Liberal Studies: Adult Degree Completion

Dr. Sonia Pérez Villanueva, a scholar from the Basque Country, holds a PhD in Spanish Studies from the University of Birmingham in England. Her research interests are Peninsular Studies (Spain and Portugal), Autobiographical Studies, and Gender Studies, particularly cultural, visual, and media representations of violence against women in Spain.

Her latest research project focuses on the persecution of Crypto-Jewish women in Spain by the Inquisition. She is the founding editor, with Leyla Rouhi and Irene Mizrahi, of ConSecuencias: A Journal of Spanish Criticism.

Sonia is the co-founder and co-chair, with Lisa Fiore and Meenakshi Chhabra, of the Violence against Women Initiative at Lesley University, a platform to give voice to victims and survivors of gender-based violence.

Liv Cummins is Professor of Drama and Creative Writing in the Humanities Department. She holds a BS in Theater and English from Skidmore College and an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Liv brings expertise as a musical theater lyricist/book writer, comedy writer, director, screenwriter, singer/songwriter, theatrical producer, and performer. At Lesley, Liv teaches creative writing, literature, drama, and English Composition courses, and her specialties include playwriting, screenwriting, drama, and comedy. She developed and teaches the new creative writing/drama course, Art & Craft of Musical Theater Writing – featuring a Cabaret Night performance of students’ original songs – and the Art & Craft of Comedy Writing.

As a musical theater dramatist, Liv is inspired by the passions and perseverance of historical women characters, as shown in her musicals Vanishing Point and The Bridge. The adventurous lives of aviator Amelia Earhart, author Agatha Christie, evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson (in Vanishing Point), and engineer Emily Warren Roebling, ‘silent builder’ of the Brooklyn Bridge (The Bridge), animate Liv’s musicals. Her shows have been produced at theaters across the country and the world, including Seattle Public Theater, NYC’s 54 Below, Baltimore’s Stillpointe Theatre, and el Teatro Lara in Madrid, Spain, in a Spanish-language translation of Vanishing Point.

Her current musical project, Ladies, How Dare You!, tells the tale of two American suffragists in 1913 who travel by carriage to Washington, D.C. for the largest Women’s March of its time, and find themselves on a life-changing journey. The piece utilizes old-fashioned comedy hijinks and Shakespearean mistaken identities, and features an Americana-flavored score. Exploring themes of gender roles and urban and rural clashes, the show asks what it means to be an American.

Liv is also a director, singer/songwriter, and sketch comedy writer and performer. Liv hosts, directs, and performs in the live comedy/variety show, The Berserkshires! – formerly Saturday Night LIV (hosted by Liv Cummins) – a cross between the Carol Burnett show, the classic Ed Sullivan show, and Saturday Night Live. The show, which has been performed in NYC, Boston, the Berkshires, and the Albany, NY region, features original comedy sketches interspersed with music acts and oddball performers, such as jugglers, knife-throwers, impressionists, and others.

At heart, Liv is a storyteller. In her comedy, screenplays, songs, and musicals, her work weaves humor and authenticity with emotional songs to engage audiences in funny, unexpected, thought-provoking ways.

In her teaching, Liv is committed to providing an academically challenging, collaborative environment in which her students develop their critical thinking, writing, and feedback literacy skills, and form a trusted community of writers and thinkers. She aims to inspire them to question and challenge socially- and culturally-accepted constructs, develop their passions, and become lifelong learners.

Anne holds a doctorate in English Literature and an MA in Humanities from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she studied poetry with Robert Creeley, Irving Feldman, and John Logan. 

She's an alum of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA, has studied at the Linklater Studio, and developed the Drama Minor and Drama track in Lesley's English major. A former member of the Small Press Alliance of Boston and editor of Oak Square Magazine, she also started Commonthought Magazine at Lesley.

Anne currently teaches courses in English Composition, Creative Writing, Literature, and Play Production: Shakespeare. In the past, she's worked with master's students and directed two doctoral dissertations. Her classrooms strive to be safe places of mutual respect and diligence.

Professor Lowe is a historian with research and teaching expertise in both international and European history. At Lesley her courses cover the history of twentieth-century genocides, international law and human rights, and humanitarian social movements. Her courses incorporate innovative forms of history education, such as the award-winning historical role-playing games from Reacting to the Past.

Professor Lowe’s research focuses on the influence of transnational social movements on international law, foreign aid, and national sovereignty from the mid-nineteenth through twentieth centuries. She has conducted archival research in Switzerland, France, Great Britain, Germany, Norway, and the United States. She has held fellowships in both Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany and Geneva, Switzerland, and speaks both German and French.

Professor Lowe’s existing publications analyze the impact of interwar definitions of war victims’ rights on humanitarian aid provision after the First World War. Her first book manuscript examines how the League of Nations Member States used humanitarian aid as a tool to manage the crisis of European democracy from 1917 to 1939. Her second book project examines the effect of decolonization on the International Red Cross Movement from 1947 to 1977, decades during which this traditionally Eurocentric movement asserted its relevance to post-colonial regimes and anti-colonial liberation movements in a rapidly changing geo-political landscape.

Professor Lowe holds a PhD in History from Yale University, an MA and MPhil in History from Yale University, and a BA in History from Pepperdine University.

Giuseppe Formato, PhD, currently serves as Senior Lecturer at Lesley University's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, where he has developed and taught courses in world languages and cinema. During this time, he has also served as a fellow at the Camões Institute in the Consulate General of Portugal of Boston through its Fernão Mendes Pinto Program. He has been an invited speaker to high school classrooms, universities, and conferences in Europe and North America, in addition to being published in scholarly journals and serving on scientific committees worldwide. 

Dr. Formato is also an associated researcher at ISCTE-Lisbon University Institute, where he has served as a postdoctoral fellow and as a visiting researcher in its Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology. He is also currently a public high school World Language teacher in the Greater Boston area and a foreign correspondent on language education issues for O Baluarte de Santa Maria, an Azorean periodical. Some areas of research interest include critical language and eco-pedagogy, language acquisition, linguistic ideologies, the Portuguese-speaking diaspora of New England, and bilingual education.

Aaron holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh. As an associate professor at Lesley, his areas of expertise include creative writing, poetry, popular culture, and gender. As a teacher and a writer, he hones both crafts every day, and is committed to helping his writing and literature students enter into the public experience of what is often perceived as a solitary undertaking.

As a literature teacher, Robert is committed to the view that engaged reading makes us better critical thinkers and transforms our understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live. He believes that the primary value of literary study is not so much learning about literature, but learning through literature.

Robert has over 30 years of teaching experience at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the College of Art and Design, where he served as Chair of the Liberal Arts Department for fifteen years. In addition to first year composition and literature courses, he teaches a variety of electives, including Short Fiction and Novella, the Family in Literature, Romanticism in the Arts: Literature, Painting, Music.

Outside of Lesley, he's served as Scholar in Residence in Boston University's Teachers Academy in South Carolina. He's written articles and given conference presentations at local and national conferences on topics in the humanities and education; his current research interests focus on the role and efficacy of liberal arts study in the undergraduate curriculum.

As a teacher of composition and literature, Robert is committed to the belief that engaged reading makes us better critical thinkers and transforms our understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live—that the primary value of literary study is not so much learning about literature, but learning through literature.