Local partnership work with an international focus
Walter Commons for Global Study and Engagement
Lauren O’Leary
Coordinator Blaustein Humanities Center
Email: loleary@conncoll.edu
Phone: 860-439-2358
Directors & Steering Committee Members
Lauren Anderson
Associate Professor of Education, Chair of the Education Department
Lauren Anderson's research interests are situated at the intersections of education policy, teacher education, and K-12 school and classroom practice. In particular, she explores how teachers and school leaders make sense of and mediate federal, state and local policy in the context of their daily work. Lauren teaches courses focused on educational foundations, urban schooling, literacy pedagogy and elementary teaching.
Virginia Anderson
Associate Professor of Theater
Virginia (Ginny) Anderson joined the theater faculty in 2013 after four years at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, where she directed for the main stage and taught a variety of theater history courses including theater history survey courses, Women in Theater, African American Theater History, Children’s Theater, Theater in the United States, and LGBTQ Theater.
Angela Barney
Program Coordinator, Holleran Center for Community Action and Public Policy
Joyce Bennett is an anthropologist whose research and teaching focus on sociocultural and sociolinguistic issues in Mesoamerica and North America. She mostly focuses on the Kaqchikel-speaking population of the Western highlands of Guatemala, but she is also interested in other ethnolinguistic groups in the country and, most recently, some of their indigenous counterparts in North America.
Sunil Bhatia
Professor of Human Development, Chair of the Human Development Department
Sunil Bhatia is an internationally known professor in the field of psychology and human development. He specializes in understanding the development of self and identity within the context of racism, migration, globalization and formation of transnational diasporas.
Ana Lilia Campos Manzo
Associate Professor of Sociology
Ana Lilia Campos Manzo, Ph.D., formerly Campos-Holland, teaches Introduction to Sociology, Sociology of Childhood and Adolescence, Law and Society, Drugs and Society, Punishment and Society and Field Work. Her research areas of expertise are childhood/adolescence and law/crime/punishment.
David Chavanne
Associate Professor of Economics
David Chavanne teaches courses in behavioral finance, experimental economics, law and economics, and microeconomic theory. He is interested in how economics can be integrated with other social sciences, philosophy and law – and how economic ideas can be communicated to people unfamiliar with, and resistant to, the economic way of thinking. His research focuses on the ways in which people's policy preferences are affected by perceptions of how luck and personal responsibility shape life situations.
Sheetal Chhabria
Associate Professor of History
Sheetal Chhabria (Ph.D. Columbia University) is a historian of South Asia with interests in the global histories of capitalism, urban studies, and the production of poverty and inequality. Her research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and the American Historical Association.
Terry-Ann Craigie
Associate Professor of Economics
Terry-Ann Craigie’s research explores issues in economics of the family, the economics of crime, and labor economics. Although much of her work examines social and economic inequities facing vulnerable populations as a whole, the current focus of her research rests with equity issues facing the U.S. correctional population, the majority of whom are young racial-ethnic minority males.
Amy Dooling
Associate Dean of Global Initiatives, Director of The Walter Commons for Global Study and Engagement, Professor of Chinese
A scholar of modern Chinese literature, Amy Dooling has published books on 20th century women’s writing and feminist literary culture. As Associate Dean of Global Initiatives, Dooling works with offices and individuals across campus to coordinate the College’s global education efforts.
Michelle R. Dunlap
Professor of Human Development
Michelle Dunlap teaches Introduction to Human (Lifespan) Development; Adolescent Development; Children and Families in a Multicultural Society; Social and Personality Development; and Basic Applied Statistical Analyses. She has more than 40 publications, having written books, journal articles, chapters, and essays, about her research and experiences involving college students working in community service-learning settings; intergroup relations; and perceptions and misperceptions of African American child rearing; and most recently, Black and minority bodies shopping and other consumer marketplace experiences.
Erin Duran
Director of Gender and Sexuality Programs, Director of the LGBTQIA Center
Fuller-Maathai Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Intersectionality Studies, Chair of the Gender, Sexuality and Intersectionality Studies Department
Danielle Egan’s research examines the social construction of sexual “problems.” She is fascinated by the ways in which cultural institutions (medical, religious, political, psychological, scholarly disciplines) create and defend norms of social and sexual acceptability. She is also particularly interested in the creative ways people negotiate, resist and are, at times, complicit with sexual hegemony.
Leo J. Garofalo
Associate Professor of History, Chair of the History Department
Leo Garofalo teaches a first-year seminar: Castro, Che Guevara and Fifty Years of the Cuban Revolution, Introduction to Latin American and Caribbean History, Modern Latin American History: Nation and the Poverty of Progress, Rebellion and Revolutions in Latin America: Tupac Amaru to Subcomandante Marcos, History of Gender in Mexico and the Andes, Migration and Immigration in Latin America, and "Race" in Colonial Latin America.
Noel Garrett
Dean of Academic Support, Director of the Academic Resource Center and Entrepreneurship Pathway Co-coordinator
Professor of Education, Director of the Center for the Critical Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE)
As a teacher and scholar, Professor Sandy Grande centers her work in the belief that education is the heart of a critical democracy. Rather than reject matters of politics, Professor Grande views teachers as the link between the education of an informed citizenry and the imperatives of democracy. She asserts that education cannot be reduced to technical or “training” models but must address questions of power, subjectivity, and the possibility of collective agency, through the foundational disciplines of the liberal arts.
Aida Heredia
Professor of Hispanic Studies
Professor Heredia’s teaching and research interests include Latin American and Caribbean literary and cultural production, Caribbean intellectual history, Haitian visual arts and literature, the Haitian Revolution, comparative postcolonial studies in light of ancestral communities in Latin America, and the African Diaspora. She has authored two books, De la recta a las cajas chinas: la poesía de José Kozer and La representación del haitiano en las letras dominicanas. She has also published articles on memory and spirituality as counter-colonial practice in scholarly journals.
Professor of Psychology, Data, Information, and Society Pathway Coordinator
Jason Nier is a social psychologist whose research focuses primarily on intergroup relations. As a result, he is concerned with the psychological processes that are responsible for prejudice and discrimination, and the processes through which biases may be reduced.
Vandana Shiva Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Intersectionality Studies
Professor Ariella Rotramel is an interdisciplinary scholar committed to bridging theoretical and practical engagements of identity and social justice issues. Rotramel holds a bachelor of arts degree for an Independent Program of Study (Intersections of Racial, Sexual and Gender Identities) from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a doctorate in Women's and Gender Studies from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Rotramel’s research interests grow out of experiences in teaching and community. They reflect Rotramel’s curiosity about how and why intersectional identities matter and collective efforts to improve our world.
Associate Professor of Psychology, Director of the Behavioral Neuroscience Program
Joseph Schroeder has a diverse background in psychology, neuroscience, cell biology, neuropathology and pharmacology. Understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of behavior has been the unifying theme of his research interests from the beginning of his career.
Jefferson A. Singer
Dean of the College, Faulk Foundation Professor of Psychology
Jefferson A. Singer, Faulk Foundation Professor of Psychology, was appointed Dean of the College in 2015. He is responsible for the quality of the academic experience for all students. He oversees academic priorities related to general education, advising, international education, academic support, career advising and life after college. He also oversees the management and operation of offices and centers that provide advising and support for the academic program on campus and abroad. Singer is the author of six books and over 100 articles, chapters, and book reviews in the fields of personality, autobiographical memory and clinical psychology.
C. Mara Suttmann-Lea
Assistant Professor of Government
Mara Suttman-Lea hails from the Midwest, growing up in Leland, Michigan, and earning her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Chicago, Illinois. She studies American politics, and is primarily interested in the relationship between election laws, political parties and campaigns, and political participation. Her research aims to develop concrete ways to improve the electoral process and increase access to participation in politics, particularly for vulnerable populations.
Audrey L. Zakriski
Professor of Psychology, Director of the Holleran Center for Community Action and Public Policy
Co-Chair of the Psychology Department
Audrey Zakriski teaches courses in clinical, developmental and general psychology, with an emphasis on community-based learning. To facilitate an understanding of normative development and the development of psychopathology, students in her Developmental Psychopathology course work with typically developing youth, at-risk youth, and youth with psychological disturbances in a range of community settings.
Rebecca McCue
Associate Director, Holleran Center for Community Action and Public Policy
