I am Dean of the Honors College at UMass Lowell, an interdisciplinary and diverse college comprised of nearly 2000 students from almost every major across campus. Two of my greatest joys are connecting high-achieving students with faculty mentors and watching the transformation as students begin to see themselves as scholars. Fostering faculty and student collaboration has been a passion of mine since I joined UMass Lowell’s Emerging Scholars Program in 2011. In addition to facilitating these collaborations, I continue to work with undergraduate and graduate students in my own research.
My research focuses on human rights and civil liberties, including gendered rights, media freedom and freedom of expression, and the role of media in repression and dissent. I am particularly interested in relationship between media freedom and human rights in the Global South. You can learn more about my research here.
Prior to becoming a political scientist, I worked as a journalist in print and broadcast media. You can hear more about my journalism here and here.
I became interested in media freedom and the relationship between media, politics and human rights when I was a journalism instructor and student newspaper adviser, first at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, Pennsylvania and then at California State University at San Marcos.
My CV is here.