Project Faculty and Leadership Team

For this 2009 Institute, we have assembled a vibrant and knowledgeable project team, including:

Dr. Arlene Mollo - Co-Director - Professor in the College of Visual & Performing Arts at UMass Dartmouth, is an artist/educator with expertise in interdisciplinary curricular design and teacher professional development. A Museum Educator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston for twenty years, she uses “aesthetic scanning” to encourage viewers to ‘read’ works of art for evidence before making judgments about content or meaning. Mollo won the national Reston Prize for writing, directed Summer Seminars for UMass Dartmouth and coordinated Northeastern University’s Martha’s Vineyard Writing Seminars.



Dr. Mary Malloy - Co-Director
is the author of four maritime history books, including the award-winning Devil on the Deep Blue Sea: The Notorious Career of Samuel Hill of Boston. She has a Ph.D. from Brown University and teaches maritime history at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and museum studies at Harvard University. Mary was formerly Curator of Exhibit Interpretation at the Peabody Essex Museum and administrator of two NEH Institutes on Early Modern Maritime History at the John Carter Brown Library. Her first novel, The Wandering Heart, was published in April 2009.



Captain Peg Brandon, Marine Consultant - also serves as residential contact support person throughout the Institute. Brandon is professor of Marine Transportation at the Maine Maritime Academy and will talk about nautical science and environmental issues. She has over 20 years experience as Captain of a sea-going Tall Ship research vessel, with more than 40 educational and oceanographic voyages, sailing throughout the North Atlantic and Caribbean for more than 100,000 miles; Brandon was Captain of the106’ Hudson River Sloop Clearwater for six years and brings applied knowledge of the maritime world to our Institute.



Marcia Kessler is the Master Teacher in our Institute; she earned an Ed. M degree at Harvard University after 10 years as a public school teacher and now holds Adjunct Faculty appointments in Education at Lesley University and at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She teaches graduate courses in Curriculum Design & Assessment and is also expert is in infusing technology integration with academic programs.

Lori Bradley is the Administrative Coordinator & Webmaster for our Institute. Bradley will build our interactive site and use it to ease communication flow among all participants before, during and after the Institute. She will take care of administrative details for the Institute and serves as its Webmaster, assisting teachers with digital resource acquisitions and posting of teachers’ lessons onto our website. She is an artist and designer and has been teaching web design and development and creative applications for electronic media for 20 years.




Visiting Scholars and Consultants

Dr. Marc Simpson - Associate Director and Lecturer of the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art and Curator of American Art at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. From 1985-1994 he was the Ednah Root Curator of American Paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. His work on Winslow Homer includes the exhibitions Winslow Homer: Making Art, Making History (The Clark, 2005) and Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1988); and the essays “Sterling and Stephen Clark as Collectors of Winslow Homer” in The Clark Brothers Collect: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings (The Clark, 2006) and “Homer’s Wine-Dark Seas,” in Winslow Homer: Poet of the Sea (Musée d’Art américain, Giverny, 2006). He has also studied the work of such American painters as Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1993.

We will hear from Dr. Thomas Puryear, art historian in American and early modern architecture, on the subject of 19th century structures and the town planning tradition that governed building within the city of New Bedford.



Dr. Stuart Frank is the Senior Curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum and former Director of the Kendall Whaling Museum in Sharon, Massachusetts. He is the author of numerous books and articles on marine art, scrimshaw, and the singing traditions of American sailors, including Herman Melville’s Picture Gallery: Sources and Types of the Pictorial Chapters of Moby-Dick and the multi-volume Dictionary of Scrimshaw Artists. He is a graduate of Wesleyan, Yale and Brown Universities.



Stacy Rodenberger, winner of two Awards for Excellence from the American Associations of Museums as editor of Looking to Learn and Look at Me, curriculum handbooks based on the Portland Museum of Art’s collection and designed for teaching Language Arts, Science, Social Studies and Visual Arts. She will speak at the Institute with our teachers while they refine and present their final lesson plans and materials during our last week.



Dr. John Odin Jensen is on the Maritime Studies and Policy facutly at Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. As historian and marine archaeologist, Jensen's work explores the role of water and maritime resources in the frontiers of North America. Geographically, his work spans from the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, the Great Lakes, and the Coastal Alaska. Of Norwegian heritage, John was born and raised in Alaska where he continued in his family's tradition of commercial fishing, which he began doing with his father at the age of nine. Before leaving the industry, he served in nearly every position from bait boy to captain. He holds a Ph.D. in history and M.S. and history and policy from Carnegie Mellon University, and an M.A. in maritime history and underwater archaeology from East Carolina University. He holds co-appointments with the University of Rhode Island, the Frank C. Munson Institute of American Maritime Studies, and the Rhode Island School of Design.