Faculty Spotlight: Michael Hoberman & Audrey Pereira
Welcome to the Library’s Spotlight on Fitchburg Faculty Scholarship! Learn more about what our faculty are researching by reading below and also visit the main level of the library to see our display of their work. You can learn more by viewing this list of books published by other Fitchburg State faculty.
Michael Hoberman, Ph.D., has been teaching in the English Studies Department at Fitchburg State University since 2001. While he has particular interests in the early period of American literature, Jewish American history, and New England folklore (among other topics), he enjoys the challenge of offering a wide range of courses here. This coming Spring 2020 semester, he will be offering the university’s first-ever course on world Jewish literature (mostly in translation). His classes are always interactive, and he likes to think that he is an “old fashioned” professor insofar as he always stresses the importance of close reading and critical imagination. He believes in knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
Hoberman’s books and articles vary in their subject-matter, but one fairly consistent theme in almost all of his research is the importance of place and landscape. He has always been interested in how people of varying cultural backgrounds form their identities around their geographical surroundings. His most recent book, A Hundred Acres of America, looks at how several generations of Jewish American writers have addressed the theme of place in their work, from the frontier, to the city, to the imaginary landscapes of Eastern European shtetls that were destroyed in World War II. A Hundred Acres was recently reviewed in the LA Review of Books.
Hoberman grew up in New York City, went to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and has been living in western Massachusetts since the late 1980s. On a number of occasions going back to the late 1990s, he worked as a visiting professor of American Studies at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. In 2010, he was a Fulbright Scholar there. He lives with his family in the town of Buckland, Massachusetts (population < 2000), where he serves as the co-chair of the Planning Board and knows about half of the residents. In his spare time, he is a long-distance runner, backpacker, and aspiring player of the Irish tenor banjo.
View the list of his books here.
Audrey S. Pereira, Ph.D., grew up in North Andover, MA before she began her long and ambitious history with Fitchburg State University. Before teaching at FSU, Pereira obtained her B.S. here in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing in 1984. It was not long until she earned her Master of Science in Computer Information Systems at Bentley University in 1990. In 2009, Pereira started her career at FSU as an assistant professor, teaching courses in both Business Administration and Computer Science. The next few years, Pereira worked as a full-time faculty member, raised a family and still worked to further her education. In 2015, she finally obtained her Ph.D. in Management with a specialization in Information Systems Management from Walden University.
During her time here, Pereira did extensive research and eventually published works on topics including faculty participation in technological resources, the differences between online vs. face-to-face learning, and deep learning theory. Pereira recently had two articles published through the Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice including her 2018 piece titled “Comparison of Didactic, Technical, Role Modeling, and Ethics Learning Acquisition in Undergraduate Online versus Face-to-Face Modalities”. In the spring of 2019, Pereira spent her sabbatical researching and writing about her findings on deeper learning methods, and has an article that was just approved to be published.
In her personal life, Pereira lives in a house on a lake in Windham, NH where she enjoys reading and swimming in her spare time. Her family consists of her husband, two daughters and a toy poodle named Jaime. Her husband is a business appraiser who also teaches in the GCE evening program at FSU. One of her daughters works as a cyber security analyst and the other is a dentist.
Her publications include:
Pereira, A. S., & Wahi, M. M. (2017). Strategic approaches to increase course management system adoption by higher education faculty. Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice*, 17(2), 61 –60 link
Pereira, A. S., & Wahi, M. M. (2018), Comparison of Didactic, Technical, Role Modeling, and Ethics Learning Acquisition in Undergraduate Business Online versus Face-to-Face Modalities, Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice, 18(5), 56-69 link