Forum Network

Rhea Lesage is Librarian for Hellenic Studies and Coordinator for the Classics for Widener Library at Harvard University. She carries primary responsibility for building, promoting, and providing access to the library's Greek collections.

Robin A. Leaver, the General Editor of the Yale Journal of Music & Religion, is visiting honorary professor at Queen’s University, Belfast, visiting professor at Yale University, and emeritus professor of sacred music at Westminster Choir College of Rider University. He has also taught liturgical studies at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey, and music history at the Juilliard School, New York City. He studied theology at Trinity College, Bristol, England, and holds a doctorate from the Rijksuniversiteit, Groningen, the Netherlands. Dr. Leaver is a past president of both the Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Hymnologie and the American Bach Society. He is the author of numerous books, articles. and entries in reference works in the cross-disciplinary areas of liturgy, church music, theology, and hymnology, published on four continents, with significant contributions to Luther, Schütz, and Bach studies. His latest publications include Luther’s Liturgical Music: Principles and Implications (Eerdmans, 2007); Exploring Bach’s B Minor Mass (Cambridge, 2013), which he co-edited with Yo Tomita and Jan Smaczny; articles in the Bach-Jahrbuch (2013); and is the editor the forthcoming Routledge Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach. He is also engaged in various projects concerning the connections between music and theology.

Ellen Exner is a specialist in music of the eighteenth century, specifically music of the Bach family. After receiving undergraduate degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in Music History as well as Russian Language and Literature, Exner went on to receive an MA from Smith College and then a PhD in Historical Musicology from Harvard University. Her current book project re-examines the eighteenth-century roots of Mendelssohn’s famous 1829 Berlin performance of J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Exner is actively engaged with Baroque repertory as both a scholar and a performer on historical oboes. She has published critical editions of music by Gottfried August Homilius with Carus-Verlag (Stuttgart) and is finishing work on Emanuel Bach’s 1779 Passion According to St. Luke for the Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Complete Works Edition. Her research has also appeared in the journals BACH, Eighteenth-Century Music, the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, and in German-language publications dedicated to the most recent scholarship on Georg Philipp Telemann and his contemporaries. Dr. Exner is a member of the Editorial Board of the American Bach Society and serves as Editor of its official newsletter, Bach Notes. She has taught courses on baroque music as well as the history of art song by invitation at Boston University, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Following three years as Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina School of Music, she joined the full-time Music History faculty at New England Conservatory in fall of 2015.

Michael McKinnell FAIA is the co-founder of Kallmann McKinnell & Wood Architects, Inc, and along with Gerhard Kallmann and Edward Knowles, designed Boston's current City Hall. The selection of McKinnell and his partners' design in 1962 marked the beginning of the firm.

Lonnie Isabel teaches at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Isabel spent 25 years in the newspaper business, covering or directing the coverage of several presidential campaigns including the 2000 election. He also ran the coverage of Hillary Clinton’s run for Senate, the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and numerous other major national and international stories of his generation. He has covered every national political convention since 1984. Isabel has worked for Newsday, the Boston Globe, Boston Herald and Oakland Tribune. After leaving Newsday as deputy managing editor in 2005, Isabel joined the newly-created CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, where he started the International Reporting Program and the International Journalist-in-Residence. He is co-author of a book, \_Think/Point/Shoot: Media Ethics, Technology and Global Change\_ (2016).

Sam Fleming is Director of News and Programming at WBUR. He is responsible for supervising a staff of 75, including news managers, producers, reporters, writers, editors, hosts and production staff. Under his direction, WBUR’s News Department has garnered more than 50 national and local awards recognizing the quality and depth of its news coverage. Fleming first worked at the station in 1981 as a general assignment reporter. In 1992, he became WBUR’s News Director, a position he held until 2004. In that role he oversaw the breadth, depth and daily workings of the news produced at WBUR and helped to manage the content of daily broadcasts in their diverse forms.

Jessie Banhazl is the founder and CEO of Green City Growers. Over the past five years, she has proven that sustainable agriculture can be both healthy and profitable. In 2015, Banhazl planted a barren rooftop at Fenway Park and it yielded 4,000 pounds of produce for urban farmers. By growing fresh food in the most unlikely places, she is helping change people’s perception of what is possible by launching her own rooftop farming revolution.

Katerine Bielaczyc is the Director of the Hiatt Center for Urban Education and an Associate Professor of Education at Clark University. Before joining the faculty at Clark in 2012, she was Deputy Head of the Learning Services Lab at the National Institute of Education in Singapore, Assistant Professor at Harvard University jointly in Teacher Education and Technology in Education, a Senior Scientist at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, and Director of the Learning Communities Research Group at Boston College. She has also collaborated on educational projects in Europe and South America. Dr. Bielaczyc's research involves collaborating with students, teachers, and school communities to investigate new approaches to teaching and learning. Her work focuses on developing both technological and social infrastructures to support participants in working together as a knowledge building community to create knowledge regarding personal, pedagogical, and systemic transformation.

Richard Clapp is a Professor Emeritus of Environmental Health at Boston University School of Public Health. He was formerly the Director of the Massachusetts Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program and the Massachusetts Cancer Registry in the Department of Public Health. He has taught public health and given numerous community presentations over the past four decades.

Dr. Henrik Selin is an Associate Professor of International Relations and Director of Curricular Innovation & Initiatives in the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Selin is the author and co-editor of several major books on global issues of environment and climate change, along with many professional articles. He has also written numerous articles for the general public on the need for a global policy to deal with climate change.

Shane O'Reilly was born in Limerick, Ireland. He holds a BSc in Environmental Chemistry and in 2013 earned his PhD in Organic Geochemistry from Dublin City University. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Geobiology at MIT. Dr. O'Reilly is funded by the EU Marie Curie Actions Program and the Irish Research Council. If he is not out in the field sampling, doing science outreach, or running, you can probably find him scratching his head in the vicinity of a mass spectrometer.

Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman is the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Representative to the United States. Before her appointment as the representative to the U.S., she worked as a journalist for 17 years, including a job with the Financial Times in Britain and Japan. She began her public service career as the High Representative to the United Kingdom. Her work as a representative strengthens ties between Kurdistan and the United States, advocates for the KRG's position on a wide array of political, security, humanitarian, economic, and cultural matters, and promotes coordination and partnership.