Inspirational Professors

Students and alumni often say that among their reasons for attending Franklin are the small classes and personal relationships with professors. Today average class size is close to 16 students per class with a student/fulltime faculty ratio of 10 to 1. From long-serving professors to recent additions to the faculty, all Franklin professors inspire the students they teach. 

Brian Stanford

Through teaching hundreds of classes, leading 77 Academic Travels and taking an active part in the founding and evolution of Franklin College, Professor Brian Stanford has been able to participate in what he feels is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – helping to build and shape a college from the ground up.

Having taught art and art history classes at Franklin since the school was founded, Stanford remembers the faculty throwing a party for the first student to sign up at the new college, giving it, however briefly, the best student/professor ratio of any college, with nine faculty members to one student.

“Professor Stanford’s classes are relaxed and encourage thought and learning. I always come away with a new piece of fascinating knowledge,” says Miriam Storm ’09, a current senior majoring in Art History.

As the student body has grown, so has the choice of classes and majors including those in the art and art history field. Stanford recently introduced a digital photography class and there is now a Visual and Communication Arts major that Stanford helped to create, which allows students to combine many of the different art and communication classes. 

A native of England, Stanford leads a yearly Academic Travel to London to explore the theme of classical modernism. The travel blends both art and history with visits to London’s National Gallery, the Courtauld Institute of Art, Sotheby’s auction house, Salisbury Cathedral, Stonehenge, King’s College Chapel and the Kettle’s Yard museum in Cambridge. Stanford himself is also an artist and has shown his work in galleries in Switzerland, Italy, Britain and the United States.
“Professor Stanford invited us to his exhibition openings and let us peek into what a life as a real artist was. For someone hoping to have a similar future, he was an important role model,” says Jane Lafarge Hamill ’03, an artist in New York City.
Stanford enjoys teaching students that art history is largely a matter of opinion and helping them develop their own opinions on art and art history.

“Professor Stanford made me realize that art is and should be fun and that the study of art history is not at all a dry subject, but rather an exciting and dynamic field,” says Alexandra Strassheimer ’06, a graduate student in graphic art in London.

Floyd Parsons

Floyd Parsons, one of Franklin College’s longest-serving professors, joined the faculty in 1981. Born in Philadelphia and raised in San Diego, he received his undergraduate and Master’s degrees from San Diego State University. Driven by his interest in British history and politics, he moved to England for his doctoral research, earning his Ph.D. at Cambridge University. Shortly after, he arrived at Franklin College and has been a professor of history and philosophy here for over 25 years.

During his time at Franklin, Dr. Parsons has come to realize he is not a “historian who happens to be a teacher” as he first thought of himself, but rather is a “teacher who happens to be a historian.” He has taught nearly 30 different courses and almost every Franklin student has been in his classroom. Some of his current courses include “Western Civilization,” a two-semester course that fulfills the College’s history requirement; the “History of Switzerland”; and “The Cold War.” He regularly leads Academic Travel to northern Switzerland and has taught a first-year seminar entitled “Churchill and Gandhi: Parallel Lives.”

“Professor Parsons is someone who can keep class interesting,” says Ryan Ellis ’09. “I have enjoyed four years of his teaching and am constantly in awe of how he is able to grab our attention and make any subject interesting. It would be a shame to go through Franklin and not have enjoyed a ‘Parsons Class.’”

Dr. Parsons takes pleasure in “drawing out of students a recognition of alternative means of understanding themselves and the world around them.” He emphasizes that history is a subject more importantly defined by its methodology than by its content. He presents his subject as a way of organizing data, chronologically and thematically, as a way to make sense of the world. In his students, he attempts to “create a certain coherence” that stimulates thought and provides a method of understanding their past and their surroundings. Over the years of teaching at Franklin, Dr. Parsons has watched the College expand in size, prestige and number of departments, including the addition of fellow historian, Dr. Marcus Pyka, and a history major open to all students as of the fall of 2008.

Outside of the classroom, Dr. Parsons has given many lectures on campus ranging from “George Orwell and 1984” to “The History of the World: A Study of Toynbee.” He has also lectured in England on the life and times of Winston Churchill for the Workers’ Educational Association and participated in international conferences on Victorian politics and William Gladstone. His primary interests are the relationship between political theory and party politics and the conflict between science and religion. He has been published in the journal Parliamentary History and his book, Thomas Hare and Political Representation in Victorian Britain, is to be published in the summer of 2009.

Wasiq Khan

Professor Wasiq Nawaz Khan has a unique background that fits well into the diversity of Franklin College. Born in Turkey, his childhood stretched across continents, from Brazil to South Korea, Pakistan, Thailand, the United States and Indonesia. At the age of 15, he finally settled with his family in the United States to complete his education. Khan dreamed of becoming a college professor overseas and joined the Franklin College Economics Department in the fall of 2006.

Professor Khan is a teacher who loves the subject of economics and loves to teach it. In the classroom, he focuses on the value of the student-teacher relationship, with the strong belief that it is a mutually beneficial one. “Always learn as you teach,” he says. “The minute you stop learning is the minute you stop being a good teacher.” He relishes working closely with a small group of students, and the intimate environment of Franklin allows for the “maximizing of potential” and “moments of intellectual electricity.” Professor Khan appreciates “intellectually vibrant” students who have “a fascination with the way people work” and expresses great satisfaction with the quality of his students at Franklin.

“Professor Khan has been an inspiring figure in my academic development,” says Nick Hasko ’09. “He casts aside the unoriginal and the banal in a field where all too often, facts and figures rather than innovation and revelation dominate classroom discussion. He’s keen to bring students to their own ideas, theories and conclusions, all the while practicing an inquisitive skepticism that pushes students to question their outcomes with the greatest degree of rigor.”

At Franklin, Khan teaches “Principles of Microeconomics” along with a wide range of upper-division economic courses. He is currently working on formulating a new class around his interests: political economies of growth and development. He has also led popular Academic Travels to Portugal and Cairo in alternating semesters. In the future, he hopes to lead a travel to India.

His credentials include a B.A. in Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia, an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Texas and a Ph.D. from the American University. His main interests lie in the history of economic development, and his recent research centers on the economics of global migration and the effectiveness of foreign food-aid. Khan has been a consultant at the World Bank with a focus on HIV/AIDS relief and mitigation efforts in sub-Saharan Africa as well as on social-development issues in the Middle East and North Africa region. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of a nongovernmental organization known as Partners for Development which administers public health and agricultural development projects in Bosnia, Cambodia and Nigeria.

Marcus Pyka

Marcus Pyka, the newest professor in the history department, arrived at Franklin in 2007 after teaching at University College Dublin, Harvard and the University of Munich. After teaching at large universities, he was in search of a smaller campus where he would be able to give more attention to his students, an opportunity which Franklin offered. Pyka has enjoyed Franklin’s intimate community and wonderful colleagues in his first few years at the College.

At Franklin, Pyka has taken on the tremendous task of teaching “World History” (from the Stone Age to the present), a two-semester course that fulfills the College’s history requirement. He also teaches “Worlds of Islam,” a new course of his own creation, and the freshman seminar, “History of Tourism.” He is currently developing a new course to be offered in the fall of 2009 that will focus on Jewish history, one of his areas of expertise. In the spring of 2008, he led his first Academic Travel to Bavaria and will continue to offer this travel in the coming years.

In his classes, Pyka attempts to present history in an interdisciplinary fashion, highlighting the importance of critique and relevance to the modern day. As a teaching method, he focuses on “turning people into critical minds” and emphasizes the importance of “information literacy.” Pyka is constantly exploring ways to engage his students further, “make them think” and bring them to the level of college performance. He includes writing skills, presentation skills, research methods and critical thinking as learning components integral to his classes.

“Professor Pyka’s classes are probably the most challenging I have ever taken, but they have also helped me grow intellectually,” says Amanda Johnston ’11. “His teaching encourages me to take interest in unfamiliar cultures, expanding my view of global history. Most importantly, his expectations challenge me to work harder as a student and gain more from my college experience.”

Outside of the classroom, Pyka continues research in the areas of identity politics. He recently completed his first book, Jewish Identity in the Life and Works of Heinrich Graetz, which examines the components of Graetz’s definition of Jewish identity and the larger implication of his works in a historical and academic context. The book was published in the fall of 2008. He is currently working on his next book, examining the “issue of respectability” with a focus on identity politics of the 19th-century bourgeoisie.

Born and raised in Germany, he received his Master’s degree from Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelms Universität Bonn, Germany, and his Ph.D. from Ludwigs Maximilians Universität München, Germany. Pyka’s areas of research include identities and identity politics in the 19th and 20th centuries; the religious and cultural history of Judaism, Islam and Christianity; gender and the role of minorities in modern societies; the cultural history of the bourgeois world in 19th- and 20th-century central Europe; and history and methodology of historiography.

May 2009