Heidelberg
Program Staff
Eyal Pinkas
Manager of Operations and Student Care
Instructor of Humanities and Fine Arts
Faculty-in-Residence 2024-2025
Fall 2025
Dr. Nick Cumming
nicholas.cumming@pepperdine.edu
Assistant Professor of Humanities
Humanities and Teacher Education Division, Seaver College
Nick Cumming is the Assistant Professor of Humanities at Seaver College, with a specialty in late-medieval and early modern Church history. He has been teaching at Seaver since Fall 2017, first in the Religion GE sequence, then in the Humanities program. Before coming to Pepperdine, Nick earned his PhD in London and he was able to teach at Pepperdine's London program and to serve as Resident Director for the London program of Lipscomb University. Nick has also been able to visit Pepperdine's Buenos Aires program on the New Faculty Retreat. Nick and his wife Kristen have experienced the life-changing impact of living internationally, and they strongly support IP's mission to empower students through experiential learning and faith formation. Nick and Kristen have three children, Della, Rowan, and Camden and they all love to travel, especially throughout Europe. Nick is excited to live and teach in Heidelberg, a major center of the Protestant Reformation, and to instill his love for European religious history into his students!
Spring 2025
Rachel Yoshimura
rachel.yoshimura@pepperdine.edu
Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication
Communication, Seaver College
Professor Rachel Yoshimura specializes in the academic and professional fields of Rhetoric and Christian Ministry. She is a double alumna of Pepperdine University, receiving her BA in communications with an emphasis in rhetoric and leadership and her MS in ministry with an emphasis in young adult spiritual formation. Prior to her time in academia, Professor Yoshimura served as a pastor at Vintage Church Malibu where she launched their college ministry, managed staff and operations, and preached regularly. She has spoken at churches and conferences across the country and is passionate about training young adults in leadership, communication, and public speaking. She looks forward to coming alongside students during their abroad experience in Heidelberg and equipping them with communication skills and religious frameworks while in Germany together.
Faculty-in-Residence 2025-2026
Dr. John Struloeff
Professor of Creative Writing and English
Director of Creative Writing
John Struloeff is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Seaver College, where he has been a professor since Fall 2007. He is a widely published poet and fiction writer, with work in The Atlantic, The Sun, Western Humanities Review, The Literary Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and dozens of other magazines and journals, and from 2020-2021, he served as the City of Malibu’s Poet Laureate. John’s most recent book is a collection of biographical poems, The Work of a Genius, about the life and work of Albert Einstein, inspired by research he conducted in Germany, Switzerland, Prague (Charles University), and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. He loves to travel and study history and visit the places that have inspired literary work. During the 2017-18 academic year, he was the Visiting Faculty for IP in Lausanne, Switzerland — a profound and inspiring experience for him — and is excited to return to Europe to join a new group of students in Heidelberg.