderating DS-HUM, a listserv community for Disability Studies in the Humanities, since 2000. In keeping with these interests, she is currently working with two co-editors on a volume of essays and materials, Disability and the Foreign Language Classroom.

Christopher Butler came to Morris from his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. He prefers midwestern schools having been graduated by Miami University (B.A. in English and History) and the University of Notre Dame (M.A. in American Studies). His teaching interests are sociology, gender, college writing and sports. His professional writing experience includes three years as a reporter and news director for a public radio affiliate, three years of grant writing, and a year of instructional design.  He has also co-authored a book.

Matt Conner is the Instruction Coordinator and Government Documents Librarian at the Rodney A. Briggs Library. He received his MLS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he also received a Ph.D. in American Literature. In addition to coordinating library workshops, he teaches courses at the UMM campus and is actively engaged in initiatives on information literacy. His research is focused on the literature of the Civil War, and he is currently preparing a manuscript on representations of the citizen-soldier ideal and their implications for personal and national identity.

J. Wendel Cox, Lecturer in History, was born and raised in Canada and received his B.A. (Honours) in History from the University of Winnipeg. After completing his Ph.D. in History at the University of Minnesota, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Arizona State University. There he was the founding editor and director of H-AMINDIAN, a joint project of ASU's Department of History and Michigan State University's H-NET (Humanities and Social Sciences Online), that uses new media to serve students of North America's indigenous peoples. His teaching interests include the history of nomads, tribal peoples and the modern state, and the history of American comic strips. He is the author of "A Journey's Beginning: The Corps of Discovery and the Diplomacy of Western Indian Affairs" in _Lewis and Clark: Journey to Another America_ (Oasis Institute/Missouri Historical Society Press, 2003). His current research concerns Secretary of War John C. Calhoun's role in federal Indian policy during the Monroe administration and a history of violence in Winnipeg's men's-only beer parlors.

Bart D. Finzel is Morris-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Economics and Honors Program Director at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from Cornell University in 1989. He has taught courses in labor economics, personnel economics, comparative economic systems, macroeconomics, and environmental economics. His primary research interests include the economics of employee participation and the labor market effects of airline deregulation.

Stephen Gross, a fourth generation Minnesotan, holds both a B.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and joined the faculty at UMM in 1994. His research interests include American and European social history, immigration, religion in America and the history of rural life. He has taught courses in these areas, as well as classes on the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Progressive period and Minnesota history. His most recent published work, “‘Perils of Prussianism’: Main Street German America, Local Autonomy, and the Great War” (Agricultural History, Winter 2004), examines farm-village conflict in Minnesota during World War I. He is currently researching the religious response of Minnesota’s German immigrants to the locust plagues of the 1870s.

Seung-Ho Joo Assistant Professor of Political Science, received his Ph.D in Political Science from the Pennsylvania State University. Prior to coming to UMM, he taught at the Pennsylvania State University and the University of Minnesota-Duluth. He teaches a wide range of courses in the international relations field, including World Politics, International Organizations, Comparative Foreign Policy, and East Asian Politics. His research interest areas include Russian foreign and security policy, Russo-Korean relations, and Korean foreign relations. Dr. Joo is the author of Gorbachev's Foreign Policy Toward the Korean Peninsula, 1985-1991(Edwin Mellen, 2000). He co-authored the edited book, Korea in the 21st Century (Nova, 2001). He has published over 30 book chapters and journal articles. He was Humphrey Institute Policy Fellow in 1997-98. He was North American Editor of the International Journal of Korean Unification Studies and a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Korean Institute for National Unification. Dr. Joo is Executive Secretary and a member of the Governing Board of the Association of Korean Political Studies in North America, and a member of the editorial board of Pacific Focus.

Craig Kissock a professor and past chair of the Education Division at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Beginning as a teacher educator in 1967 he has taught in the United States, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe. More recently he has sought to develop comparative teacher education as a field of study in cooperation with teacher educators in over 50 countries. He has supervised the teaching practice of student teachers in over 30 countries, including the first U.S. teachers in Russian and Lithuanian government schools, and has also guided the teaching practice of students from other countries in the USA. He is active in national and international organizations of teacher educators and has co-edited journals representing the viewpoints of teacher educators in several countries.

Pareena Lawrence joined the University of Minnesota, Morris (UMM) in the Fall of 1994. She earned her Masters Degree and Ph.D. degree in Economics from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana in December of 1993. Her teaching interests are in the field of Development Economics, Econometrics and Labor Economics. Her research interests include the domain of household economics, gender roles and economic development. While most of her research work is situated in West Africa and India, she recently completed a research project that studied Underemployment in West Central Minnesota.

Jeffrey Ratliff-Crain is Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, Morris, and recipient of the Minnesota Psychological Association's Walter D. Mink Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching. He received his Ph.D. in Health Psychology from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD, in 1991. He teaches "Introduction to Psychology," "Drugs and Human Behavior," "Social Psychology," "Applied Social Psychology," and "Empirical Investigations in Social Psychology." His research interests include health decisions and behaviors, physiological and cognitive sources of stress buffering, predictors of use of common drugs, and individual and situational determinants of sexual aggression.

Engin Sungur is Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of Statistics and the Coordinator of the Assessment of Student Learning at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He recieved his Ph.D. from the Carnegie Mellon University in 1985. He teaches statistics courses at various levels, including "Introduction to Statistics," "Statistical Methods," "Discrete and Continuous Multivariate Analysis," "Design of Experiments," and "Data Analysis." His primary research interest areas are statistics education, modern multivariate analysis, and distribution theory.