Albright adds five new faculty members

Mark Baldridge comes to Albright from SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Utica, N.Y., where he taught interactive media and game design. Baldridge’s students created animated materials that reflected real world client classroom visits. Prior to teaching at SUNY, he worked at the Sol International Schools (Media Arts) in Daejean, South Korea, where he taught screenwriting and video post-production. This international experience gave insight into digital art as it is viewed globally. He coupled this with a prior stay in Guadalajara and Monterrey, Mexico, where he taught animation. Outside of his academic background, Baldridge has a lot of experience as an interactive and media producer. He has a number of exhibitions and performances to his credit, and he remains active in the arts, currently working on a gameshow that he hopes to run sometime later this year.

Katherine (Katie) Brown is a scholar and teacher of early modern Hispanic literatures and cultures and second language acquisition. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Hispanic studies from the College of William & Mary, and a doctorate in Spanish from Yale University, where she completed an interdisciplinary dissertation on the narrative functions of architecture in the novels of Miguel de Cervantes. In addition to her research and publications on topics such as Cervantes, Borges and 16th-century missionary theater in Mexico, Brown holds a certificate in second language acquisition and a mini-certificate in distance language teaching from the Yale Center for Language Study. Prior to joining Albright, she taught all levels of Spanish language, literature and culture at Yale and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Brown is currently at work on her first book — which expands upon her dissertation research — and she looks forward to bringing her interests in interdisciplinary and multi-literacies to Albright Spanish classrooms.

Alan Shane Dillingham is an historian who focuses on the concerns of the global 1960s, anti-colonialism and indigenous resurgence in Latin America. He is particularly interested in transnational processes of development, indigenous rights activism and the rise of official multiculturalism. Among his many publications, his first book, “Insurgent Oaxaca: A History of Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in the Twentieth Century,” is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. He teaches on Latin America, the global sixties, indigenous cultures and politics. He also serves on the organizing collective of the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas. Prior to joining Albright, Dillingham was an assistant professor at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, and was previously a visiting assistant professor at Reed College and Dickinson College. He holds a doctorate in Latin American history from the University of Maryland.

Hayley Munir received her doctorate from Binghamton University (SUNY). She completed her undergraduate degree at a liberal arts college where she experienced firsthand the impact that student-centered institutions can have on preparing a student for life after college. She specializes in judicial politics at the state trial court level and her current research examines the effects of institutional features on fairness in the judicial process. She collected the first dataset of state trial court election results for all U.S. states from 1976-2016 and studies courts in the comparative context.

Jordan M. Shomper is a choral musician and teacher who grew up in Berks County, attending Fleetwood Area High School. He is currently on faculty at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa., and serves as an assistant-conductor for a premiere chamber choir, Vox Philia, in Reading, Pa. Before joining the Albright community, Jordan taught at Cocalico Middle School in Lancaster County, where he led sections of skill-based general music and music-directed musicals, and conducted multiple choral ensembles. He is an avid supporter of the arts and has commissioned many works to be written for his ensembles. He serves the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) as repertoire and resources chair for junior high and middle school choirs, as a member of the App Committee for conferences, and is a frequent clinician at music education conferences, including ACDA. Jordan received his Bachelor of Science in music education from Millersville University and Master of Music in performance, choral conducting at West Chester University.