Linda Adler-Kassner
Associate Vice Chancellor of Teaching and Learning
Faculty Director, Center for Innovative Teaching, Research, and Learning (CITRAL)
John and Jody Arnhold
John Arnhold is the Founder and Managing Member of Arnhold LLC, a Registered Investment Advisor. He retired as Chairman and Chief Investment Officer of First Eagle Investment Management. He was also the president of the First Eagle Funds. Mr. Arnhold began his career in 1975 in the credit training program at Chase Manhattan Bank. From there, he joined Chase’s Corporate Lending and then Merchant Banking Groups. In 1981, he joined Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb’s merger arbitrage department. Two years later, John joined First Eagle where he launched its Merger Arbitrage business. In 1988, he was appointed co-director of First Eagle’s institutional securities business. In 1994, John became CEO of the Firm, where he led its investment management, brokerage and global securities businesses.
John received his B.A. in English from UC Santa Barbara in 1975. He became a trustee of the UC Santa Barbara Foundation in 2012, and he formerly served as its Chair, as well as Chair of Investments and Finance Committees, and Treasurer of the Foundation.
Jody Gottfried Arnhold is a luminary in dance education and an advocate for dance. She taught dance in NYC public schools for over twenty years, founded the Dance Education Laboratory (DEL) at 92Y, supports the dance program at the New York City Department of Education, created the Arnhold Graduate Dance Education Program at Hunter College, and is the visionary benefactor behind the Doctorate in Dance Education at Teachers College Columbia University.
John and Jody have made many significant investments in research, teaching, and programs at UC Santa Barbara. Beyond financial support, John invests his time on campus and volunteers as an assistant coach with the women’s tennis team; Jody works closely with our dance faculty to support international colloquium in dance and performance studies.
John and Jody have two children, reside in New York City and Connecticut, and are members of the UCSB Gold Circle.
Distinguished Visiting Artist
Cristina Pato
www.cristinapato.com
Musician, writer, educator and producer, Cristina Pato, has been hailed as “a virtuosic burst of energy” by The New York Times. After 25 years of experience as a professional musician, touring around the world with the Galician bagpipes and piano, Cristina now channels her creativity into writing, producing, and teaching, focusing on the role of the arts in society.
Cristina has served as a visiting professor and artist-in-residence at New York University (NYU), Harvard University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Additionally, she collaborated for over fifteen years with The Silkroad Project, the non-profit organization founded by cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
Since 2017, Cristina writes a weekly column titled “The Art of Restlessness” for Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia for which she was awarded the XVII Afundación Journalism Prize: Fernández del Riego. In 2022 she published her debut novel “No día do seu enterro” (“On His Burial Day”) with Editorial Galaxia (Colección Literaria, 2022), now in its third reprint.
Cristina divides her time between New York City and Galicia and shares her life with photographer Xan Padrón.
Arnhold Arts and Humanities Commons Faculty Fellows
Sara Pankenier Weld
A Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature Affiliate, Sara Pankenier Weld researches childhood, particularly in Slavic, Scandinavian, and North American contexts and in literature, culture, and theory. Her increasingly global work challenges discriminatory attitudes toward children in scholarship, society, and culture. She has advocated for children and the humanities and foreign languages as a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project in 2024 and for the latter also through the Foreign Language Advisory Council at UCSB. In Spring 2025 Sara is a Fellow of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge, where she will be completing her fourth book. In 2023 Sara was elected President of the International Research Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL), after serving on its Board for 4 years and as a convenor the 2023 IRSCL Congress, which brought hundreds of participants from over 30 countries and 5 continents to UCSB and included multiple public humanities events, including the UCHRI Engaging Humanities funded Revisiting Island of the Blue Dolphins event. Sara is a co-convenor of the IHC Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group. Sara has taught at UCSB since 2012, with her teaching often reflecting her enthusiasm for literature and culture, international perspectives, visual culture, and/or nature and the Channel Islands.
Sowon Park
Dr. Sowon S Park specializes in British Modernism, Political Fiction, World Literature, and the relationship between Literature and other forms of knowledge, in particular Cognitive Neuroscience. Before coming to UCSB, she was Lecturer in English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Her previous academic appointments were at Cambridge University and Ewha University, Seoul. She has also held visiting appointments at UCSD, ZFL, Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren, Berlin and the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, UK. She is currently Co-PI of the 5 year Trauma-Informed Pedagogy Project and creator/convener of Unconscious Memory Network. She co-edits Global Asias (Oxford University Press); and Critical Interventions in Medical and Health Humanities (Bloomsbury) and serves on the editorial board of the following literary journals : Neohelicon, Arcadia, Primerjalna književnost and The Korean Association of Nineteenth Century Literatures in English. Past research projects include AHRC funded ‘Creative Multilingualism’ and IHC Research Group on Sustainability and the New Human and her publications are on Virginia Woolf, Suffrage fiction, Anthropomorphism, the Gender of Modernism, East Asian Modernist literature, World literature, Script, Pak Kyongni and neuro-cognitive literary criticism. She is former/honorary President of the Research Committee on Literary Theory of the International Comparative Literature Association and the recipient of the 2020 Council of Graduate Students Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award.
Staff
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Nicole Strobel
Nicole Strobel earned her PhD in Film and Media Studies from UC Santa Barbara in 2023. Her research focuses on global digital cultures, politics, and industries, specifically on the connections between contemporary video cultures, affective politics, and virality. Her research has been recognized at UCSB and the International Communication Association, and she has worked with YouTube Research to improve digital news ecosystems. As an educator, she has designed many interdisciplinary, student-centered courses and was an inaugural Mellon Engaging Humanities Graduate Teaching Fellow at UCSB.