Lilly Fellows Program Staff

Mark R. Schwehn, Project Director
Mark Schwehn received his B.A. from Valparaiso University, and his Ph.D. in history and humanities from Stanford University. He has written widely about Henry Adams and William James, including, with other scholars, A William James Renaissance. He has also written essays on the poetry of Robert Frost, film criticism, history, cognitive theory, human sexuality, and, especially, the modern university. His book about the relationship between religion and higher learning, Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America, was published in 1993 by Oxford University Press. In 2001, his anthology Everyone a Teacher was published by Notre Dame University Press.  Most recently,
he edited with his wife Dorothy Bass an anthology on vocation, Leading Lives that Matter: What We Should Do and Who We Should Be, published by Eerdmans in 2006.

John Steven Paul, Program Director
John Steven Paul has been a member of the Valparaiso University faculty since 1979, and chair of the department of theatre since 1991. He is founder (1987) and director of Soul Purpose, Valparaiso University’s nationally touring liturgical drama troupe, for which he has written more than a dozen plays. He founded the Young Actors Shakespeare Workshop at Valparaiso University in 1982. He was awarded VU’s Alumni Association Distinguished Teaching Award in 1999. He has held the WC Dickmeyer Professorship in Christian Education since 2001. He will continue to be a member of the department of theatre and to serve as the director of Soul Purpose during his tenure as LFP Program Director. Paul received his B.A. from Valparaiso University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His creative and scholarly work includes the direction of more than 50 plays, musicals, and operas for mainstage and studio theatre as well as articles and reviews appearing in ARTS (Arts in Religious and Theological Studies), Liberal Education, The Christian Century, The Cresset, and Asian Theatre Journal. To contact John, click here.

Joe Creech, Assistant Director
Joseph Creech received his PhD in history from the University of Notre Dame. He teaches history and humanities in Christ College at Valparaiso University and specializes in American cultural, political, and religious history. In 2005 he was named one of the notable "Young Scholars in American Religion" by the Center for the Study of American Religion and Culture. He is the author of Righteous Indignation: Religion and the Populist Revolution in North Carolina (Illinois, 2006). To contact Joe, click here.

  Kathy Sutherland, Administrative Assistant
Kathy Sutherland received a B.A. from Sterling College in Sterling Kansas, an M.A. in College Student Development from Azusa Pacific College in Azusa, California, and has done coursework toward an M.S.W. at Indiana University. She worked in Residence Life at Taylor University, University of Chicago and Valparaiso University and as an author’s assistant before coming to the Lilly Fellows Program.  To contact Kathy, click here.