Support WesternThe Western Program
at Miami University
Meet Our Faculty and Staff
Listen to faculty talk about their work with students.
Our faculty includes professors from:
... making for a lively blend of perspectives from different disciplines.
This mix offers you an opportunity for integrating your varied interests as you build an intellectual community with faculty, as well as your fellow students. Western has a long and vibrant tradition of close interaction among faculty and students who seek to enrich their teaching and learning by extending them beyond the classroom.
Kevin Armitage (Assistant Professor) has worked as a research scientist, bus driver, teacher, bouncer, bartender, and commercial fisherman in Naknek, Alaska. His PhD is in American history and his research interests include American environmental and cultural history, and modern social theory.
Ann Elizabeth Armstrong (Associate Professor of Theatre) specializes in directing, community-based theatre, feminist theatre, and intercultural theatre. She received an Ohio Humanities Council Grant for her Freedom Summer walking tour and co-directs an interdisciplinary project that culminated in the 2009 world premiere of the play Down in Mississippi. Armstrong is faculty advisor for the Walking Theatre Project, a student-led activist theatre company.
Hays Cummins (Professor) earned his PhD in oceanography and has led courses to the Bahamas, Florida Keys, Netherland Antilles, and Costa Rica. His research focuses on the reconstruction of past ecological communities in marine systems and understanding ecological change, particularly the impacts of global change on coral reefs. He also has a passion for weather and astronomy. [Personal Website]
Kim Ernsting (Assistant Director) has over 25 years' experience in academic advising, career and leadership development, internships and cooperative education, student activities and residence life.
Carolyn Haynes (Director of the University Honors Program) earned her PhD in American literature, with a specialization in teaching writing, and since coming to Miami, she has taught over 40 courses on a range of interdisciplinary topics. She is currently an affiliate of the Western Program. Her passion is helping students to develop as scholars, thinkers and persons.
Katie Johnson (Associate Professor of English) specializes in theatre, film, and gender studies. While teaching at Western in the 1990s, she designed creativity and culture courses and directed plays for the Western performance group. Katie also directed and acted in productions of The Vagina Monologues. Katie is writing a book on race and gender performance in early 20th-century theatre.
Mary G. McDonald (Professor of Kinesiology and Health) is interested in feminist and cultural studies of sport, the media and popular culture, and power relations as constituted along the axes of race, class, gender and sexuality. She teaches courses that critically analyze sporting and popular representations, popular and scientific constructions of the body, interdisciplinarity, and the social construction of knowledge.
Kathy M. McMahon-Klosterman (Associate Professor of Educational Psychology) prepares special education teachers for licensure at the undergraduate and graduate levels. She also teaches Interdisciplinary Studies related to diversity as well as Women's Studies. She is one of the creators of the minor in Disability Studies. She has been a long time activist for social justice, organizing the first Women Take Back the Night March in Oxford in 1978. She is active in women's issues and disability rights. She served for 5 years as the Associate Director of Affirmative Action at Miami University and 2 years as Eminent Faculty Scholar for Community Engagement and Service.
Nicholas P. Money (Director and Professor of Botany) has studied fungal biology since graduating from the University of Bristol in England in 1983. At Miami he has worked on a variety of research projects with students that have included experiments on fungal development and the amazing mechanisms that catapult fungal spores into the air. He is the author of a quartet of popular books on fungal biology, including Mushroom published by Oxford University Press in 2011.
[See The Man Who Studies the Fungus Among Us 
(NPR author interview).]
He says: "My research and teaching are defined by my love of science and belief in its power to make sense of life, the universe, and everything else." His engagement in the Western Program has allowed him to explore his wider interests in the relationship between science and the arts.
Lisa Weems (Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Curriculum) teaches cultural studies, popular culture and public life as well as feminist and postcolonial approaches to inquiry. Her scholarship focuses on the intersections of race, nationality and sexuality in the construction of public/educational "problems" and the ethical dimensions of teaching and learning with/in difference.