Faculty

Millie M. Kidd, Director of the M.A. in Humanities program, received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 1985, where she also did her undergraduate study. Her area of specialization is Victorian Literature, but her interests and expertise range from Shakespeare to twentieth-century American and World, and she has published widely in both British and American Literature. George Eliot, William Faulkner, Rudolfo Anaya, and E. E. Cummings are among the authors on which she has published. She has taught at the University of Illinois, CU; Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio; and Holy Names College in Oakland, CA. Dr. Kidd is currently a Professor in the English Department and Director of the M.A. in the Humanities Program at Mount St. Mary’s College.

Jean Amato received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon. Her research centers on theories of nationalism, gender and the ancestral homeland in Twentieth Century Chinese, Diasporic and Asian American Literature and Film.

Dr. Patricia Ash is chair of the Department of History and Political Science at Mount St. Mary’s. She holds a B. A. and M. A. in History from Rice University and a J. D. from the University of Miami School of Law (where she was an editor for the law review). Dr. Ash practiced law in Miami, Florida, before completing her Ph. D. in History at Claremont Graduate University. She specializes in American history, with emphases on the history of women and intellectual and cultural history. She currently is pursuing her interest in the intersection of religion and political activism by working on a biography of Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Workers’ Movement.

Dr. Helen Boutrous received her bachelor’s degree in economics from UCLA and her law degree from the University of San Diego. She served as an attorney for the United States government in Washington, DC, representing the federal government in cases involving constitutional challenges and issues of administrative law. She received her Ph.D. in American Government and Public Policy from Georgetown University. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Political Science at Mount Saint Mary’s College (MSMC) and is the coach of the MSMC Mock Trial and Moot Court team. Her teaching areas include American Government, Public Policy, and Law. Her research agenda includes Presidential influence on regulatory policy; the role of courts and interest groups in the development of public policy; and the shifting roles of federal, state and local governments.

Matthew Brosamer came to Mount Saint Mary's College as a specialist in medieval and renaissance literature, and teaching in this area forms a large part of what he does here. His love of centuries-old literature was what brought him to the academic profession in the first place, so he is thrilled to have the opportunity to teach it here.
He did his undergraduate work at Georgetown University in Washington D.C., where he majored in medieval studies, with areas of concentration in literature and philosophy. His Ph.D. is from the English Department at UCLA, where he resisted the temptation to specialize early; he worked mostly on Old and Middle English literature, but made regular forays into 16th and 17th century literature as well. Since then, his primary focus has been on Chaucer and other English poets of the 14th century, but he's also published on the Archpriest of Hita (a 14th century Spanish poet!), Beowulf, Malory, and Graham Greene.

Associate Professor Scott Bryson (PhD, University of Kentucky; BA and MA, Baylor University) teaches in the Mount's traditional program as well as the Weekend College. He is the author of The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry (University of Iowa Press, 2005), and he has edited or co-edited several other books. His current scholarship focuses on urban theory and culture, primarily as it relates to the phenomenon of Los Angeles literature.

Michael Heim click here

Dr. Jamie Quick earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Duquesne University in 1991. His doctoral dissertation investigated the ontological and epistemological status of dreams in the works of Descartes and Leibniz, using the deconstructive techniques of Jacques Derrida. His research and teaching interests include contemporary continental philosophy (primarily Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze), aesthetics (the philosophies of literature and film), and ethics. He has published or presented papers on such figures as Descartes, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bataille, Derrida, and Irigaray. Prior to teaching at Mount St. Mary's, Dr. Quick taught at Duquesne University, Indiana University South Bend,Eckerd College, and St. Petersburg College.

 Deborah Shirley J.D. is a senior appellate court attorney in the chambers of Justice Laurie D. Zelon of the California Court of Appeal.  Prior to attending law school, she worked to enforce the Voting Rights Act at the United States Justice Department in the Civil Rights Division.  As a student at Harvard Law School, she was an editor of the Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, prosecuted misdemeanor criminal cases in Massachusetts, and provided post-conviction and appealate representation to indigent death row inmates as an intern with the Equal Justice initiative of Alabama and the Southern Center for Human Rights.  Following law school, she was a trial and appellate attorney with the law firm of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher in Los Angeles until she joined the California Court of Appeal.

 Dr. Fred Simonelli received his B.A. degree from John Carroll University, an M.P.A. in Public Policy from the University of San Francisco, an M.A. in History from California State University in Sacramento, and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Nevada, Reno. He has taught at Mount St. Mary's College since 1996 and was the Chair of the Department of History and Political Science from 1999 to 2002. His areas of research and teaching are African American history and the history of antisemitism in Western culture. He is the author of AMERICAN FUEHRER: GEORGE LINCOLN ROCKWELL AND THE AMERICAN NAZI PARTY (University of Illinois Press, 1999) and is a contributing author in two additional books on neo-nazism. He has also published numerous articles in scholarly journals and encyclopedias. In 1997, Dr. Simonelli was one of 12 scholars invited to participate in an international symposium in Stockholm, Sweden, on the problem of worldwide neo-nazi resurgence. He has been awarded research fellowships by the Skirball Institute (2000) and Yad Vashem in Israel (1999) and is regarded as one of the nation's leading experts on antisemitism and neo-nazism.

Dr. Wanda Teays is a philosophy professor and the department chair at MSMC. She is the author of Second Thoughts: Critical Thinking for a Diverse Society 3rd ed., co-editor of bothBioethics, Justice, and Health Care and Violence Against Women: Philosophical Perspectives. She has written articles in bioethics, social justice, and the law and is a commentator on philosophy and film. One of her passions is philosophy and native cultures, which she regularly teaches here at the Mount. She is most excited to be teaching a new course, “Native American Art and Philosophy” in the M.A. in Humanities program. Her hobbies are b/w photography, gardening, and spending time with her pet cockatoo, Jasper.

Marcos M. Villatoro is the author of the Romilia Chacón crime novels. The Los Angeles Times Book Review listed his Home Killings as a Best Book of 2001. It won the Silver Medal from Foreword Magazine and First Prize in the Latino Literary Hall of Fame. The other Romilia novels include Minos and A Venom Beneath the Skin.

Random House publishes the Romilia Chacón crime fiction novels in mass-market paperback (under Dell). Germany, Japan, Russia and Brazil have acquired foreign rights of all the Romilia books. Cypress Productions of Los Angeles has bought the film rights for Minos.

His autobiographical novel The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones was an Independent Publishers Book Award Finalist and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

His other books include They Say that I am Two (poems), On Tuesday, When the Homeless Disappeared (poems), A Fire in the Earth (novel), and the memoir Walking to La Milpa: Living in Guatemala with Armies, Demons, Abrazos, and Death.

In the 80’s and early 90’s, Villatoro lived in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Alabama, doing grassroots community work in Central America and with migrant farm workers. After graduating from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1998, he and his family moved to California, where he holds the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair in Writing at Mount St. Mary’s College. He's also a regular commentator for NPR.

Villatoro lives with his wife and four children in Los Angeles.