Courses
Courses at Deep Springs are intensive, student-driven, and small. Classes usually have between four and twelve students. In most courses, the majority of class time is spent in seminar-style discussions. (Other forms of class structure, including those based in the lab, studio or field, also regularly appear within the curriculum.) There are no majors or concentrations, and students are encouraged to explore a variety of topics in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
The distinctive quality of the Deep Springs academic program is that it treats students not as consumers but as creators of their education and as stewards of a joint intellectual project. The Curriculum Committee (staffed and chaired by students) selects the college’s professors, and the Student Body determines each semester’s curriculum by choosing course from a variety of proposals submitted by each professor. Classes rely heavily on student participation; thorough preparation and robust engagement is seen as a student’s responsibility to the entire class. Students not only drive most class conversations but are also responsible for thinking critically on how each course can improve, attempting to improve their own participation, giving feedback to other students and the professor, and often helping decide questions of class structure.
Curriculum
During the regular academic year, students take two or three full courses at a time. There are typically nine courses offered. The Curriculum Committee maintains a balance of course offerings within the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Courses range from The Special Theory of Relativity to Art and Politics in Twentieth-Century China. While the curriculum includes introductory courses from the major disciplines, it is common for classroom discourse at Deep Springs to get to material reserved for upper-division or graduate seminars elsewhere. In addition, students can pursue independent or directed studies, with permission from the Curriculum Committee. There are only three required courses at Deep Springs, each outlined below.
The facilities and resources at students’ disposal include a fully equipped science lab, a library with over 30,000 volumes, a museum and archive with rich historical material from Deep Springs and the local area, an art studio, a music studio and collection of musical instruments including a Steinway grand piano, a darkroom, and more.
Required Courses
Summer Seminar
The Summer Seminar is the introduction to Deep Springs academics for each incoming class. Often taught by an interdisciplinary team of professors, the course focuses on issues of ethics and governance. Students read and discuss diverse works of literature, philosophy, and social sciences.
Writing
Although writing-intensive courses vary in their specifics from year to year, students learn how to write well and how to offer constructive criticism to others. Particular attention is paid to crafting cogent arguments and giving due consideration of the audience of a written piece.
Public Speaking
All students take Public Speaking throughout their time at Deep Springs. The campus community meets each week to listen to speakers practice their rhetorical skills. Afterward, the speakers meet to receive feedback on their performance from peers and professors. Each student gives two graded speeches per semester.
Elective Courses
Deep Springs College operates year-round. See the Academic Calendar for an example of a typical academic year. In addition to the required courses, the balance of the two to three full courses taken by a student in any given term are elected by the student and approved by the Curriculum Committee. Short descriptions of classes offered during the most recent six academic years can be found in the Deep Springs College Course Catalog (2020-2026).
Faculty Overview
At Deep Springs, the student-to-faculty ratio is usually about 5:1. In addition to the President and the Dean, the college generally employs three long-term faculty: the Robert Aird Chair of Humanities, the Julian Steward Chair of Social Sciences, and the Herbert Reich Chair of Natural Science. Each year the college also invites several short-term professors to visit and increase the breadth of our curriculum. More information about this deliberately dynamic process is on the Academic Job Openings page. Below, you will find information about the current and recent members of the academic pillar.
Current Long-Term Faculty
Jeff Miller, Political Theory and Classics
Dean of Faculty and Students (B.A., UC Santa Cruz; M.A. and Ph.D., University of Virginia). Prior to coming to Deep Springs, Jeff taught a wide range of political theory courses in the Political Science and International Relations Department at the State University of New York at New Paltz, where he also served as department chair and directed the University’s honors program for a decade. He has also worked as a visiting professor at New York University, the Florida Institute of Technology, and the University of Memphis. Before he went to graduate school he worked in the U.S. Congress for three years. Most of his research considers themes in Ancient Greek political thought, with a recent emphasis on democratic theory and how non-philosophical texts like plays, law court and assembly speeches can broaden our understanding of political thought in Classical Athens. He has written for a variety of disciplinary journals and most recently published Crisis of Democracy: Lessons from Ancient Athens, which attempts to broaden our understanding of democracy by using Classical Athenian practices and policies as examples. His current book project is an investigation of the role physical labor plays in the occidental philosophical tradition.
Jay Nadeau, Physics
Herbert Reich Chair of Natural Science, Jay Nadeau is a scientist with a broad transdisciplinary background, spanning theoretical nuclear physics, experimental neuroscience, metagenomics, and the search for life on other planets. Her most recent project flew a custom designed holographic microscope to the International Space Station. Other projects involve nanoparticles for cell labeling and cancer therapy, two-dimensional quantum materials, and lightfield microscopy. Teaching interests have been at the intersection of fields, designed to introduce physics to biologists and vice versa, which led to the textbook Introduction to Molecular Biophysics. She is also a lover of linguistics and French and Russian literature. Her goal is to help everyone speak each other’s language, whether it’s biologists speaking to physicists or poets solving differential equations. Although born and raised in Hawaii, she has spent a lot of time in cold places. Her PhD in theoretical physics is from the University of Minnesota, and she was a professor of Biomedical Engineering at McGill University in Montreal for 11 years, where she did field work in the High Arctic and Greenland looking at microbial life in cold springs and sea ice. Currently appointed at Portland State University’s Physics department, she comes to Deep Springs with the goal of offering STEM courses that offer something to everyone, and of introducing DS students to research on the rich biomes of the Inyo Valley using off-the-shelf and custom instrumentation.
Scott Spillman, History
Julian Steward Chair of Social Sciences (BA, University of North Carolina; MA and PhD, Stanford University). Scott comes to Deep Springs from Colorado, where he has taught American history at Colorado College and the University of Colorado–Denver and has worked in public history at History Colorado, the Colorado Encyclopedia, and the Leadville Historic Preservation Commission. He is the author of Making Sense of Slavery: America’s Long Reckoning, from the Founding Era to Today (Basic, 2025) and is currently researching ideas about the Enlightenment and the American West in the United States after World War II. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Point, Liberties, The New Yorker, The New Republic, n+1, the Chronicle Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is eager to teach courses on intellectual foundations, classic texts, major problems, and research methods across the social sciences.
Aaron Tugendhaft, Political Thought, Assyriology, Jewish Thought
Robert Aird Chair of Humanities (B.A., Art History, University of Chicago; M.A., Social Thought, University of Chicago; Ph.D., Hebrew and Judaic Studies, NYU). Aaron comes to Deep Springs from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was Associate Professor of Instruction in the Thomas Jefferson Center for Core Texts and Ideas. He has also taught at Bard College Berlin, The University of Chicago (where he was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts), the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU, and served as History Department Chair of the Ramaz School in New York City. Interdisciplinary to the point of undisciplined, Aaron has written two books, Baal and the Politics of Poetry (Routledge, 2018) and The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (Chicago, 2020; French translation, 2022), and published essays in Arion, Cabinet, The Journal of Higher Education, and The Jewish Review of Books. Committed to working with students of all ages, he also regularly teaches online Great Books seminars for adults through the University of Chicago Basic Program and recently founded The Abarbanel Institute to offer summer enrichment programs for high school students.
Tom Cassidy, Mathematics
President (B.A., Economics, University of Pennsylvania; Ph.D., Mathematics, University of Oregon). Tom comes to Deep Springs from Bucknell University, where he served as Mathematics Department Chair, Associate Dean of Faculty, and Associate Provost for Academic Affairs. He has also been a Guest Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, a Visiting Scholar in the Demography Department at UC Berkeley, and a Fulbright Scholar at the University of the West Indies. Tom has published works in the abstract realm of non-commutative ring theory, and in the applied field of mathematical demography. At Deep Springs, Tom hopes to teach both mathematical theory and the mental skills that are strengthened by grappling with abstractions.
Recent Long-Term Academic Faculty
Andy Zink, Biology
President (B.A., Philosophy and Biology, Bowdoin College; Ph.D., Ecology and Evolution, Cornell University). Andy comes to Deep Springs after 16 years at San Francisco State University, where he was Professor of Biology and Chair of Hiring, Retention, Tenure, and Promotion. In addition to teaching a range of courses and holding several SF State leadership positions, he has received numerous research grants and awards. He has mentored close to 100 undergraduate and graduate students in his lab, the majority of whom are from groups traditionally underrepresented in the sciences. Andy has long been fascinated by the evolution of cooperation and conflict in animal societies. His scientific research focuses on the evolution of social behavior and disease ecology.
Brian Hill, Physics & Astronomy
Herbert Reich Chair of Natural Science 2020-2026 (B.Sc., Physics, University of Washington; Ph.D., Theoretical Physics, Harvard University). Brian came to Deep Springs from the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Saint Mary’s College of California. His Ph.D. and postdoctoral research were in theoretical particle physics, and his research topics included the heavy quark effective field theory and lattice gauge theory. After a long and instructive stint in Silicon Valley, including software development at NeXT and Apple, Brian returned to academia in 2015. At Saint Mary’s, he and his students got the campus observatory involved monitoring exoplanets as part of the TESS follow-up observing program. At Deep Springs, while proposing and teaching courses in physics, astronomy, mathematics, and computer science, he established and enjoys training students to use the Deep Springs observatory where they can get excellent views under the unusually dark and clear skies of Deep Springs Valley, do astrophotography projects, and even take data on transient phenomena, such as supernovae.
Visiting Faculty and Scholars—Academic Year 2026 –2027
Summer Seminar (Term 1, July–August 2026)
David McNeil (B.A., Liberal Arts, St. John’s College, Annapolis, Ph.D., Social Thought, University of Chicago). David was the Robert Aird Chair of Humanities at Deep Springs College from 2015-2020. Prior to coming to Deep Springs, he taught at the University of Essex (in the UK), Hofstra University, Grinnell College, St. Mary’s College, CA and the University of Chicago. He is the author of An Image of the Soul in Speech: Plato and the Problem of Socrates (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), and academic articles on Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Nietzsche, Hegel and contemporary Critical Theory. Since leaving Deep Springs he has worked as an independent writer and researcher focusing on topics in philosophy of mind and philosophy of law.
Emily Tucker (J.D. Boston University, M.T.S. Harvard Divinity School, B.A. McGill University) is the Executive Director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, where she is also an adjunct professor of law. Under her leadership, the Privacy Center has published several groundbreaking investigations of government and corporate surveillance, including law enforcement use of facial recognition technology, the dragnet data practices of Immigration & Customs Enforcement, and the federal government’s genetic surveillance program. Before coming to Georgetown, Emily worked for ten years as a movement lawyer, supporting grassroots groups to organize, litigate, and legislate against the criminalization of poor communities and communities of color. Emily writes academic articles about why we should never use algorithms in contexts that implicate fundamental political questions, and manifestos against the AI industry for Tech Policy Press. She was a 2021 Soros Justice Fellow, and in 2025 she won a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for a forthcoming book about edtech.
Michel Ge (B.A., Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University; M.A., Computer Science, Hunter College; DS ’17) teaches creative writing at Ohio Wesleyan University’s New York Arts Program and is a forthcoming MFA student in Fiction at Hunter College, where he hopes to complete his novel about a bickering elderly Chinese couple’s gradual acceptance of their life in the heartland of America. In his Computer Science Master’s thesis, he created a temporal logic system based on a fragment of English. He dabbles in Chinese-English literary translation and language learning.
Fall Semester (Terms 2 & 3, September–December 2026)
Chris Kraus (BA, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ) studied acting and performance for five years in New York and made a series of nine experimental films before she began writing and moved to Los Angeles. Since then, she has published five novels – most recently, The Four Spent the Day Together (Scribner, 2025). Her first novel, I Love Dick, was adapted for television and a new edition will be pubished next year in the UK. Her other books include Aliens and Anorexia, Torpor and Summer of Hate; a literary biography, After Kathy Acker; and three books for art and cultural criticism. Chris taught writing at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fe between 2013-2017 before its official accreditation, and was Writer-in-Residence at ArtCenter College of Design from 2020-2024. Since 1990, she has been a co-editor of the independent press Semiotexte. Her books have been translated into seventeen languages and her writing has been praised for its damning intelligence and dazzling speed.
Richard Mahon (B.A., History and Religious Studies; Ph.D., History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz) will be teaching at Deep Springs for the fourth time, having made his first trip to the valley in Terms 4-5 1990—when he was asked to teach composition to second year students after he’d already arrived. He will be teaching composition again, this time to DS 26. He has focused his teaching at the first-year student level at both UC Santa Cruz and a range of California community colleges, and has taught courses in English, history, humanities, philosophy, political science, and religious studies. Richard has also held a variety of leadership positions at the college, system, and regional level, including stints as a commissioner at the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC, Deep Springs’ accreditor) and WASC (the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, the accreditor for four-year colleges in California.
Spring Semester (Terms 4 & 5, January–April 2027)
Mercer Greenwald (Ph.D. and A.M., Harvard University; B.A. German Studies and B.M. Viola Performance, Bard College Conservatory of Music) is a doctoral candidate working on the intersections of literature, music, and philosophy from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Most recently she has been interested in the art of conversation in the era of sentimentality (“Empfindsamkeit”), pretension as a category of romantic irony, and the figure of the moment (“Augenblick”) in the novel. Her dissertation traces the expression, production, and transmission of mood (“Stimmung”) in German lyric poetry from the Age of Goethe to the present. She is so excited to teach at Deep Springs.
Jacob Eigen (DS’04, B.A., Humanities, Yale University; MFA, Fiction Writing, Hunter College) is thrilled to return to the valley, where he was a student and a writing tutor (Summer Seminar 2015 and ’16). The intervening years passed quickly for him, ludicrously quickly. He almost cannot account for them. He taught at the Pierrepont School in Westport, CT. He got married. He published a first book. But these details, taken together, only serve to remind him of the Whitman poem he first read in the Deep Springs time shack years ago:
And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man’s life?
And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life?
(As if any man really knew aught of my life,
Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections
I seek for my own use to trace out here.)
He will be offering classes in what appears to be his expertise: the search for clews and indirections.
Term 6 (May–June 2027)
Mercer Greenwald (Ph.D. and A.M., Harvard University; B.A. German Studies and B.M. Viola Performance, Bard College Conservatory of Music) is a doctoral candidate working on the intersections of literature, music, and philosophy from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Most recently she has been interested in the art of conversation in the era of sentimentality (“Empfindsamkeit”), pretension as a category of romantic irony, and the figure of the moment (“Augenblick”) in the novel. Her dissertation traces the expression, production, and transmission of mood (“Stimmung”) in German lyric poetry from the Age of Goethe to the present. She is so excited to teach at Deep Springs.
Bennett Gilbert (B.A. Yale; M.A. University of Chicago, M.S. Columbia University, M.A.L.S. Reed College, M.A. Portland State University), currently Adjunct Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy at Portland State University, works at the juncture of moral philosophy and the philosophy of history. Along with a number of others, he seeks to develop basic moral concepts out of our relationship to time. He also works in the history of ideas, notably the role of the printed book in the development of thought. He is the author of Power and Compassion: On Moral Force Ethics and Historical Change (Amsterdam University Press, 2025), A Personalist Philosophy of History (Routledge, 2019) and numerous papers; and co-editor (with Natan Elgabsi) of Ethics and Time in the Philosophy of History (Bloomsbury, 2023). His next book, All That We Are: Personhood for Our Times, will be published in 2028 (Bloomsbury).
Tawanda Malalu was born in Gaborone, Botswana. His debut collection, Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die (Princeton University Press, 2022) received the 2023 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry; it was also listed as a best poetry book of 2022 by The Boston Globe, The New York Times and The Washington Post, and was a finalist for the 2022 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Brittle Paper, Lana Turner, The New England Review, The Paris Review, Wasafiri and elsewhere. Tawanda received his A.B in Psychology and English from Harvard College, and his M.F.A in Poetry and Screenwriting from The Michener Center for Writers. He can’t believe he’s finally getting the chance to be at Deep Springs.
Stephanie Safdi (J.D., Yale Law School; M.E.M., Yale School of the Environment; M.Phil., Historical Studies, Cambridge University; A.B., History & Literature, Harvard College) is a Clinical Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She founded and directs the Yale Environmental Justice Law and Advocacy Clinic, which provides legal services for community groups, non-profits, and Tribal Nations on matters that advance environmental justice and intersectional concerns such as energy and climate, public health, participatory environmental governance, and Indigenous sovereignty. Her current areas of research focus include Indigenous water governance in the American West and legal accountability for environmental trauma. Prior to joining the Yale Law School faculty in 2025, she was a Visiting Clinical Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a Clinical Supervising Attorney and Lecturer in Law with Stanford Law School’s Environmental Law Clinic. She represented public agencies, non-profits, and Tribes on environmental, public health, and land use matters before entering academia.
Johan Ugander (Ph.D., Applied Mathematics, Cornell University; CASM, University of Cambridge; M.Sc., Lund University; DS’02) is an Associate Professor at Yale University in the Department of Statistics & Data Science. His research develops computational and statistical frameworks for analyzing social networks, social systems, and other large-scale social and behavioral data. Prior to joining the Yale faculty in 2025 he was an Assistant Professor (from 2015) and tenured Associate Professor (from June 2022) at Stanford University. His awards include an NSF CAREER Award, a Young Investigator Award from the Army Research Office (ARO), and the 2016 Eugene L. Grant Undergraduate Teaching Award from Stanford’s Department of Management Science & Engineering.
Current and Recent Visiting Faculty and Scholars—Academic Year 2025–2026
Summer Seminar (Term 1, July–August 2025)
Kateri Carmola, Political Science
Kateri Carmola (Ph.D, Political Science, UC Berkeley; B.A. Philosophy UChicago) taught three summer seminars during the 1990s, when she was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. She was a professor of political science at Middlebury College on political theory and warfare from 2001-2012. Her book (Private Security Contractors in New Wars: Risk, Law & Ethics, Routledge, 2010) addressed the challenge of regulating private military and security companies who work for governments, NGOs, and private industry. After leaving academia in 2012, Kateri worked as a consultant for some of the same companies that were now seeking to comply with new regulations governing the use of force and human rights. Kateri currently works to assist victims of labor and sex trafficking in the US. She recently taught a graduate course on human smuggling and trafficking at George Mason University in northern Virginia. Kateri is familiar with the Nunnian ideals of labor, intellectual engagement, and self-governance, and is excited to return to Deep Springs, especially now that it is co-ed.
Donald Favareau, Biosemiotics and History of Science
Donald Favareau (Ph.D., Applied Linguistics, UCLA; B.A., Philosophy, UCLA) has, since 2001, been intimately involved in the project to develop the interdisciplinary research agenda of Biosemiotics. He is the author of its first textbook anthology and commentary, Essential Readings in Biosemiotics (2010) as well as many edited collections, articles and book chapters. He was Associate Professor in the University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore for 20 years, and recently retired from there to become an itinerant scholar and visiting-professor-for-hire.
Dan Schneider, Public Policy and Sociology
Dan Schneider (B.A. University of Pennsylvania; M.A., History, London School of Economics; J.D. University of Wisconsin Law School; M.P.A. Harvard Kennedy School) is an Assistant Professor at American University’s School of International Service. A lawyer by training, he teaches courses on corruption, terrorism, transnational organized crime, responses to atrocities, and U.S. foreign policy.
Before coming to American University, Professor Schneider was a federal prosecutor with the Fraud Section of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, and later with the Department’s Office of International Affairs. In 1996, he served as the Justice Department’s Resident Legal Advisor to Russia, working on issues of judicial reform, the rule of law and corruption. An expert in the areas of judicial reform, criminal justice, the rule of law, civil society, governance, and corruption, Professor Schneider has consulted for the World Bank, the American Bar Association, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, and other nongovernmental organizations on a wide range of projects. These projects focused on the rule of law, judicial reform, civil society, and corruption in many countries, including Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Ethiopia, Moldova, and Albania.
He is a 1994 recipient of a Fulbright Teaching grant, teaching criminal and constitutional law in Russia. From 2012 – 16, with funding from the National Institute of Justice, Professor Schneider undertook a study of the obstacles to cooperation between American and Mexican law enforcement agencies tasked with combatting Mexican-based drug trafficking organizations.
Connie Jiang, Writing Tutor
Connie Jiang (B.A., Classical Studies and Philosophy, Swarthmore College; DS’19) is a current M.A. student at the University of Georgia in Greek and Latin—though she wants to make it clear that Sanskrit and Classical Chinese are of equal (if not greater) importance to her in her studies. As of late, her thoughts often revolve around pedagogy and paideia, ancient notions of the Good Life, and service. She hopes to get some oil painting and piano practicing done in the time that she’s not reading or hosting office hours.
Fall Semester (Terms 2 & 3, September–December 2025)
Jeremy Bearer-Friend, Law
Professor Jeremy Bearer-Friend (J.D., Law, Stanford; M.A., Education, UC Berkeley; B.A., Comparative Literature, Brown; DS ’01) is an internationally recognized expert on tax law, tax administration, and tax policy. His tax scholarship has been cited by the U.S. Treasury Department, in testimony before both chambers of Congress, and numerous academic publications. He is an Associate Professor of Law (with tenure) at George Washington University Law School.
Donald Favareau, Biosemiotics and History of Science
Donald Favareau (B.A., Philosophy, UCLA; Ph.D., Applied Linguistics, UCLA) has, since 2001, been intimately involved in the project to develop the interdisciplinary research agenda of Biosemiotics. He is the author of its first textbook anthology and commentary, Essential Readings in Biosemiotics (2010) as well as many edited collections, articles and book chapters. He was Associate Professor in the University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore for 20 years, and recently retired from there to become an itinerant scholar and visiting-professor-for-hire.
Mina Khanlarzadeh, Historian
Mina Khanlarzadeh (Ph.D., Columbia University; B.Sc., Physics, Sharif University of Technology) is a historian whose interdisciplinary work engages global political thought, literary and translation studies, gender studies, and the history of science. Before joining Deep Springs, she held postdoctoral fellowships at Northwestern University and the Forum Transregionale Studien, with additional fellowships from Freie Universität Berlin’s Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities,” the Leibniz Research Alliance “Value of the Past,” Das Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL), and the Ehsan Yarshater Center at Columbia University. She is currently completing a monograph on comparative critiques of cultural alienation in popular culture and political thought under (semi-)colonial conditions. Her academic writing has appeared in journals such as Religions and Popular Music and Society, among others. At Deep Springs during the 2025–26 academic year, she will teach courses on political thought and literary studies.
Sam Laney, Oceanography
Sam Laney (Ph.D., Biological Oceanography + Electrical & Computer Engineering, Oregon State University; M.Ed., Higher Education, UMass Amherst; B.S., Agriculture & Life Sciences, Cornell University) is an oceanographer, engineer, and educator. He is a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and an Affiliate with the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center, Applied Physics Laboratory. Since the mid-1990s he has been examining light and photosynthesis in the ocean, with a particular emphasis on high latitude oceans and the development of innovative ocean instrumentation. In 2023 he received a Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Transdisciplinary Research in the Changing North, at Université Laval (Québec) where he held an appointment as Chercheur Invité, Départment de biologie. He serves on the faculty of WHOI’s graduate Joint Program with MIT in the biology and engineering disciplines and was a Visiting Professor at Deep Springs in 2007 and 2011. He is a Deep Springs alum (DS87) and past resident of Telluride Association’s Cornell Branch (CB90).
Martha Marvin, Biology
Martha Marvin (Ph.D., Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; B.A., Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley) teaches in the Neuroscience Program at Williams College. Her research interests are focused on the interaction between genes and the environment in embryonic development. Specifically, she is investigating how early life stress alters lifelong stress responses, using zebrafish as a model organism. A second line of research explores the effects of environmental estrogen-like compounds on heart development. Dr. Marvin has an avid interest in hands-on science experiences for K-12 schools and other learning environments. During Williams’ January term, she offers a service-learning course in which Williams students bring zebrafish to local elementary schools to teach the children about development and genetics, adapting a curriculum called Project BioEyes.
Spring Semester (Terms 4 & 5, January–April 2026)
Andrew Alexander, Mathematics
Andrew M.H. Alexander (A.B., The University of Chicago) is a writer and mathematician based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has taught mathematics and philosophy at a small startup Great Books-based school in Arizona, mathematics and poetry at a school for academically-accelerated students in San Francisco, and calculus at a camp for math and skiing nerds in Jackson Hole. He’s developed inquiry- and exploration-based courses in calculus, multivariable calculus, and complex analysis, with corresponding online textbooks, emphasizing beauty and the process of discovery. He seeks to write mathematics in a way that’s humane: respectful of our human finitude and fondness for storytelling. His writing has been featured at the Mathematical Association of America’s annual “Mathfest” conference, and he’s regularly been invited to speak about pedagogy at the Joint Mathematics Meetings. He also consults on mathematical methods in research psychology.
Jacob Eigen, Poetry and Fiction
Jacob Eigen (DS’04, B.A., Humanities, Yale University; MFA, Fiction Writing, Hunter College) is thrilled to return to the valley, where he was a student and a writing tutor (Summer Seminar 2015 and ’16). The intervening years passed quickly for him, ludicrously quickly. He almost cannot account for them. He taught at the Pierrepont School in Westport, CT. He got married. He published a first book. But these details, taken together, only serve to remind him of the Whitman poem he first read in the Deep Springs time shack years ago:
And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man’s life?
And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life?
(As if any man really knew aught of my life,
Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections
I seek for my own use to trace out here.)
He will be offering classes in what appears to be his expertise: the search for clews and indirections.
Donald Favareau, Biosemiotics and History of Science
Don is continuing as a visiting professor in Terms 4 & 5. See his bio in the Terms 2 & 3 section above.
Rachel Hastings, Linguistics and Mathematics
Rachel Hastings (B.A. Harvard, Ph.D. Cornell, Applied Mathematics; Ph.D. Cornell, Linguistics) is a Member of the Faculty at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. In this role she has team-taught interdisciplinary full-time coordinated studies programs over the last 20 years. She teaches math at all levels and linguistics +__[insert your field here]__, sometimes both together. She is currently engaged in a sabbatical project on the why and how of low-tech education.
Mina Khanlarzadeh, Historian
Mina is continuing as a visiting professor in Terms 4 & 5. See her bio in the Terms 2 & 3 section above.
Term 6 (May–June 2026)
Cynthia Ma, Philosophy
Cynthia Shihui Ma (B.A., St. John’s College; Ph.D., Philosophy, Tulane University) is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, School of Civic Leadership. Her research investigates conceptions of statesmanship in ancient Greek and pre-Qin Chinese thought. Her in-progress monograph on Plato’s Statesman explains how the sophist and the statesman are to be understood as apparitions of the philosopher, and considers the implications for the tenability of Socratic maieutics. In 2023, she received the Emerging Scholar Award from the Ancient Philosophy Society. Her article, “The Philosopher’s Eros in the Myth of the Reversed Cosmos,” is published in Epochē.
Stephen David Engel, Humanities
Stephen David Engel (Ph.D. in History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz; M.A. in Liberal Arts, St. John’s College; B.A. in Liberal Arts, The Evergreen State College) is a transdisciplinary scholar who thinks about history, literature, and time, and who uses creative writing as an historical method. His writing has appeared in Rethinking History, ROAR Magazine, The Anthology of Babel, and other publications. In 2023, he was awarded the Hayden White dissertation fellowship for excellence in historical theory. He has taught courses on ancient states and empires, pedagogy, classics of world literature, poetry, the power and limits of dialogue, and other topics.
Charles Grimes, Theatre and Literature
Charles Grimes (Ph.D., NYU, English Literature; M.A., Villanova University, Theater; S.B., MIT, Humanities and Engineering) joyfully returns to the Valley after teaching Terms 4-5 in 2010 (Beckett and Pinter) and Term 6 (Acting) in 2011. At the University of North Carolina Wilmington, he teaches in the Department of Theatre, where he directs plays and is a dramaturg, and in the Honors College, with teaching interests in scientific ethics and the arts and the theatre of the HIV/AIDS crisis. His book, Harold Pinter’s Politics: A Silence Beyond Echo, was published in 2005. He has also taught four Telluride Association Summer Programs with former DS Dean Justin Kim, focusing on modernism, myth, and negative capability.
Rebecca Raphael, Philosophy
Rebecca Raphael (Ph.D. and A.M., University of Chicago; B.S. Communication, Northwestern University) is a religious studies scholar with significant engagement in literature and philosophy. Early in her career, she brought disability studies into Hebrew Bible scholarship with Biblical Corpora: Disability in Hebrew Biblical Literature. Through a series of papers she means to collect, she continues to explore the theme of anomalous bodies in Second Temple apocalypses. As the Texas State University philosophy department’s first hire in religious studies, she enhanced her graduate work in philosophy in order to teach in that field as well. She was the founding program director of Texas State’s B.A. in religious studies. Currently Director of Dialogue, she oversees the department’s community-facing Dialogue Series. Recently, she has been deeply engaged with two projects that constitute a mid-life pivot: re-training in biosciences as a part-time student at the University of Texas-Austin, and traveling the country to visit colleges that are unique in pedagogy, curriculum, or identity features. The latter quest brought her to Deep Springs as a visitor, and she is eager to live this distinctive experiment.