Faculty Biographies

Jill Dupont| C. Neal Keye | William K. Miller | Randall A. Poole

Jill Dupont, Ph.D.
The College of St. Scholastica
Department of History, Politics and Culture

Office: Tower 4122
Phone: (218) 723-6098
e-mail: jdupont@css.edu

Jill Dupont (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2000) is assistant professor of history at the College of St. Scholastica. Before joining the St. Scholastica faculty in 2007, she served as assistant professor of history at the University of North Texas (2001-2007). She has also taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Professor Dupont is a specialist in US social and cultural history, with teaching and research interests in African American history and culture; race, gender, and ethnicity; comparative history of African peoples in the diaspora; theory and history of performance genres; and sports and society. She has been interviewed on Texas public television and radio, served as a consultant for a PBS documentary film ("Racing Dixie"), and lectures widely in academic and public forums. She has published a number of reference articles and reviews, and is currently working on a book, Shadow Play: Race, Nation, and the Spectacle of Boxing in American Culture.

C. Neal Keye, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of History, Politics and Culture
Program Director, Oreck Alpern Grant for the Study of Religion and Culture after 9/11
The College of St. Scholastica

Office: Tower 3409
Phone: 723-6177
e-mail: ckeye@css.edu

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize "the way it really was" (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.
- Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1936)

C. Neal Keye (Ph.D. 2000 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is associate professor of History, Politics, and Culture at the College of St. Scholastica and Program Director of the Oreck-Alpern Grant for the Study of Religion and Culture after 9/11. Before coming to St. Scholastica in 2001, he taught at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of Religious Studies and for the Program in Social Theory and Cross-Cultural Studies. Professor Keye has held a fellowship in Public Ethics at the Institute of Arts & Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is currently Chair of the "Religion, Gender, and Sexuality" section for the Midwest region of The American Academy of Religion. Professor Keye's teaching and research interests include modern and contemporary discourses on religion, culture, and history, method and theory in the study of religion, western intellectual history, modern philosophy and aesthetics, feminist theory and gender studies, the history and politics of colonialism, imperialism and globalization, with areas of specialization in modern Europe, India, and the Middle East. He is currently working on a revision of his doctoral dissertation for publication (Messengers of the Gods? Rethinking the Interpretive Turn in the Discourse of the Human Sciences after 9/11), and is working on an edited volume in consultation with Dr. Judith Farquhar (series editor at Duke University Press), Heirs of Twain? Genealogies of Resistance and Dissent in the Age of the War on Terror.

William K. Miller, Ph.D.
The College of St. Scholastica
Department of History, Politics and Culture

Office: Tower 4150
Phone: (218) 525-3256
e-mail: wmiller@css.edu

William K. Miller (Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 1986) is adjunct associate professor of history at the College of St. Scholastica. He has had over thirty years experience in higher education and the arts, both as a professor and administrator. An Egyptologist and historian of the ancient near east, he has taught courses in ancient and classical history, archaeology, and religious studies. His teaching interests extend to US history, especially Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era. He is co-director of the University of Minnesota Egyptian Eastern Desert Expedition and has co-authored Pharaonic Inscriptions from the Southern Eastern Desert, Egypt (American University in Cairo Press) as well as articles in the Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. He has served as director of the Glensheen Historic Estate in Duluth, executive director of the St. Louis County (Minnesota) Heritage and Arts Center, and dean of student affairs at the College of St. Scholastica and at Lewis University. Professor Miller is a member of many scholarly and community organizations, including the International Association of Egyptologists, the American Research Center in Egypt, the Center for the Study of the Presidency, the Abraham Lincoln Association, the St. Louis County Historical Society, Minnesota Citizens for the Arts, and the Lake Superior Chamber Orchestra.

Randall A. Poole, Ph.D.
College of St. Scholastica
Chair, Department of History, Politics and Culture

Office: Tower 4134
Phone: (218) 723-6468
e-mail: rpoole@css.edu

Randall A. Poole (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame, 1996) is associate professor of history at the College of St. Scholastica. Before coming to St. Scholastica in 2004, he taught at the University of Notre Dame (1997-1999) and Boston University (1999-2004). He has held research fellowships at New York University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Stanford University, Columbia University, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, and the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow (where he was a Fulbright scholar). He has also been a research associate of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at Notre Dame, a faculty fellow of the International History Institute at Boston University, and an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.

Professor Poole's research and writing focus on Russian and European intellectual history, the history of ideas, and the history of philosophical and religious thought. Since 1990, he has delivered more than thirty scholarly papers and lectures at academic conferences and universities in the United States and abroad. He teaches courses in world, European, and Russian history.

Selected Publications

Problems of Idealism. Essays in Russian Social Philosophy. Translated, edited, and introduced. Foreword by Caryl Emerson. Yale University Press, 2003. xxiv, 468 pp. Scholarly edition with monographic introduction (78 pp.), full annotations, and contributor biographies.

"Religion, War, and Revolution: E. N. Trubetskoi's Liberal Construction of Russian National Identity, 1912-1920," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 2 (Spring 2006), pp. 195-240.

"Sergei Kotliarevskii and the Rule of Law in Russian Liberal Theory," Dialogue and Universalism (Institute of Philosophy, Warsaw University), vol. 16, no. 1-2 (2006), pp. 81-104.

"William James in the Moscow Psychological Society: Pragmatism, Pluralism, Personalism," book chapter, William James in Russian Culture, ed. Joan Delaney Grossman and Ruth S. Rischin. Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, pp. 131-158.

"The Apophatic Bakhtin," book chapter, Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith, ed. Susan M. Felch and Paul J. Contino. Northwestern University Press, 2001, pp. 151-175.

"Utopianism, Idealism, Liberalism: Russian Confrontations with Vladimir Solov'ëv," Modern Greek Studies Yearbook: Mediterranean, Slavic, and Eastern Orthodox Studies (University of Minnesota), vols. 16-17 (2000-2001), pp. 43-87.

"The Neo-Idealist Reception of Kant in the Moscow Psychological Society," Journal of the History of Ideas 60, no. 2 (April 1999), pp. 319-343.

"The Russian Dialectic between Neo-Idealism and Utopianism," published in Russian translation in Voprosy filosofii (Questions of Philosophy), no. 1, 1995, pp. 70-94.

Six entries on Russian philosophy, 2000 words each with full references, for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online edition, 2002): Sergei Askol'dov, Aleksei Kozlov, Lev Lopatin, Moscow Psychological Society, Sergei Trubetskoi, and Vladimir Vernadskii.

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