Purchase College Names New Leadership

Purchase College, SUNY, is pleased to announce new leadership in several academic and administrative areas. Purchase College, which is ranked as one of the top ten public liberal arts colleges by U.S. News & World Report, is well known for its dedicated and engaged faculty, staff, and administration.

Purchase College Provost Barry Pearson said, “I believe these new appointments will help us further our mission to provide a rigorous and inspiring education. While our new leaders hail from different fields of study, what they have in common is not only their impressive academic and artistic achievements, but their deep commitment to our students’ success. I am confident that our new leaders will usher in a time of significant progress that will benefit the entire campus community and generations of students to come.”

Dr. Peggy A. De Cooke has returned to her role as Associate Provost with expanded responsibilities. In addition to overseeing the college’s academic assessment and accreditation processes, Dr. De Cooke will coordinate the faculty development and mentoring program and supervise the Purchase College Institutional Review Board. She will work closely with the Director of Continuing Education (CE) to develop, administer, and promote CE’s programs, including those associated with the Broadview Senior Learning Community. Dr. De Cooke will also serve as designee for the Provost.

Dr. De Cooke holds a doctorate in developmental psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. She has published/presented more than 50 papers on factors influencing student’s learning and performance behaviors. Dr. De Cooke has extensive teaching experience at the graduate, undergraduate, and high school levels, offering a broad array of courses in introductory and developmental psychology, with an emphasis on the assessment and observation of children’s and adolescent’s behavior, particularly in the socio-emotional/behavioral domains and in the classroom. Dr. De Cooke has served as an instructional curriculum development consultant and regularly offers seminars to teachers.

Christopher Robbins has been named director in the School of Art+ Design. A prominent public artist and associate professor of Art + Design, his work focuses on social change and cross-cultural collaboration. He is the co-founder of Ghana Think Tank (GTT), which seeks to “develop the first world,” by sending problems in the “developed” world to think tanks established in Cuba, Ghana, Iran, Mexico, El Salvador, and Morocco, among other countries. Their current project, the award-winning American Riad, is an Art and Housing Justice project that focuses on rebuilding a street-corner in Detroit through a shared community space modeled on a Moroccan Riad.

Dr. Aviva Taubenfeld, Associate Professor of Literature and Writing, has been named Chair of the School of Humanities. A scholar of US literature specializing in immigration and ethnicity, Aviva is author of Rough Writing: Ethnic Authorship in Theodore Roosevelt’s America (2008) as well as essays on immigrant history, ethnic and diasporic literatures, translingualism, and national and transnational identity. Dr. Taubenfeld has been teaching at Purchase since 2003, offering courses on U.S. literature, ethnicity, childhood, writing, and pedagogy. She served as Director of Writing from 2009-2018 and taught for two years in the Bedford Hills College Program for incarcerated women. In 2013, she was honored with the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Nelly van Bommel, Associate Professor of Dance at Purchase College, has been named Director of the Conservatory of Dance. A French native of Dutch descent, she was selected as one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in January 2010. She is an award-winning choreographer whose work has been featured in France, Taiwan, Canada, and the U.S. in venues, companies, and programs including Ballet Austin, Milwaukee Ballet, Kaatsbaan International Dance Center, the Baryshnikov Arts Center (artist in residence), Western Michigan University, Purchase College, SUNY, Taipei National University of the Arts and Springboard Danse Montreal. In 2012 and 2013, she was the Director of Choreography at the RDA Summer National Choreography Intensive.

About Purchase College, SUNY

Purchase College, part of the State University of New York (SUNY) network of 64 universities and colleges, was founded in 1967 by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. His aspiration for Purchase was to create a dynamic campus that combined conservatory training in the visual and performing arts with programs in the liberal arts and sciences, in order to inspire an appreciation for both intellectual and artistic talents in all students. Today, Purchase College–SUNY is a community of students, faculty, and friends where open-minded engagement with the creative process leads to a lifetime of intellectual growth and professional opportunity. For more information about the College, visit www.purchase.edu.