Administrative Work

My work as Vice Provost focuses on two main areas. I oversee and support all of Academic Affairs' budgets and lead our strategic finance work. I also lead the Division of Student Success and related retention/thrive projects. Units within the Division of Student Success include the professional advisors in Undergraduate Success, our Gateway/Act 101 program, the Office of Career Education, the Registrar's Office, and our Office of Academic Development, which houses the Learning Resource Network, the Writing Center, and Disability Support Services. 

Prior to becoming a full-time administrator in 2019, when I was named Associate Provost, I was a long-time faculty member in the Department of Historical & Political Studies specializing in American political, urban/suburban, and environmental history. I came to Arcadia in 2004 and was awarded tenure in 2010. My earlier administrative work at Arcadia included a one-year appointment as Associate Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences in 2018-2019, six years as Chair of the Department of Historical & Political Studies from 2012-2018, and interim Dean of Undergraduate Studies for the 2011-2012 academic year. I also served as President of Arcadia’s first Faculty Senate from 2014 to 2016 and was Chair both of the General Education Steering Committee that created Arcadia’s Undergraduate Curriculum in 2007 and of the Faculty Governance Task Force that created the University’s new Faculty Senate governance system in 2014. Beyond Arcadia, I served as Executive Director of the Urban History Association from 2017-2020.

Teaching and Scholarship

I haven’t had the time to continue to teach or research since becoming a full-time administrator in 2019. However, prior to then I taught a variety of courses on U.S. history and the United States’ relationship with the world including F.D.R. to Obama: U.S. Politics and Reform; The Vietnam Wars; The U.S. & Vietnam: Then & Now, which included a one-week travel component to Ho Chi Minh City; America in the 1960s; America as Empire. My scholarship primarily examined the contours of modern American liberalism – its evolution and internal tensions, its potential and limitations – by focusing on the politics of land use and development in the cities, suburbs, and recreational vacationlands on the Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington, D.C. since World War II. My most prominent publications included “‘Enlightened System’ or ‘Regulatory Nightmare’?: New York’s Adirondack Mountains and the Conflicted Politics of Environmental Land-Use Reform during the 1970s” (Journal of Policy History, 2019); “Shades of Black and Green: The Making of Racial and Environmental Liberalism in Nelson Rockefeller’s New York” (Journal of Urban History, 2008); “Suburban Growth and Its Discontents: The Logic and Limits of Reform on the Northeast Corridor,” in The New Suburban History (University of Chicago Press, 2006).

EDUCATION

University of Pennsylvania
Ph.D., History

Dartmouth College
A.B., Religion