Date: May 05, 2011

Hofstra Students Select 2011 Teachers of the Year

Outstanding Faculty to be Recognized at the Hofstra Gala Tonight and at Commencement on May 22

Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY – Hofstra students have selected five outstanding faculty members as the 2011 Teachers of the Year. They are:

• Benny Barak, professor of marketing and international business, Frank G. Zarb School of Business
• Elizabeth Glazer, associate professor of law, School of Law
• Laurie Johnson, professor, counseling, research, special education and rehabilitation, School of Education, Health and Human Services
• Robert Papper, professor of journalism, media studies, and public relations, School of Communication
• Bhaswati Sengupta, assistant professor, economics, Hofstra College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Teachers of the Year are selected by current, graduating students in each school. “What makes Teacher of the Year such a singular honor is that for the faculty member to be selected, that person needs to ranked as a top faculty member by graduating students over a three-year to five-year period of time,” said Hofstra Provost Herman Berliner.

The teachers will be recognized this evening, May 5, at the annual Hofstra Gala and will be honored again at Hofstra’s Spring Commencement activities on May 22. The bios for each of the Teachers of the Year follow:

Frank G. Zarb School of Business:
Benny Barak, professor and chairperson of marketing and international business

Dr. Barak's professional interests include cross-cultural consumer behavior with a special focus on issues related to age perception and levels of religiosity in the U.S., Asia (China, India, and South Korea), and Europe (France). His research has been presented at conferences sponsored by the Association of Consumer Research, the American Marketing Association, the Academy of Marketing Science and the American Association for Advances in Health Care Research.

Dr. Barak developed new survey measures concerned with aspects of self-perceived and ideal age, perceived youth and self-perceived sexual roles and more recently measures of religiosity as well. Articles dealing with the inner age measures have been published in the Psychology and Marketing, International Journal of Behavioral Development, Journal of Applied Measurement, Asia-Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, Decisions Marketing, Journal of Consumer Marketing, the Journal of Advertising Research, the Journal for Global Business Advancement, Sex-Roles, The Gerontologist, the International Journal of Aging and Human Development, the Journal of Ambulatory Care Marketing and the Journal of Social Psychology. Other publications include a chapter on sales promotion in The Encyclopedia of Management (Van Nostrand Reinhold). Before coming to Hofstra, Dr. Barak taught at Rutgers University and Bernard M. Baruch College (CUNY).

Dr. Barak's international background includes his having lived five years or longer in Indonesia, the Netherlands and Israel. He is fluent in Dutch, English, French, German and Hebrew. His international, non-academic experience includes work as an Israeli military diplomat (representing Israel vis-a-vis Lebanon and Syria), as an Israeli military public relations officer dealing with the international press corps, and (after achieving graduate business training in the United States) as a market researcher evaluating international phosphate markets for a major Israeli exporter, Negev Phosphates Inc.

Hofstra School of Law:
Elizabeth Glazer, associate professor of law

In addition to serving as associate professor of law, Professor Glazer serves as co-director of the Hofstra LGBT Rights Fellowship. Professor Glazer received a J.D. in 2004 from the University of Chicago, while serving as a member of the Law Review. Following graduation from law school, Professor Glazer was associated with the New York office of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP.

Professor Glazer's research examines the topic of exclusion in the First Amendment, antidiscrimination law, and property law. Recent work has focused on the legal treatment of sexual minorities—specifically, bisexuals, transgender individuals, and polyamorists—who do not fit precisely into antidiscrimination law’s established identity categories. 

Professor Glazer's recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal, Northwestern University Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review Colloquy, the Cardozo Law Review, Columbia Law Review Sidebar, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review Pennumbra, the Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review, and the Hofstra Law Review, among other journals.  She has also been invited to deliver lectures at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Northwestern University School of Law, the University of Chicago Law School, the University of Illinois College of Law, the University of Minnesota Law School, among other schools, and to Morgan Stanley, Nixon Peabody LLP, The City of New York’s Department of Juvenile Justice, among other organizations. 

In 2010 Professor Glazer was selected by the National LGBT Bar Association as one of the “Best LGBT Lawyers Under 40.” She teaches courses in First Amendment, Jurisprudence, Property, Law & Sexuality, Business Drafting, and Transactional Lawyering.

School of Education, Health and Human Services:
Laurie Johnson, professor, counseling, research, special education and rehabilitation

Professor Johnson, who earned her Ph.D. from Hofstra in 1985, has conducted research and developed training frameworks in conflict transformation, in interculturalism and human rights education.

Focusing her research on promoting reconciliation between divided communities, Dr. Johnson spent seven months in Cyprus in 2006 under a prestigious Fulbright grant. Cyprus has been torn by sociopolitical conflict for more than three decades, during which time there has been virtually no contact across its ethnic communities. Dr. Johnson's  Fulbright project was aimed at promoting systemic efforts to integrate peace education into the schools on both sides of that dividing line, and neither teachers nor counselors had received exposure to conflict resolution methods or training in cross-community relations.

Professor Johnson has also worked on similar matters in strife-ridden Northern Ireland. She served as the Sheelagh Murnaghan Visiting Professor at Queens University in Belfast, living there on special leave from 2000 to 2001. While there, as in Cyprus, she focused on the development of systemic approaches to conflict resolution, such as integrated education.

Closer to home, Professor Johnson has worked with the American Red Cross in their disaster relief mental health services division and  was called upon in 2005 to serve in the Hurricane Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast, stationed in southwestern Louisiana. Previously  Professor Johnson worked  at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan with the American Red Cross  to provide "psychological first aid" to survivors and rescuers after the collapse of the Twin Towers. She continued to work well into 2003 with bereaved families in Nassau County.

School of Communication:
Robert Papper, professor and chair of journalism, media studies, and public relations

Professor Papper is the Lawrence Stessin Distinguished Professor of Journalism at Hofstra University. His teaching specialties include convergence news, broadcast news writing, reporting and producing, the business of news and the future of news.

For 17 years, he has overseen the RTDNA/Hofstra University Annual Survey on the state of local radio and television news.  He also conducts Future of News studies for the RTDNF; he originated the Middletown Media Studies (which morphed into the Video Consumer Mapping Study funded by The Nielsen Company), and is co-editor of Electronic News, the official journal of the Radio Television Journalism Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Professor Papper is at work on the fifth edition of his Broadcast News & Writing Stylebook and has won more than 100 state, regional and national awards, including four regional Edward R. Murrow Awards and a DuPont-Columbia for "Excellence in Broadcast Journalism."

He is a past president of the Maine Association of Broadcasters and a long-time member of the national education committee of the Radio Television Digital News Association.  In 2006 Professor Papper was honored as the Ball State University Researcher of the Year. In  2007 the Associated Press Broadcasters inducted him into the Indiana Hall of Fame for Distinguished Service in Broadcast Journalism.

Bhaswati Sengupta, assistant professor, economics
Hofstra College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Bhaswati (Bonu)  Sengupta received her doctoral degree in Economics from North Carolina State University. Before joining the faculty at Hofstra, she held the position of Visiting Assistant Professor at Grinnell College, Iowa.  She also worked as an economic consultant for the United Nations, studying the impact of repatriation of Afghan refugees from Iran.  Professor Sengupta's primary research interest is in the analysis of the decision-making process of migrant workers in various social, institutional and economic settings.  Her work has covered many different immigrant groups, both in the United States and abroad.  She also works in the field of Real Options and is interested in its unique applications in modeling economic behavior under certain kinds of uncertainty.  She has authored/coauthored numerous articles on subjects such as the gender gap in Long Island, the labor market characteristics of immigrant women in Queens, unionization rates in New York City, etc. Her teaching interests and experience lie in the fields of econometrics, mathematical  economics, economic development, labor economics and introductory and intermediate micro and macroeconomics.

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