LCA Retired Faculty
Rashmi Luthra
Rashmi Luthra is Professor Emerita of Communication at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Her work has been published in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication; International Journal of Communication; Women’s Studies in Communication; Communication, Culture and Critique; Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization; Gazette: International Journal for Mass Communication Studies; Feminist Formations; Feminist Issues; Communication Yearbook; Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, and in several edited collections. She has also edited two volumes on Journalism and Mass Communication as part of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems published by UNESCO. Her book, Refugee as Threat or Opportunity: Metro Detroit Discourses on the Refugee in the Age of Displacement, is forthcoming. She continues to mentor faculty and to review manuscripts for top tier journals in the field. Beyond research, Professor Luthra is enjoying creative writing and spending time with her granddaughter
Stéphane Spoiden
Stéphane Spoiden is a Professor Emeritus of French and Global Culture,s who published several books and articles on culture, cinema, and the European Union. He was director of the International Studies and Global Cultures programs for many years. Prof. Spoiden retired in 2018.
Jacqueline Vansant
Jacqueline Vansant, Professor Emerita of German at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, taught courses on German language, literature, and culture during her almost twenty-five years at UM-Dearborn. Her scholarly work has been centered on the constructions of ethnicities, gender, and identities in post-World War II and contemporary Austrian literature, memoirs, and films as well as the image of Austria in Hollywood films and exile studies. Her publications include Against the Horizon: Feminism and Postwar Austrian Women Writers (1998), Reclaiming ‘Heimat’: Trauma and Mourning in Memoirs by Jewish Austrian Reémigrés (2001), and Austria Made in Hollywood (2019). Since 2008 she has been researching a group correspondence by classmates who fled Vienna between April 1938 and April 1939 and is presently working on an edition of the letters. Check out her website!
Margaret Willard-Traub
Margaret Willard-Traub, Associate Professor Emerita of Composition and Rhetoric, retired in 2022. She served as Director of the Writing Program and Writing Center (2006-2012), Director of the Writing Program (2017-2022), as a member of the campus-wide task force charged with revising general education (2013-2014), and as CASL representative to the Faculty Senate Council (2016-2018), among other roles. Her work has appeared in College English, Assessing Writing, Feminist Studies, Rhetoric Review and Pedagogy, as well as in a number of collected editions. Her current scholarship addresses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the decision-making and reflective processes of faculty and administrators at post-secondary institutions nation-wide.
Jonathan Smith
Jonathan Smith, Ph.D., professor of English in the Department of Language, Culture, and the Arts at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, retired from active faculty status on April 30, 2023.
Professor Smith received his bachelor of arts from Rice University in 1984 and his master of arts, masters of philosophy, and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1985, 1988, and 1990, respectively. He joined the University of Michigan-Dearborn faculty as an assistant professor in 1991, was promoted to associate professor in 1997, and professor in 2005. In 2002, he was Jack Williamson Visiting Professor in Science and the Humanities at Eastern New Mexico University. He became the Dearborn campus’s ninth William E. Stirton Professor, its highest faculty honor, in 2012.
Professor Smith’s undergraduate training in both English literature and chemical engineering led to his interdisciplinary research in the literature and science of nineteenth-century Britain. His first book, Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1994), argued for the methodological congruity of literature and science in the period, while his second, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (2006), broke new ground in its analysis of the illustrations in Darwin’s books and the impact of Darwin on fine art and popular visual culture. The 2008 recipient of the Dearborn campus’s Distinguished Research Award, Professor Smith has also co-edited two volumes of primary source material, one for Victorian Science and Literature (2011) and another forthcoming for Nineteenth-Century Science and Visual Culture in Great Britain. A rigorous and innovative teacher, Professor Smith taught a wide array of undergraduate courses, was an early adopter of online pedagogies, and mentored numerous students in research projects. From 2002 to 2005, he led a team from the Dearborn campus and The Henry Ford that developed a National-Endowment for the Humanities funded website on The Automobile in American Life and Society. Professor Smith was also deeply engaged in shared governance and academic administration, serving on numerous departmental, college, campus, and university committees, as associate dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters (2006-2009), as chair of the Department of Literature, Philosophy, & the Arts (2011-2016), and as chair of the Department of Behavioral Sciences (2016-2022).