Simmons College

Since 2000, I have been the Director of the Simmons Honors Program and involved in Honors education through national organizations, such as the National Collegiate Honors Council and the National Association of Fellowship Advisors. In this time, Honors has become a four-year academic program and offers both a formal mentoring program and co-curricular activities with the assistance of a Dean's Fellow.

My research in the last few years has centered on social movements of the early 20^th century in the United States as well as innovative pedagogy to present historical debates in exciting new ways. Through the Reacting to the Past initiative, founded at Barnard College, I have developed a six-week long "game," Greenwich Village 1913: Suffrage, Labor, and the New Woman that brings students back into a pre-war modernity where everything seemed possible, social change was in the very air, and dreams reached new heights. I currently use this game in Women's Studies 204, Roots of Feminism.

My most recent research has taken me from the streets of New York to the small town of San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua where I am engaged in a project with Professor Bonita Betters-Reed (SOM) to collect oral histories of elderly sanjuaneños, people who have lived through dictatorship, revolutionary insurrection, Sandinista government, and now a tourist boom in their small town on the Pacific Ocean. I am writing a book on the history/oral history of San Juan del Sur for use in local high schools.

At Simmons, you will find me teaching Honors mentoring courses, Women's Studies and Spanish language. I also give seminars to high school Spanish teachers through the Teachers as Scholars program. There I teach Latin America, War and Memory as well as Cuba: Conquest, Slavery, and the Forging of Nation.