Meet The Faculty Fellows
Faculty Fellows play an important role in creating an academic presence in the halls. This is achieved through their committed four hours a week in their assigned community by interacting with residents during their planned programs and office hours. Unlike Faculty in Residence, Faculty Fellows do not reside in on campus housing.
La'Tonya Rease Miles, Ph.D
McCarthy Hall
Director, Academic Resource Center
- B.A., English Language & Literature, University of Maryland, College Park
- Ph.D., English, University of California, Los Angeles
As Director of the Academic Resource Center at Loyola Marymount University, Dr. Miles works collaboratively with faculty, administrators and academic departments campus-wide to develop programs that improve student success, including first-year experience, learning communities and tutoring. She also is the creative director behind the First To Go community, which provides academic and social support, as well as empowering enrichment activities for first-generation college students. Dr. Miles’s research interests include sport in American popular culture, multi-ethnic literatures, and the hidden curriculum in higher education. Further, she is passionate about NBA basketball, college football and “Friday Night Lights.”
Kathleen Harris, Ph.D
Rains Hall
Director, National and International Scholarship Office
- J.D. Loyola Law School Los Angeles
- Ph.D UC Berkeley
Kathleen Harris is currently the Director of the National & International Scholarship Office at Loyola Marymount University. With a doctorate in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley, she is a medievalist by training, but her interest in Old French oral tradition translated remarkably well when she was part of the African Studies Institute at the University of Georgia, a group she joined while working on infusing the merit scholarship program she was directed with opportunities for travel, study, research, and creative activity beyond our borders. Dr. Harris is delighted that the innovative program she helped start in Tanzania is still flourishing 10 years later. She serves as a guide through the application process for many distinguished honors, and is proud that since her arrival in 2001, 16 LMU students have won US Student Fulbrights, and her two extraordinary Fulbright experiences covering four countries inspired her even more to open the door to new world regions for LMU’s prospective applicants. Dr. Harris also recently finished her Juris Doctorate (JD) at Loyola Los Angeles Law School where she had the chance to study human rights and environmental law in San Jose, Costa Rica and international arbitration and comparative tort law at the University of Bologna in Italy.
Sue Scheibler
McKay Hall
Associate Professor, School of Film and Television
- BA, Biola University
- MA, Talbot Theological Seminary
- MA, Claremont Graduate University
- MA, University of Southern California
- PhD, University of Southern California
Susan Scheibler, Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies, has been a professor at LMU since 1991, where she began as a part-time instructor before her hire as a full time professor in 2001. She holds graduate degrees in Critical Studies, Philosophy of Religion and New Testament Studies. Her work as been published in Theorizing Documentary; The Alternative Media Handbook; War: Interdisciplinary Investigations; and in several journals, including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She is currently at work on a book The Meditative Gaze, which looks at films, TV, and video games throught a Daoist/Buddhist lens.
Anton Smith, Ph.D.
Del Rey South Hall
American Culture Studies Teaching Fellow
- B.A., Afro-American Studies and Classics (University of Virginia)
- M.A., Afro-American Studies (UCLA)
- M.A., Ph.D., American Studies and Ethnicity (USC)
Dr. Anton L. Smith is originally from Riverhead, NY. His research examines how African American writers experience faith in a society that has historically devalued their humanity and intellectual abilities. Dr. Smith has taught courses in composition and African American literature at UCLA and Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. He currently teaches courses in comparative ethnic literature and religious studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles for the American Cultures Studies program.
His current book project, Spontaneous Spiritualities: African American Literature and the Legacy of Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin in the Twenty-First Century, explores how phenomena such as charisma and ecstasy have allowed African Americans to navigate social inequalities that directly impinge upon their daily lives. Dr. Smith argues that charisma and ecstasy, both in the sacred and secular sense, represent culturally-structured assumptions, values, and commitments underlying black people’s perception of reality. Though scholars of the twentieth century frequently cite humanism as a means for African Americans to express themselves within a public forum, no studies have yet explained what humanism looks like in literary and religious settings or analyzed how conceptions of it have influenced African American spiritual expression in the next century. Dr. Smith’s reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth, and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain revise the historical assumptions held by theologians and literary critics that the function and significance of the church in the black community has steadily declined since the Harlem Renaissance. What he finds in these works is that while the church has lost some of its sense of mission in the black community, spirituality has not died altogether.
Dr. Smith also enjoys Scrabble, weight training, basketball, and running. He has raced in Mojave Narrows half-marathon, the Los Angeles and San Francisco marathons, and looks forward to competing in his first ultramarathon in 2013.