US and Latin American History
BA, Syracuse University; MA, PhD, University of Virginia

Andre Fleche joined the Castleton faculty in the fall of 2006. He earned his doctorate in history at the University of Virginia, where he also served as a member of the research staff of The Valley of the Shadow Project, an on-line database documenting two communities during the Civil War. Prof. Fleche offers courses in American and Latin American History with a special interest in the American Civil War, the Age of Revolution in the Americas, and global approaches to history. His essays and articles have appeared in The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864, edited by Gary W. Gallagher, the journal Civil War History, and elsewhere. He is currently working on turning his dissertation into a book examining the impact of the European revolutions of 1848 on the American Civil War.

Coordinator, Politics ,
BA , Daemen College; MA, PhD, SUNY at Buffalo

Melisse Pinto received her BA from Daemen College, and MA and PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo. As Castleton’s Political Scientist, she teaches a wide range of courses, including Comparative Politics and Government, Middle Eastern Politics and Government, Environmental Politics, International Relations, Political Ideologies, Political Philosophy, Cases in Civil Liberties and US Foreign Policy.

Coordinator, Economics and Environmental Studies, Department Chair
BA in Social Studies Education,Syracuse University; MA, PhD in Economics,University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Judy Robinson teaches courses in Economics and Society, Microeconomics, Women in the Economy, Development and Trade, Great Ideas in Economics, the Political Economy of the Environment, as well as introductory Environmental Studies.

Scott Roper joined the Castleton faculty in 2005 after three years as an assistant professor of geography at West Texas A&M University.  A native New Englander and a former selectman in a small New Hampshire town, he often can be found wandering through American cemeteries, villages, and baseball stadiums—sometimes with his cultural geography and North America classes—investigating some of the traits that make geography so much fun. Currently, Dr. Roper is working on projects relating to baseball as both an "Americanizing" agent and a tool for labor control in early twentieth-century Manchester, New Hampshire; to the impacts of regional images on the development of New England communities prior to the Great Depression; and to ethnic patterns exhibited in North American graveyards.  He also serves as editor of P.A.S.T. (Pioneer America Society Transactions) and as book review editor for Material Culture.

African History, World History, and Women’s Studies
M.A and Ph.D. in history, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Trish Van der Spuy taught at a high school in Harare, Zimbabwe, and has been involved in projects to rewrite South African history text books. Having lectured in African, Atlantic and British/US history, as well as women’s history, at the University of Cape Town, she taught South African history and coordinated the Women and Gender Studies Undergraduate program at the University of the Western Cape. A one-year visiting post teaching South African history at Emory University turned into a year teaching African History at Williams College – and Dr van der Spuy now teaches African History, World History, and Women’s Studies, at Castleton. Her research interests include gender and slavery, women’s auto/biography, and ‘race’ and gender in South African history. She is currently working on a biography of Cissie Gool, a political activist and member of the Cape Town City Council from the 1930s through to her death in 1963.

Asian History
BA, Michigan State University; MA, PhD, University of Michigan

Carrie Waara teaches courses in World History, Chinese History and Culture, Japanese History and Culture, Modern Pacific Asia, Women’s Studies, and History, Memory and War. She delights in the close student-faculty interaction made possible by small classes and a small campus, and believes whole-heartedly in the value of liberal arts education for the new millennium.

Her research has focused on art, publishing, and politics in early twentieth-century China and on the history and memory of World War II in Japan, China and the US. Publications include “Invention, Industry, Art: The Commercialization of Culture in Republican Art Magazines” in Sherman Cochran, ed., Inventing Nanjing Road: Shanghai Consumer Culture and “The Function of the Nude and Gender Construction in Shanghai Art Periodicals” in Jason Kuo, ed., Shanghai Visual Culture (forthcoming.)