Faculty Profiles

The Institute is shaped by its faculty. Members of the faculty hold joint appointments in the Institute and one of the professional schools, either Music or Divinity. All offer courses that enhance the curricula of their respective schools and reflect the mission of the Institute. As the following profiles indicate, the faculty bring a variety of gifts and expertise, representing the finest in their disciplines.

Horace T. Allen, Visiting Professor of Liturgical Studies. Professor Allen visits Yale from Boston University, where he is Professor of Worship in the School of Theology. He has served in this position for over twenty years. He has also taught at Westminster Choir College, Notre Dame University, and Weston Theological Seminary (Jesuit) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as overseas at the Presbyterian College and Theological Seminary in Seoul, Korea, and at Peking University in Beijing, China.

Professor Allen is a minister of Word and Sacrament of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and a member of its Eastern Korean (Hanmi) Presbytery. He has served in the Worship Commission of the Consultation on Church Union, the Consultation on Common Texts, and the English Language Liturgical Consultation, and as director of worship and music for the Presbyterian Church, as well as warden of the historic Iona Abbey in Scotland as a member of the Iona Community. A.B., Princeton University; M.A., M.Div., Harvard University; M.Phil., Ph.D., Union Theological Seminary.

Wesley D. Avram, Stephen Merrell Clement–E. William Muehl Assistant Professor of Communications. Professor Avram's interests integrate rhetoric and philosophical theology with preaching and ministry. Most recently senior pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, Wilmette, Illinois, he has been college chaplain at Bates College and taught at Bates and Northwestern. Articles have appeared in venues as varied as The Journal of Religious Ethics, New Oxford Review, and Sojourners. Professor Avram has received preaching prizes from The Christian Century Foundation and Princeton Seminary and research grants from Princeton Seminary, the N.E.H., and The Louisville Institute. Special studies at the Hebrew University, Ecumenical Institute at Tantur, University of Chicago, and Yale. B.S., with distinction, Northwestern University; M.Div., Princeton Seminary; Ph.D., Northwestern.

Marguerite L. Brooks, Associate Professor (Adjunct) of Choral Conducting. Professor Brooks was named to the faculty in 1985 to chair Yale's graduate program in choral conducting and to direct the Institute's choral activities. She conducts the Yale Camerata and Yale Pro Musica and instructs all choral conducting students from both the Institute and the School of Music. She serves as director of music at the Church of the Redeemer (UCC) in New Haven. She has taught at Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and Amherst College, and was director of choral music at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. B.A., Mount Holyoke College; M.M., Temple University.

Margot E. Fassler, Director. Professor Fassler was named Robert S. Tangeman Professor of Music History in 1999. She holds joint appointments at the Divinity School, the School of Music, and in the Department of Music. A historian of music and liturgy, her special fields of interest are medieval and American sacred repertories. She offers courses in medieval and contemporary liturgics, sacred repertories of music from early Christianity to the present, Christian hymnody, liturgical drama, and with Jaime Lara in mariology. Her book Gothic Song won the Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy and the Otto Kinkeldey Prize of the American Musicological Society. She has recently finished a book on the Virgin of Chartres (Yale University Press) and is now writing a book on Hildegard of Bingen. B.A., State University of New York; M.A., Syracuse University; M.A., Ph.D., Cornell University.

Siobhán Garrigan, Assistant Professor of Liturgical Studies and Assistant Dean for Chapel. Professor Garrigan was made Government of Ireland Scholar for her thesis "Beyond Ritual: Communicative Ethics and Liturgical Theology." She is interested in the intersection of worship, theology, and society, which she has explored using multimedia resources, and she has also examined the relationship between liturgy and life in articles for the Irish journals Céide and The Furrow. She has worked extensively with homeless people. Her experiences as a worship leader in ecumenical settings led to her involvement in a volume on Celebrating the Triduum, and to her role in 2000 as coordinator of Fís, the first Irish interchurch conference. B.A., Oxford; S.T.M., Union Theological Seminary; Ph.D., Milltown Institute, Dublin.

Martin Jean, Professor (Adjunct) of Organ. Professor Jean has performed widely throughout the United States and Europe and is known for his wide repertorial interests. He was awarded first place at the international Grand Prix de Chartres in 1986 and, in 1992, at the National Young Artists Competition in Organ Performance. A student of Robert Glasgow, in the fall of 1999 he spent a sabbatical with Harald Vogel in North Germany. Last year he completed a cycle of the complete organ works of Bach at Yale and is currently recording the six symphonies of Louis Vierne in Woolsey Hall. A.Mus.D., University of Michigan.

Jaime Lara, Assistant Professor of Christian Art and Architecture and Chair of the Program in Religion and the Arts. Professor Lara has both degrees and interest in liturgics as well as art, architecture, and anthropology. His studies have focused on early Christianity, the Spanish Middle Ages, medieval theater, and the colonial era of Latin America, and he concentrates on making connections between the disciplines. He regularly travels to Mexico and South America to lecture, do research, and uncover little-known aspects of religious culture and the visual arts. His book on Mexican architecture and eschatology, City, Temple, Stage, will appear soon, and another is in preparation on St. Francis of Assisi in Latin American art, Flying Francis and Other Flighty Phenomena. B.A., Cathedral College; M.Div., Immaculate Conception Seminary; M.A., City University of New York; S.T.M., Yale University; Ph.D., Graduate Theological Union and the University of California, Berkeley.

Thomas Murray, Professor (Adjunct) of Organ and Chair of the Program in Organ. Professor Murray has been a member of the faculty since 1981, and was appointed professor of music and university organist in 1990. Successor to Robert Baker and Charles Krigbaum as the senior professor of organ, he teaches the organ literature seminar and gives instruction to the organ majors. He maintains an international touring schedule and has recorded extensively, specializing in music of the Romantic period. During his years at Yale he has been active as a choral conductor, directing the University Choir from 1989 to 1994. B.A., Occidental College.

William Porter, Lecturer in Organ Improvisation. William Porter is professor of organ at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where he also teaches Music Theory. He holds degrees from Oberlin College, where he also taught organ and harpsichord from 1974 to 1986, and from Yale University, where he was director of music at Yale Divinity School. Widely known as a performer and teacher in the United States and in Europe, he is a leader among organists working toward a recovery of an historical approach to musical performance, and has achieved international recognition for his skill in improvisation in a wide variety of styles. He has taught and performed at the North German Organ Academy, the Italian Academy of Music for the Organ, the Göteborg International Organ Academy, the Dollart Festival, the Lausanne Improvisation Festival, the Smarano Organ and Clavichord Academy, the Boston Early Music Festival, and the National Convention of the American Guild of Organists. He is a cofounder of Affetti Musicali and of Musica Poetica, Boston-based ensembles that have received critical acclaim for their performances of Baroque repertoire. An active church musician, from 1985 to 1997 he was director of music at the Church of St. John the Evangelist in Boston; he is now artist-in-residence at First Lutheran Church in Boston. He has recorded on the Gasparo, Proprius, BMG, and Loft labels. B.Mus., Oberlin College; M.M.A., D.M.A., Yale University.

Lana Schwebel, Assistant Professor of Religion and Literature. Professor Schwebel comes to Yale from Vassar College, where she has been visiting Assistant Professor of English since 2000. Primarily a medievalist, she explores the ways in which poets understood the sale of indulgences in fourteenth-century England; she is particularly interested in the use of poetic language to articulate penitential thought and doctrine. She is currently working on an article on Piers Plowman. A.B., Barnard College, Columbia University; M.A., Ph.D., University of Penn-sylvania.

Bryan D. Spinks, Professor of Liturgical Studies and Chair of the Program in Liturgical Studies, Fellow of Morse College. Professor Spinks chairs the Program in Liturgical Studies at the Institute and the Divinity School, and is known internationally for the extraordinary breadth of his learning. He works on Syriac traditions of liturgy, placing his scholarship in the context of patristics and the early sources of Christian liturgy. A priest in the Anglican tradition, Professor Spinks works on a range of Reformation topics, with publications on Luther, Calvin, Richard Hooker, William Perkins, and most recently on seventeenth-century English and Scottish sacramental theology. Before coming to Yale, he taught at St. Peter's School in Huntingdon and at the University of Cambridge, where he was also chaplain of Churchill College. He served on the Church of England Liturgical Commission from 1986 to 2001, and was involved in the compilation of Common Worship 2000. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. B.A., St. Chad's College, University of Durham; Dip.Theol., University of Durham; Cert.Ed., University of Cambridge; M.Th., King's College, University of London; B.D., D.D., University of Durham.

James F. White, Visiting Professor of Liturgical Studies, comes to the Institute from Drew University, where he was the Bard Thompson Professor of Liturgical Studies. He was formerly professor of liturgy at the University of Notre Dame and previously taught Christian Worship at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. He has served as visiting professor at Yale, Catholic, and Emory universities. Professor White has written extensively on liturgical architecture, sacramental theology, and liturgy and justice. As a historian, he is particularly interested in the diverse ways in which individuals have shaped Christian worship as compared to the general anonymity of much of liturgical history. He was the principal writer of the United Methodist eucharistic rite. A.B., Harvard University; B.D., Union Theological Seminary; Ph.D., Duke University.

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