Alfred Hunt is a Professor Emeritus of History at SUNY Purchase College, where he had served as the Dean of the College of Letters and Science and received the Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence.

Hunt was both the creator and on-camera host of the cable talk show, "Critical Issues," and he has authored numerous scholarly articles as well as the book The Influence of Haiti on Antebellum America.

He was twice a Fulbright Scholar teaching for one year in Venice, Italy, and one year in Barbados, West Indies, as well as a founder, director, and instructor in study abroad programs in Spain and Italy. He has given as many as 40 lectures a year on American and world history to senior communities. 

When not on land, he has spent many years also on the faculty of the study abroad program, Semester at Sea. He has been guiding SAS students through the often stormy waters of current events and similar subjects for many years.

Hunt first came to SAS roughly twenty years ago and has led courses on varied topics, from American foreign policy, U.S. political practices, food and fads from an historical perspective, slavery in the U.S., higher learning and education in America, history of the 1940s to 1980s, secular traditions of the Christmas holidays in America, and Mark Twain.

This term, Hunt is leading his ever-popular Let's Talk Current Events: Topics in the News, in which he facilitates weekly lively round-table discussions among SAS's news junkies. He is also teaching Art as History, a survey of the cultural and political history of the United States from its beginning until the arrival of modernism, from the point of view of the visual arts.

Without a hint of exaggeration, one can safely state that Harriet Sobol has been teaching continuously at SAS for more than half of SAS's existence. As a testament both to her professionalism, preparation, and popularity with SAS students, semester after semester, each new catalog since the 1970s has boasted at least one of her writing or book discussion courses.

Her longest-running course, BookTalk, introduces Sobol's students to books written by lesser-known authors from other countries, cultures, or backgrounds. She engenders tolerance, sensitivity, and acceptance with her discussions, even in the face of stark but respectful disagreements in student reactions to a particular book topic or character.

It should come as no surprise that Sobol is a verocious reader and a regular at the library, screening millions of books discovered through recommendations, reviews, and many online book forums. She conducts extensive research to identify new readings -- an ongoing challenge in that the repeat enrollments of past students preclude her from rerunning syllabi from past years.

Most at ease when speaking off the cuff rather than from a script, Sobol elicits ideas from her students and guides discussion, ensuring that they learn from each other while also appreciating the various authors' artistic and stylistic choices.

This fall, Sobol has already covered

The Postcard (2023) by Anne Berest, Tina Kover (Translator), Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (2022) by Gabrielle Zevin, and Trust (2022) by Hernan Diaz. Yet to come is a discussion in mid-December of the latest James McBride novel, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Story (2023).

Fiction on her radar for winter and spring discussion is sure to appear on her students' holiday wish lists.