One of the original “Mayflower” faculty in 1971,  Demetrios J. Constantelos, championed the value of Greek studies in the modern world. 

A Greek Orthodox clergyman, he  helped found the Interdisciplinary Center for Hellenic Studies at Stockton, one of the foremost academic centers in the United States for the study of Hellenism and donated more than 3,000 books for the Constantelos Hellenic Collection and Reading Room in the Stockton library.

During his tenure he served as the coordinator of Historical Studies and was appointed the Charles Cooper Townsend, Sr. Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies.

Constantelos’ legacy includes winning the contest to name the school newspaper. He said he suggested The Argo because he thought of the students there as Argonauts — adventurers in search of wisdom.

Scholarship and teaching were lifelong passions, and one of the sources of his success as a classroom teacher, conference speaker, parish priest, and conversationalist was the fact that he was a man with a constantly inquiring mind and a readily apparent love of history, religion, and teaching.

Constantelos, who died in 2017, also helped establish several Greek Orthodox parishes in South Jersey .

William Daley spent his career advocating for the liberal arts and critical thinking skills. A member of the founding Mayflower faculty in 1971, he literally became the voice of the Stockton Idea with a video presentation he made on the topic in 2015.

Daly advocated for the role of preceptors who would not just help students define their path through Stockton, but would also encourage them to explore new ideas, do internships and study abroad.  He supported a good base of introductory courses as rigorous training in reasoning, writing and basic math.

The faculty were always at the core of this mission, as educators and preceptors. 

He acknowledged the critics of the “liberal arts,” and concerns about preparing students for specific careers.  But, he noted, if the economy is unpredictable, maybe the type of education Stockton offered, which promotes the ability to adapt to change, is the best base for a career.

Daly received three Outstanding Achievement Awards from the New Jersey Department of Higher Education, nine appointments by Stockton Student Senate as Social and Behavioral Sciences Professor of the Year, and he was the first recipient of the Stockton Alumni Association’s award for outstanding service to Stockton students. He was the winner of the Academy for Educational Development’s national prize for educational innovation.

Daly was instrumental in the development of Stockton’s Educational Opportunity Fund, the Basic Studies program, and the General Studies program, and he chaired the institutional self-study which led to Stockton’s initial accreditation. 

Stephen Dunn came to Stockton in 1974. His teaching and writing inspired thousands of students and poetry lovers over 47 years, helping to define a Stockton education.

In 2001, Dunn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his book, “Different Hours.” Over the span of his career, he wrote 15 collections of poetry and received numerous awards, including the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations.

As Stockton’s commencement speaker in 2014, he talked about the value of a liberal arts education, telling students: “I have no doubt most of you are prepared for What Next, which means you are ready for the inevitable crooked path that awaits you. Our area of General Studies has anticipated this, has allowed, nay insisted, that you take courses outside of your comfort zone.”

Dunn also penned the lyrics for Ospreys on Parade, Stockton’s alma mater. He died in 2021.

Deborah M. Figart, Distinguished Professor of Economics at Stockton, is author or editor of 21 books/monographs and over 100 other publications. 

Figart’s work has focused on issues such as discrimination, irregular work schedules and the gig economy, casino employment, emotional labor at work, financial literacy, student loans, and public banking initiatives. 

One of her books is “Stories of Progressive Institutional Change: Challenges to the Neoliberal Economy (Palgrave, 2017). 

Figart was president of the Association for Social Economics in 2006 and President of the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) in 2016.

In 2018, she was selected to join a select group of experts as part of the Faculty of Advisors of Public Banking Associates (PBA), a national collegium of economists, bankers and public policy experts providing research and consulting to government officials and agencies considering creation of publicly owned banks. 

Figart’s analysis in April 2018 of the likely impacts and potentialities of a state-owned bank was the first assessment of its kind reviewing the idea for New Jersey.

The analysis, “Exploring a Public Bank for New Jersey: Economic Impact and Implementation Issues”, produced for the William J. Hughes Center for Public Policy at Stockton University, quantified the significant monetary and employment benefits that could be realized from new infusions of credit and capital derived from operations of the state bank.

Mary Lou Galantino is a professor, breast cancer researcher, and cancer survivor who emphasizes the whole patient in her work. In addition to her teaching at Stockton, she helped establish oncology rehabilitation programs at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia and at Bacharach Institute for Rehabilitation in Galloway Township.

She has been treating patients in cancer rehabilitation for more than 30 years and is a practicing clinician at Christiana Rehabilitation Services. She collaborates with colleagues at Specialty Rehabilitation serving the Helen F. Graham Cancer Center and Research Institute.

“As a professor teaching physical therapy, specifically my DPT program, I maintain a clinical practice because it keeps me current,” said Galantino, who came to Stockton in 1991.

A 2020 COVID-19 study by Galantino and Dr. Erin Helm, the director of Specialty Rehabilitation Helen F. Graham Cancer Center, examined 15 women ages 38-76 with various stages of breast cancer, from when the center closed in March through its reopening in May. The patients reported significantly increased levels of emotional distress at the time of COVID-19 closures, which decreased when they returned to rehabilitation care.

Galantino’s passion for cancer study and cancer’s impact on patient recovery, increased after her own experience.

“In 2001 while pregnant, I felt a lump in my breast, and while nothing showed up in the mammogram, I was convinced something was wrong. It wasn’t until two years later that I was diagnosed with breast cancer,” Galantino said. “It was through my experience that I discovered what it was like to become a patient. The side effects of chemotherapy and my surgeries were very eye opening to me.”

Janice Joseph has given her students the opportunity to view crime and its impact through an international lens.

Janice has taught at Stockton since 1989. She was recognized in 2021 for her outstanding service as the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS), Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Representative to the United Nations (UN) for over 10 years. She also served as a member of the working group for “Domestic/ Family Violence During the COVID-19 Era” which organized a three-day International Virtual Summit in November 2019. 

Joseph offers her students the opportunities to participate in these unique experiences, providing for more comprehensive learning. She introduced criminal justice students to the UNODC SHERLOC (United Nations Office and Drugs and Crime) Project, where she supervised two independent study projects. Using the SHERLOC database at the UN headquarters, students collected information from three criminal justice databases, which was submitted to the UN to be disseminated to its member states. They presented their research during the 2017 Day of Scholarship.

 

Audrey Wolfson Latourette is a Distinguished Professor of Law at Stockton University where she was named Faculty of the Year 2012-2013 from the School of Business by the Student Senate.

Latourette, who came to Stockton in 1977, also served as a Scholar-in-Residence at New York University during a sabbatical in 2004 and 2013 and has since occupied summer scholar-in-residencies there. 

Latourette is a cum laude graduate of Temple University School of Law. She has given numerous presentations at regional, national, and international conferences, garnering several Best Paper Awards, including the McGraw Hill Publishing Best Paper Award in the category of Ethics/Business Law/and Issues in Higher Education for “Copyright Implications for Online Distance Education” awarded at the Fifth Global Conference of Business & Economics held at Cambridge University in 2006.

Among Latourette’s publications are: “Women in Law, History and Literature:  A Study of the Historical and Contemporary Legal Status of Women”; in Network: A Journal of Faculty Development (Faculty Resource Network of New York University, Spring 2014);  “Transfer Students:  Legal Issues Regarding Policies” in Advising Transfer Students: Strategies for Today’s Realities and Tomorrow’s Challenges (National Academic Advising Association, 2012); “Legal Implications of Academic Advising” in Advising Administration (National Academic Advising Association, 2011); “Plagiarism: Legal and Ethical Implications for the University” in The Journal of College and University 1-91 (2010).

David Lester dedicated his life and teachings to suicide and suicide prevention.

An author and former President of the International Association for Suicide Prevention, he has published extensively on suicide, murder and other issues in thanatology, a scientific discipline that examines death from many perspectives. He is also an expert on telephone counseling. 

Lester was the founder of the psychology program at Stockton where he served as Associate Professor of Psychology from 1971 to 1975, Professor of Psychology from 1975 to 2008 and Distinguished Professor of Psychology from 2008 to 2015. He was awarded Emeritus status in 2015.  

“Throughout my career, I have collaborated with those who have lost loved ones to suicide,” he said in a 2011 interview. “One of my students at Stockton lost her sister to suicide and shared her sister’s diary with me.” After reading and analyzing the diary, Lester published a book titled Katie’s Diary: Unlocking the Mystery of a Suicide.

Lester came to Stockton in 1971 as one of the original "Mayflower" faculty. From 1977-1978, he also served Stockton as coordinator of the criminal justice program and from 1967-1968, was the principal investigator at Stockton for the National Institute of Mental Health Grant.

In 2011 he was elected president of the American Association of Suicidology. 

Among the books he’s written are: Rational suicide: Is it possible? (2014), Suicide in men (2014), Theories of suicide (2014), The “I” of the storm (2014), On multiple selves (2015), and Suicide as a dramatic performance (2015), plus several books with Nova Science (The End of Suicidology, How Culture Shapes Suicidal Behavior and Firearms and Suicide – Is Prevention Possible?)

Franklin H. Littell, is remembered as a father of Holocaust Studies in America.

He served as the Ida E. King Distinguished Visiting Professor of Holocaust Studies from 1996-98. Beginning in 1998, Littell taught in the M.A. program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton, which was founded and organized by him and his wife, Marcia Sachs Littell, who also taught at Stockton. 

Littell advocated education programs to improve relations between Christians and Jews. He reminded his students that questions can be more significant than answers. Without the right questions, he said, responses are insignificant and even misleading. 

Born in 1917 into a family of Methodists, Littell became a Methodist minister, and later taught Christian theology and church history at various universities.  He was a founding board member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and served on its content committee.

He spent nearly a decade in post-war Germany during the Nazi occupation and was deeply affected by the atrocities committed during World War II. He dedicated his life to researching the Holocaust and bringing its tragic lessons in human rights to widespread public attention. In 1959, Littell taught the first Holocaust course in America.

His best-known book was “The Crucifixion of the Jews” (1975), in which he pressed his view that Christianity is essentially Jewish. Little died in 2009 at the age of 91.

One of the original “Mayflower” faculty,  at Stockton University, Lubenow is an integral part of Stockton’s history. 

In an interview, Lubenow recalled how the young faculty of the 1970s did not have much of an age difference from the students. He said the original faculty members were recruited right out of graduate school with no teaching experience, which left room for creativity. Living and working together at the Mayflower, the students in the 1970s often called faculty by their first names.

Times have changed, as have the students, but in courses like “Inventing the Past,” which explores how we study the past and interpret its meanings for the present, Lubenow continues to challenge students to question and think critically.

Lubenow serves on the Stockton Honors Program Advisory Committee.  He served as President of the North American Conference on British Studies from 2005-2007. He was a Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and has authored several books. 

Paul Lyons was outspoken advocate for about peace, human rights and justice, with a lifelong commitment to social justice.

An author and musician, Lyons fought for fairness through protesting, organizing and political campaigning. He had a strong belief in equality, the dignity of all peoples, and the need for participation in the democratic process. 

As a professor of social work and history, Lyons enjoyed nurturing a student's curiosity and engagement with academics and society. He was committed to helping those who came from troubled backgrounds. 

As a scholar, Lyons grappled with  political and social events and their meanings.  He wrote five books on 20th Century American history. 

The Paul Lyons Memorial Lecture Series was established at Stockton following his death in 2009. The series brings to Stockton leading regional, national, and international scholars in American Studies, the area in which Lyons undertook most of his interdisciplinary work. 

Patricia Reid-Merritt has been teaching and lecturing on issues surrounding race and racism her entire academic career, the majority of which has been at Stockton, where she has influenced faculty, staff and students since she arrived in 1976. 

She brought the first Kwanzaa program to Stockton 45 years ago, was instrumental in developing the Council of Black Faculty and Staff, Africana Studies minor and Fannie Lou Hamer Human and Civil Rights Symposium, and continues to bring cultural dialogue to the campus community.

She is a social worker by profession and an active member of the National Association of Black Social Workers, whose fight against systemic racism has been at the forefront of their agenda for the past 50 years.  

Reid-Merritt has authored and edited a myriad of publications, lectured on campus panels that deal with important topics, and gained an outpouring of campus support when she participated an the online seminar, "Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism: Redefining the Social Contract” in June 2020.

 

A scholar and author on the Holocaust and genocide, Carol Rittner, R.S.M. served as the Ida E. King Distinguished Professor of Holocaust Studies at Stockton in 1994-95 and is the Dr. Marsha Grossman Professor of Holocaust Studies Emerita.

She has worked and lectured at Stockton and around the world on the history of the Holocaust, and specifically those who risked their own lives to help, the Righteous Among the Nations, as she explained in a lecture, “Courage to Care,” which is available on the Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center website. She also produced an Academy Award nominated documentary by the same name.

In 2014 she spoke at the United Nations on both the 70th anniversary of the deportation of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, and on the more recent genocide in Rwanda, casting an unflinching eye on not just victims, but also perpetrators, bystanders and rescuers.

“If Anne Frank had been my neighbor in Amsterdam during World War II and the Holocaust, would I have helped her?” she asks the audience to ask themselves at the beginning of her lecture “The Courage to Care.”

Her work not only teaches about the past, but serves as a guide for the present and the future, showing students that everyone plays a role in preserving and protecting human rights for all.

Lisa Rosner’s research expertise is in the history of science and medicine, and in the digital humanities.

Armed with a quick wit and a doctorate in the history of science, Rosner, who came to Stockton in 1987,  has taught classes on the history of medicine and science and also directed Stockton’s Honors Program, where she encouraged students to challenge themselves through research. 

Her publication “The Anatomy Murders” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) details the story of a pair of 19th-century criminals who turned to slaughter to make a living in the emerging and lucrative market for medical school cadavers.  It was an interest in the history of medicine, not some fascination with mass murder, that led Rosner to write the book. 

She also authored books about the lives of medical students in 19th-century Edinburgh - then a world center of medical study - and on the diaries of a 19th-century Edinburgh doctor.

One publication, “Vaccination and Its Critics” (ABC-Clio, 2016), which presents perspectives of researchers, public health specialists, physicians, patients, consumer advocates, and government officials, helps to illuminate the past, present, and future of vaccines on a global level. It presents a timeline of discoveries tracing the medical and societal progression of vaccines from the early development of medical preventives to the eradication of epidemics to present-day discussion about vaccine’s role in autism.

Sharon began teaching physics at Stockton in 1972.  He later helped develop Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center at Stockton and was the first Weinstein Professor of Jewish Studies in 2008. He is the longtime advisor of the Hillel/Jewish Student Union and for 35 years has served as master of ceremonies at the annual Student, Faculty and Staff Dinner.   

Sharon recalls the original student body had more non-traditional students since before 1971 the region didn’t have a college. He said many were residents of Atlantic and Cape May counties who wanted to go to college but were not able to travel to other colleges in Gloucester and Camden counties.

A great believer in general studies and allowing both students and faculty to explore different interests, Sharon has taught courses in Chess, Hebrew, and Space Travel and Extraterrestrial Life in addition to physics and Jewish Studies. He is known for making his topics accessible.

“I enjoy teaching and one of my hopes is that if I do a good job, and I interest the students and excite them, then non-science majors would have a more positive attitude towards science, more interest in science, more desire to learn more about science when they read in the newspapers or hear on television about science,” he said in an interview.

Sharon has published extensively in professional journals and he received a 2005 Award from the New Jersey Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers for his Lifetime Contributions to Physics Education.

As an expert in corrections, suicide in correctional facilities, jail design, treatment of incarcerated individuals with mental illness and criminal justice education,  Christine Tartaro has not just educated Stockton students, but has served as an advocate for mental health treatment in the criminal justice system and an expert witness in legal cases involving suicides in custody.

She is currently coordinating the evaluation of a $740,000 Department of Justice grant with the Atlantic City Police Department and Jewish Family Service to improve public safety response and health outcomes for individuals with mental illness and/or substance abuse.

For the last 15 years Tartaro has also partnered with Associate Professor Joshua Duntley to stage a “murder” on campus as part of the summer CSI Camps for high school students. The weeklong campus gives participants experience in crime scene investigation and prosecution.

Since his arrival at Stockton in 1986, Wendel White has challenged students and the public to view the world through a camera lens and a racial lens.  He was recently selected as the 2021 Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography by The Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University.

When reflecting on the significance of this opportunity, White said, “The Gardner fellowship does not accept applications, the fellows are nominated by an international network of scholars, curators and artists. In some way, the fellowship represents a general awareness of my work and an acknowledgement of the ideas and concerns that have been central in my photography for several decades.”

White will work on “Manifest: Thirteen Colonies,” a proposal created specifically for the Gardner Fellowship. It will use some of the existing images from his multi-part project, “Manifest,” which began in 2008.   

White’s projects also benefit his students. “Red Summer”  which documents the landscape of racial violence in the U.S. between 1917 and 1923, became a course in the American Studies program in Spring 2019 for the centennial of the year that earned the name “Red Summer.”

White is also the recipient of a John  Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography and three artist fellowshhips from the N.J. State Council of the Arts.  His work is also featured in museum and coporate collections.