Alan L. Stanzler Award for Excellence in Teaching

The Alan L. Stanzler Award for Excellence in Teaching goes to Ellie Beargeon, Affiliated Faculty in the Marlboro Institute, an Iraq War Veteran who served in the U.S. Army for six years before transitioning to a career in higher education. ”She has an unrivaled ability to not only connect to her students on a personal level, but also to connect the course works to the lives of both herself and every person in the classroom.”

Mike Bent (Belmont, MA) started performing stand-up comedy when he was sixteen at the famous Ding Ho comedy club in Cambridge, MA. He has performed at comedy clubs and colleges throughout the U.S. as well as the White House and the Montreal Comedy Festival.

Brad Lemack is an award winning, Los Angeles-based talent manager and entertainment publicist, educator, author, content creator, business consultant and coach. He has been a professor of performing arts, public relations, communications and marketing at the Emerson College Los Angeles Campus since 1995. Brad has created numerous popular courses for Emerson College Los Angeles, including The Business of Acting, The Business of the Business, Improv Comedy UCB and Entertainment PR. Over the years, he has also contributed to the development and reimagining of the College's Los Angeles internship program and taught an academic course component of the acclaimed program.

Allyson Sherlock is a longstanding member of the Emerson community, first receiving her MA (2004) and MFA (2011) from the Visual and Media Arts department, and now as a Senior Affiliated Faculty member, where she has been teaching film editing and motion graphic design for the past 10 years. Allyson loves to share her passion for storytelling with her students, and aims to inspire her classes to see post-production techniques not as a means to an end, but as a never-ending well of creative possibilities. She has taught media production at several schools in the Boston area, and in 2011, was honored with the Petra T. Shattuck Teaching Award of Excellence. Allyson’s own films have enjoyed both commercial and festival success, and she finds great joy in collaborating with other filmmakers as an editor/animator to help them achieve their own vision.

Kenneth Grout has been an affiliated faculty member since 2011, currently in the Department of Communication Studies. He enjoys teaching the Introduction to Speech Communication and Oral Presentation of Literature courses, as they "are bedrock courses that teach fundamental skills and then build on those to elevate communications to art." He notes that "the skills taught in these courses are those that every student at Emerson [College] needs, for they will improve who they are no matter what they actually wind up doing in life."

Professor Anderson-Connolly, a 1990 Emerson College graduate, has been working as a radio journalist since that time and as affiliated faculty at Emerson since 2014. Professor Anderson-Connolly has been a reporter, anchor and news director at the local and national level. She continues to be an anchor for NBC Radio news and iHeart Media, and has experience in television news as a producer. Married with two daughters, one a recent Emerson graduate, Professor Anderson-Connolly recently completed her Master’s degree in Journalism through the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Israela Brill-Cass is a negotiation and conflict communication professional with over 25 years of experience as an attorney, mediator, facilitator, trainer and consultant. In 2015, she launched her company, fixerrr - the 3 r's stand for rethink, respond and resolve - to help individuals, groups and organizations recognize their strengths, assess their options and gain the tools they need to succeed. Brill-Cass has designed, managed and served as a neutral for conflict resolution and workplace communication programs for the Massachusetts Superior Courts, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, federal agencies, institutes of higher education and private corporations. She created the first federally funded Agricultural Mediation Program in New England to help local cranberry growers.

Ian Blaustein's writing and teaching interests range widely across ethics, political philosophy, and the history of both.

Alden Jones is a writer and scholar specializing in creative writing, literature, cultural studies, and exoticism. She is the author of The Blind Masseuse: A Traveler's Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia, called the "Best travel book of 2013" by The Huffington Post, and the story collection Unaccompanied Minors, winner of the New American Fiction Prize.

The 2015 Alan L. Stanzler Award for Excellence in Teaching recipient is Aaron B. Daniels from the Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies.

Robb Eason's research interests include Epistemology and The Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Technology, The Philosophy of Science, The History of Philosophy, and Neuroethics. He has written a chapter for a book on the philosophy of technology called Chasing Technoscience, and has published articles in the Philosophy of Science and the History of Philosophy. He also co-edited and contributed to a volume of the journal Philosophy and Social Research, focusing on the work of the American philosopher, Robert Brandom.

Morgan Baker is a feature writer and essayist. Her work has appeared in Talking Writing, Brain, Child Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The Martha's Vineyard Times, The Boston Globe, United Parenting Publications, Underwired, and multiple alumni magazines. In 2009, she was the Faculty Spotlight in the Emerson Review. In 2006, she won the Gold Award for feature writing from Parenting Publications of America.