Visiting Speakers

“Emmy” prize-winner Paul Smaczny studied law, Romance languages and Germanic studies in Regensburg and Paris. After graduation he first threw in his lot with the theatre, working as director’s assistant and dramaturge in France from 1986 to 1989.

Andrew Sobanet's research interests include the twentieth and twenty-first-century novel; politics and literature; autobiography; 20th-century history; French cinema. He is the author of the book Jail Sentences: Representing Prison in Twentieth-Century French Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008).  

Daniel Speich Chassé is Assistant Professor for History at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. He was a research associate at the ETH Zurich, at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and at the Institut d’Etudes Avancées in Nantes, France.

Art Spiegelman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning artist and illustrator, author of MAUS, In the Shadow of No Towers, and Breakdowns.

Judith Stein is distinguished professor of history at the City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  She is the author of  The World of Marcus Garvey (1986) and Running Steel, Running America (1998) and most recently Pivotal Decade (2010). She is currently working on a book, Globalization and Neoliberalism in the United States.

Professor Adam Tooze teaches and researches widely in the fields of twentieth-century and contemporary history.

John Valverde is the Associate Executive Director for Program Operations, overseeing Osborne’s Family Services, Treatment and Prevention and Workforce Development units. John first joined the Osborne staff in 2009. Prior to assuming the position of Associate Executive Director, John led Osborne’s Workforce Development services, and was instrumental in the establishment of the Green Career Center.

Milind Wakanker received his PhD from Columbia University, studying under Professors Gauri Viswanathan, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, Gyan Prakash, and E. Valentine Daniel. He currently teaches in the School of Culture and Creative Expressions at Ambedkar University Delhi. Prior to that he was an Assistant Professor of English at State University of New York, Stonybrook.