New Faculty at Thomas More College

announcement:

Thomas More College Announces Several Administration and Faculty Appointments for 2007-2008 Academic Year

March 23, 2007--President Jeffrey O. Nelson is pleased to announce the hiring of Dr. William E. Fahey as Provost/Academic Vice President and Professor of Humanities; Dr. Christopher O. Blum as Professor of Humanities; the appointment of Mr. Brian Shea as Assistant Professor of Humanities; the appointment of Dr. Mary Mumbach as founding director of the Caroline Gordon Program for the Study of Literature as a Mode of Knowledge; the hiring of Andrea Assaf as part-time director for the Vatican Forum; and the hiring of Tony Assaf as a special assistant for Program Development. Below in alphabetical order are biographical and other related details.

Andrea Kirk Assaf

Andrea Kirk Assaf received her MA in liberal arts from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, in 1999. Immediately following graduation she attended the International Institute for Political and Economic Studies in Athens, Greece. She went on to the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C. where she commenced a career in journalism, specializing in news about the Catholic Church as well as the Middle East. She also spent summers helping her father, the author Russell Kirk, with various editing and agrarian projects. She periodically assists her mother, Annette Kirk, with programs at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal located in the Kirk's ancestral village (Mecosta, Michigan). Andrea is an alumna of the Thomas More College Summer Program.

After spending six months traveling through Europe as a freelance journalist, interviewing European conservatives, Andrea settled in Rome where she has worked for the last five years writing for such publications as Inside the Vatican magazine, United Press International, Newsmax magazine and website, Our Sunday Visitor, the Wall Street Journal, and for the Vatican's charitable organization, Caritas Internationalis. In 2003 she was awarded a Phillips Foundation fellowship to research the relationship between the Bush administration and the Vatican. She has been interviewed by Zenit News Agency, Global Journalist Radio, Deutsche Welle Radio, Relevant Radio, and Niedziela, a Polish newspaper.

In 2003, she founded the Vatican Forum, a lecture series that brings Church experts to the general public to discuss issues in the news or cultural themes involving the Church. Speakers have included Italian politician and philosophy professor Rocco Buttiglione, veteran Catholic journalist and author Russell Shaw, Faith and Reason Institute founder Robert Royal, Priests for Life director Fr. Frank Pavone, neuroscientist and theologian Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, president of the Culture of Life foundation Austin Ruse, and the editor of Inside the Vatican magazine, Robert Moynihan, among others. Topics have included Church-State relations, bioethics, Flannery O'Connor and the problem of modernism, G.K. Chesterton, international law, and the papal conclave.

As a complement to the College's highly-regarded Rome Program, the Vatican Forum is now sponsored by Thomas More College and will be organized on a part-time basis by Mrs. Assaf (who already worked with Professor Connell this month on the College's first Vatican Forum event, a lecture by Robert Royal).

Andrea is married to Tony Assaf. They have one child, Maya (1) and are expecting a sibling for Maya this fall. Mrs. Assaf manages and edits her popular blog: www.andreakirkassaf.blogspot.com

Tony Assaf

Tony Assaf studied philosophy, theology, and oriental studies in Rome, receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in 2000. He also received an International Masters Certificate in Management and Communication for Cultural Politics from the Libera Università di Santa Maria Assunta in 2004.

During his nine years in Rome, Mr. Assaf has worked for the United Nation's World Food Programme, the Italian news agency AdnKronos, the Italian television company RAI, as an on-call translator for the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and as a co-founder and researcher for the Italian think-tank Middle Eastern Geopolitical Observer. He also worked as a personal assistant to Cardinal Opelio Rossi at the Casa Internazionale del Clero and as a volunteer for Caritas Internationalis. In the field of communications, he has written for Inside the Vatican magazine, and interned in the Arabic section of Vatican Radio. He is the founder of the Arabic version of Zenit News Agency, for which he serves as editor, translator, journalist and fund-raiser.

Mr. Assaf is a native speaker of Arabic and is also fluent in Italian, French, and English with an academic knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Siro-Aramaic, the language spoken by Our Lord. He has taught Arabic to Italian and English speakers as a private tutor. On a personal note, he was asked to be a lector in Arabic and Aramaic and serve at several Masses celebrated by Pope John Paul II. On one occasion Mr. Assaf read for the Pope at the Good Friday service; on another he read at the Pope's Christmas midnight Mass.

Mr. Assaf will join the College on August 1, 2007 and assist the President and new Provost with Program Development.

Christopher Olaf Blum

Christopher Blum will join the faculty of Thomas More College bringing with him over a decade of teaching experience at Christendom College (Front Royal, Virginia), where he was an Associate Professor of History and served as Department Chairman for the last five years. Professor Blum has displayed considerable breadth in his teaching: in addition to his History offerings, he has taught courses in Euclidean Geometry, The History and Philosophy of Scientific Thought, The Essay, and Medieval Art and Architecture. He is a distinguished teacher and has been ranked highly over the last several years by the nationally acclaimed Choosing the Right College, which remarks that Dr. Blum has always been one "counted on for exceptional courses." In addition to teaching, Dr. Blum has served extensively on the College's senior Curriculum Committee and was the chief architect behind Christendom College's Medieval Festival, held annually near the Feast of All Saints. He and his wife Kathleen have both been Advisors for the American School in Switzerland.

Dr. Blum was educated at the University of Virginia, where he graduated Bachelor of Arts with distinction in Biology and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa (the nation's oldest undergraduate liberal arts honors society, founded in 1776). As a National Science Foundation Fellow, he studied at the University of Notre Dame, where he received the MA in History & Philosophy of Science, and later the PhD in History & Philosophy of Science and European History. His dissertation examined the life and work of St-George J. Mivart, an outspoken critic of the adequacy of Darwinian theory. Dr. Blum was also the recent recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for Humanities to participate in the summer session on Gothic art and architecture.

Dr. Blum's published essays include studies on Jane Austen, the notion of the Common Good, the abbey church at Vezelay, Euclid's Elements, the educational vision of John Henry Newman, and the French Catholic political author, Louis de Bonald. He has published widely in such journals as Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, Modern Age, The Downside Review, The Journal of Education, and Sacred Architecture. Dr. Blum is an adept translator of French and has edited two volumes of French Catholic social thought, Critics of the Enlightenment (2004) and The True and Only Wealth of Nations (2006). Of his work, Joseph Pearce has said "Christopher Blum is to be commended for bringing together such a wealth of wisdom on the subject of the French Revolution and its devastating impact." Daniel Mahoney, a scholar of French and political thought, has described Blum's work as "handsome and ably translated" and National Review magazine has stated that "Christopher Blum illuminates a neglected tradition important to anyone interested in the battle over the nature and future of the West."

Professor Blum and his wife of fourteen years, Kathleen, have two children, John Louis (8) and Isabel Marie (2). Dr. Blum is a long-time visitor to the Granite State and has spent many summers hiking in the White Mountains.

Dr. Blum has been appointed Professor of Humanities effective August 1, 2007.

William Edmund Fahey:

William Fahey comes to Thomas More College after nearly a decade of teaching at Christendom College (Front Royal, Virginia), where he established the Department of Classical and Early Christian Studies, of which he was Chairman. While at Christendom he has taught courses in Greek, Latin, Classical and Byzantine History, Patristic Theology, Mediaeval Political Thought, and Classical and Early Christian Literature. Dr. Fahey also taught at The Catholic University of America, as well as at Brookfield Academy (Wisconsin) and the American Academy (St. Davids, Pennsylvania). In addition to holding posts on a number of faculty committees, Dr. Fahey was editor of the journal Faith & Reason, Director of the Christendom College Press, and President of Faculty Senate.

Educated at Xavier University (Cincinnati, Ohio) in Classics and History, Fahey pursued postgraduate studies in Ancient History at University of St. Andrews (Scotland), where he met his wife and still managed to complete his MPhil. He earned both the MA and PhD in Early Christian Studies from the Catholic University of America. He has held a number of distinguished fellowships, including the Thomas Savage, SJ Fellowship for excellence in Humanities; the Russell Trust Award of the University of St. Andrews; The McGuire-Peebles Fellowship at the Catholic University of America; the Richard M. Weaver Fellowship; the Marguerite Eyer Wilbur Fellowship; two Earhart Fellowships; and was a Salvatori Fellow at the Heritage Foundation (Washington, DC). His archeological work has lead him to Wales, the south-east coast of England, eastern Turkey and the Alpine valleys in Italy.

Dr. Fahey's scholarly interests extend from the Classical World through the Fathers of the Church to the importance of Agrarian thought on past and contemporary culture. In addition to Cicero, Virgil, St. Augustine, St. Benedict, and St. Gregory the Great, he has an especial interest in the writings of G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Fr. Vincent McNabb. He has published in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, The St. Austin Review, Faith & Reason, The University Bookman, Classical World, and The Classical Bulletin. Dr. Fahey has recently finished co-editing (with Joseph Pearce) a volume of Hilaire Belloc's political thought, as well as an anthology on the principle of subsidiarity. He is currently translating St. Robert Bellarmine's political writings.

Dr. Fahey is a Benedictine Oblate (novice) with the Monastery of Our Lady of the Annunciation (Clear Creek, Oklahoma). He and his wife Amy - a doctor in English literature from Washington University, St. Louis, and an M.Phil. from St. Andrews, Scotland - have four children: Helena (10), Mary (6), Catriona (4), and William (6 months). Dr. Fahey's family has lived in Massachusetts and Maine since the Eighteenth Century.

Dr. Fahey has been appointed Professor of Humanities and Provost of the College effective August 1, 2007.

Mary Mumbach

Dr. Mary Mumbach has been appointed founding director of the Caroline Gordon Program for the Study of Literature as a Mode of Knowledge. After completing her current tenure as Dean of the College in the Spring of 2008, the thirtieth anniversary of her position as founding dean, Dr. Mumbach will continue as full professor with the added responsibility of designing and directing the Gordon Program. The Gordon Program will be an institutional vehicle to advance the understanding of literature as a mode of knowledge and explore the foundations and contemporary importance of "Ontological Criticism" through scholarly conferences, lectures, and publications. It will also develop a component that seeks to teach current teachers of literature in high school and/or college how to incorporate the insights and theories Dr. Mumbach has developed during her academic career into their classrooms and curricula.

Brian Shea

Mr. Shea, having served this College community with great distinction for more than a quarter century, has been appointed Assistant Professor of Humanities, effective June 1, 2007. Please congratulate Professor Shea when you see him.

Mrs. Andrea Kirk Assaf's blog, Quo Vadis is still up. The Forgotten Victims.