Welcome to University Hall! The building is home to four Faculty Fellows-in-Residence — Professors Patsy Cooper, Warren Frisina, Cyrus Patell, and Deborah Williams — who will be conducting a variety of different programs and activities for hall residents during the coming year.
Professor Patricia M. (“Patsy”) Cooper is Assistant Professor of Language and Literacy in the Steinhardt School. Her scholarly interests focus on the intersection of teacher education and the effect of formal learning experiences on young children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development. Three issues dominate her research agenda: effective and equitable pedagogy, the learning needs of diverse children, and emergent and early literacy development. A recurring strand that embodies all three issues is the contribution of early childhood educator Vivian Paley to teacher education. She is the author of numerous articles, as well as the forthcoming book The Classrooms Young Children Need: Lessons in Teaching from Vivian Paley (2009, University of Chicago Press). Her courses this year include theories of early childhood development, foundations of reading and writing, and children’s literature.
Professor Warren G. Frisina is married to Professor Cooper. He is Dean of Hofstra University’s Honors College where he teaches courses in religion and philosophy. He has published widely in American 
pragmatism, Neo-Confucianism and the academic study of religion.
Contemporary theories of knowledge, metaphysics, Chinese philosophical and religious thought, and comparative philosophy and religion are among his current research and teaching interests. He is especially interested in the implications of recent work in cognitive psychology for our understanding of knowledge and the mind. His book, The Unity of Knowledge and Action: Toward a Nonrepresentational Theory of Knowledge, was published in 2002 by SUNY Press. He is also co-editor of The Pragmatic Century: Conversations with Richard J. Bernstein (2007, SUNY Press) and Teaching the Daode Jing (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).
Professor Cyrus R. K. Patell is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Honors in the English Department at NYU. He is the author of Negative Liberties: Morrison, Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal Ideology (Duke, 2001). 
A revised version of his section on the “Emergent Literatures” for The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume 7, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, is forthcoming from NYU Press. His research and teaching interests include U.S. Literature, with an emphasis on emergent (minority) traditions; cultural studies, with an emphasis on popular culture; and intersections of literature and political theory. A new volume, The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York City, edited with English Department colleague and Broome Street Faculty Fellow Bryan Waterman will be published early next year. This fall he will be teaching the MAP course Conversations of the West. You can find out more about him at his websites patelldotorg and ahistoryofnewyork.com.
Professor Deborah Lindsay Williams is Professor of English 
and Director of the College Honors Program at Iona College in New Rochelle. She is also Adjunct Professor of English at NYU. She is the author of Not in Sisterhood: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, and the Politics of Female Authorship (Palgrave, 2001). She has edited a volume of stories by Zona Gale that is forthcoming from The Feminist Press; her research interests include the politics of the literary marketplace in the early 20th century, the ways in which gender and race influenced the social reforms of the Progressive Era, and the social critiques found in the intersections between “popular” fiction and “serious” fiction at the turn of the 20th century.