Faculty

JOHN PATRICK COBY

Phone: (413) 585-3555
Office: Seelye Hall 407
E-mail: pcoby@email.smith.edu


Pat Coby graduated from the University of Dallas with a major in English and a minor in Art. He attended graduate school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in City and Regional Planning. But not liking the program, he returned to the University of Dallas to do a Masters and a Ph.D. in Political Science. He taught at Kenyon College in Ohio for five years, then at Idaho State University for two years, before coming to Smith College in 1985. His teaching areas include political philosophy, especially ancient and early modern political philosophy, and American political thought.

He does research and writes on some of the major figures of Western political thought: Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Marx -- and Shakespeare. Future research will focus on American political thought and on the Scottish Enlightenment.

Daniel K. Gardner

Phone: 413-585-3718
Office: 138 Elm Street #4
Email: dgardner@smith.edu

Daniel K. Gardner, Dwight W. Morrow Professor, specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of pre-modern China. He received his A.B. from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His most recent books are The Four Books: The Basic Teachings of the Later Confucian Tradition (Hackett Publishing, 2007), and Zhu Xi's Reading of the Analects: Canon, Commentary, and the Confucian Tradition (Columbia University Press, 2003), an extended analysis of how--and why--different commentators over the centuries read the enormously influential text of the Analects differently.

Richard Sherr

Phone: 585-3174
Office: Sage 314
Email: rsherr@email.smith.edu

Richard Sherr, Caroline L. Wall ’27 Professor of Music, specializes in the history of music in the Renaissance and teaches courses on the history of music before 1800, Bach and Handel, and the history of opera. He received his B.A. from Columbia University and his M.F.A. and Ph. D. from Princeton University. He has published widely on the subject of the singers of the papal chapel and music in Italy in the late 15th and 16th centuries. Soon to appear are a scholarly edition of an important manuscript of 15th-century polyphony in the Vatican Library and a scholarly edition of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, Princess Ida (the one that satirizes women’s education).