Faculty Resources

A: As DeBartolo Endowed Chair, I will lead an innovative, interdisciplinary mentoring initiative that integrates evidence-based practices shown to cultivate and sustain well-being. I’m most excited to bring faculty and graduate students back together after such a sustained period of isolation and hardship. My work during the next several years will foster meaningful social connections among peers, help participants cultivate their sense of purpose, support behavioral and physical health, and aid in professional development.

A: I joined the faculty at USF in 2007. Previously, I studied here as an undergraduate in the 1990s. The transformation that has occurred during my 20+ years of coming to campus is remarkable. Walking under the flowering trellis bursting with bougainvillea, by the bronze bull statues in the Marshall Center’s South Plaza, and into the spacious MSC atrium would have been unimaginable back then.

A: My work with the Judy Genshaft Honors College (JGHC) has been especially rewarding. I recently taught an ethics seminar that emphasized civic engagement with its semester-long focus on health equity and service-learning. My JGHC students designed accessible and inclusive documents for visually impaired readers now in use by our client, the Florida Department of Health-Hillsborough. In fall 2023, I am teaching a new honors course, The Science of Happiness and Well-Being, which dovetails with my work as the DeBartolo Endowed Chair.

A: Listening to audiobooks is one of my favorite hobbies. I lean heavily towards fiction in my free time, most recently Hanya Yanagihara’s novels A Little Life and To Paradise. Both books offer deeply moving stories about the impulse to protect our loved ones and the suffering we endure when we aren’t up to the task. 

A: What does it mean to live a good life? Under which conditions do people flourish personally and collectively? These questions are central to my work as the DeBartolo Endowed Chair, and they cannot be fully addressed without the insights contributed by those studying language, philosophy, history, ethics, religion, the arts, and other humanistic fields of inquiry.