Academic Leadership
Emergent Studies
In 2019/2020, I led an interdisciplinary initiative at the University of New Haven to form a new self-designed major. The program, Emergent Studies, will form an interdisciplinary community of students and faculty. The program focuses on student-led projects that don’t fit easily into single majors. Students work with peers, senior students, and multiple faculty advisers to develop their own major courses of study. A distinguishing feature of this program is a focus on guiding students who enter the university as "undeclared." Emergent Studies acknowledges this undecided moment in a student's college trajectory as a space of personal discovery and opportunity. In my role as head of this initiative, I recruited faculty affiliates from across all colleges at the University of New Haven, led brainstorming meetings, designed the first three years of the program, wrote grants, and met with administration. This program has since been implemented at the University of Have as the Interdisciplinary Studies major.