Morse Fellows
Morse College is a vibrant community. We would love to count you among us. The Fellows meet a few times per semester at the Head of College’s house, to interact with friends from all parts of the University and from the broader community. Many play the role of Advisor for a student or two. We extend invitations to student functions such as performances and college-wide social events, welcome participation at intramural sports, provide dining privileges in the college at lunch or dinner, all so you can meet with students, faculty and friends. Please join us - we welcome you!
Maiani da Silva
Violinist; Lecturer, Yale School of Music
Biography
Maiani da Silva is a contemporary violinist, performer, arranger, and educator. She is a member of the four-time Grammy-winning sextet Eighth Blackbird, co-founder of performance-art duo The Furies, as well as Lecturer at Yale’s Department of Music and a Trotter Distinguished Visiting Professor at University of Oregon (2023). She has premiered concertos with the Cincinnati Symphony and the U.S. Navy Band, premiered staged works by David Lang/Anne Bogart, and has also collaborated with Bang On a Can All-Stars, Electric Earth Concerts, Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music, Wild Up, Louis Andriessen, Viet Cuong, Ted Hearne, Nina Shekhar, Childish Gambino, George Lewis, Taylor Mac, Julianna Barwick, Joe Hisaishi, and more.
Maiani studied under the tutelage of Irina Muresanu at The Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and Mela Tenenbaum in Brooklyn, N.Y. Other mentors include Lenny Matczynski, and Andrew Mark. Maiani is also an Artist in Residence and Fellow at Yale University’s Morse College.
Maiani was born in Bahia, Brazil, grew up in Los Angeles, and also lived in Boston, Paris, Mexico City, and San Francisco before settling in woodsy Connecticut. Maiani also enjoys in-person philosophical debates, traveling the world, and reading about evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology and primatology. Listening to 90s slow-jams and Motown always lifts her spirits.
For more info: https://www.maianidasilva.com
Rana Dajani
Professor of Molecular Biology
Biography
Rana is a molecular biologist, social entrepreneur and global thought leader.
Rana Dajani is a professor of molecular biology at the Hashemite University in Jordan. Her area of expertise is epigenetics and biomarkers of trauma among refugees. Through her leadership, she has introduced national and regional stem cell laws and presided over numerous scientific boards and United Nations councils, most recently as the President of the Society for the Advancement of Science and Technology in the Arab World.
Rana Dajani is currently a visiting professor at the systems awareness center at MIT and a Morse fellow at Yale University and a Radcliffe fellow at Harvard University.
A tireless supporter of building indigenous research capabilities in the developing world and creating a mentoring program to support women scholars in STEM that was recognized by the National Academy of Sciences. Her 2018 book Five Scarves: Doing the Impossible — If We Can Reverse Cell Fate, Why Can’t We Redefine Success? challenged global policy makers to address ongoing inequities in education and employment, while also putting forward a new paradigm for measuring success in an evolving world.
She is the founder of We Love Reading, a grassroots initiative to create changemakers in underserved communities by fostering a lifelong love of reading. A recipient of the UNESCO International Literacy Prize, We Love Reading has established more than 4,000 locally run libraries in over 60 countries.
Rana has also been recognized as a Fulbright fellow, Eisenhower fellow and Ashoka fellow and by joining the list of the 100 most influential Arab Women and receiving the Jacobs social entrepreneur award. Nansen UNHCR refugee award, and the Schwab Social Entrepreneur Award from the World Economic forum.
Offers assistance in:
Career advising
I can advise in the following areas: Interdisciplinary, intercultural research and career advise
Contact Information:
Stephen Darwall
Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy
Biography
Stephen Darwall is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale, many years after being a Morse frosh in 1964. He graduated as a Philosophy major after playing in the Band and managing the men’s swimming team. He went on to the University of Pittsburgh for his Master’s in Philosophy and then taught at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill until 1984. It was then on to the University of Michigan where Professor Darwall taught for 24 years, served as department chair for 8, and as Director of the Honors Program in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. In 2008 he joined Yale. He is deeply interested in moral philosophy and its history, and is focused on questions around the nature of moral obligation and well-being.
Interests:
Prof. Darwall is happy to have lunch or dinner with interested students.
Offers assistance in:
Advising and mentoring for upperclassmen, Career advising, Serving as a reader for students preparing CVs and job or fellowship applications
Contact Information:
Edward A. Dennis
Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry, Pharmacology, the Graduate Division, and the Chancellor I Endowed Chair at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD)
Biography
Dr. Dennis received his B.A. from Yale University (1963) and was a member of the first class that graduated from Morse College. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and carried out postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School. He received a Doctorate in Medicine (hon) from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany and a Doctorate (hon) from the University of Lyon INSA in France. Dr. Dennis started as Assistant Professor at UCSD and served two different times as Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Prof. Dennis’ has over 425 publications and his career research focus has been on the structure, function, mechanism, and inhibition of the enzyme phospholipase A2 as well as on signal transduction, inflammation, lipid metabolism, eicosanoid action, metabolic diseases and especially developing the lipidomics field. He also served as Chair and President of the Keystone Symposia, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Lipid Research, and Director of the LIPID MAPS Lipidomics Consortium.
Dr. Dennis served as Chair of the Board of Governors of the Association of Yale Alumni (AYA) as well as on the Board of Directors of the Yale Alumni Magazine and the Yale Alumni Fund and on the Alumni and Development Affairs Committee of the Yale Corporation. He also served on the University Council (2004-2013) including the Committee on Engineering, the Committee on Technology Transfer, and the Committee on West Campus Development. He was the recipient of the Yale Science and Engineering Association Meritorious Service to Yale Award (2004) and the Yale Medal (2008).
Toni Dorfman
Professor of Theater Studies
Biography
For 23 years Toni Dorfman has taught full-time at Yale. She holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, earned mostly at Carleton College and then at the University of Iowa, and a master of fine arts degree in directing from Columbia University. In 2003 she cofounded the annual Yale Playwrights Festival. At Yale in addition to teaching classes in acting, directing, and playwriting, she’s taught seminars in revenge tragedy and moral ambiguity, biography and drama, representations of the underworld, “The Deep: Representations of the Sea” (in spring 2022), and early opera. In summer she’s taught Sophocles’ Antigone in the Yale Warrior-Scholar Project helping enlisted veterans prepare for college. In July 2019, at the invitation of the then artistic director of the National Theater of Greece, Stathis Livathinos, in Delphi she led an international workshop for professional actors on performing Greek tragedy.
Since 2009 she has stage-directed nine major productions of 17th-century opera for the Yale Baroque Opera Project, including Cavalli’s Il Giasone, Scipione Affricano, La Didone, and Doriclea (going up in May 2023); Sacrati’s La finta pazza (American premiere); and all three of Monteverdi’s extant operas, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, L’incoronazione di Poppea, and Orfeo (in May 2022), all in collaboration with musical director Grant Herreid. Her interest in ancient Greek myth, epic, and drama – the inspiration for much early baroque opera – is lifelong. What in particular she loves about early opera is not only the expressive beauty of its music but also its casts of human and divine characters, bringing together two worlds in the same space.
Her own plays, including Rounding Cassiopeia, Family Wolf, Third Wave Fems, One of the Damned Few (with Bud Thorpe), and The King of the Cimbri, have been developed and presented in London, New York, Santa Fe, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New Haven at Yale Rep and the Long Wharf Theater.
In her twenties she cofounded The Shade Company, a repertory theater on Canal Street and a charter member of what is now the Alliance of Resident Theaters/New York. She’s served on the editorial board of Shakespeare Bulletin and the national board of the University/Resident Theater Association. As an actor she’s played Lady Macbeth, Titania, Helena, Aldonza, Grusha, Dorine, Hesione Hushabye, Pirate Jenny, Kagekiyo’s Daughter, Mother Courage, and Clytemnestra, among scores of other roles; in film she’s played Queen Marie in Ionesco’s Exit the King (1976) and Candace in Edward Columbia’s The Page Burner (2022), with dozens of television commercials in between.
She is married to Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis. They live in East Rock with a pollination garden, designed by Eliza Shaw Valk, her daughter, in front for butterflies and bees.
Offers assistance in:
Academic advising for first-year students