Biography
After receiving her Ph.D. in Religious Ethics in 2009, Betsy began her career in a postdoctoral fellowship program designed to introduce recent graduates to the challenges and rewards of teaching undergraduates in the context of a residential liberal arts college. As part of this this program, she spent a year as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at Lake Forest College. This experience reinforced her long-held commitment to undergraduate education and convinced her to continue working within the context of a small liberal arts college in her next position as Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Marymount Manhattan College.
She transitioned to a hybrid faculty-administrative role at Rice University in 2012, working in their newly developed Program in Writing and Communication. In this role, she taught a series of disciplinary-based first-year writing courses and led pedagogical programing for other faculty teaching within the program.
Two years later, when Rice launched its Center for Teaching Excellence, she was appointed as a founding Assistant Director. And in 2016, she was promoted to Associate Director.
In these positions, she developed and oversaw numerous instructional development initiatives, all with an eye toward shaping the culture of an elite research university to support and reward excellent teaching on campus. In so doing, she also received external recognition. She has been invited to consult with faculty and administrators across the country on the use and abuse of student ratings. And in October of 2017, she and Justin Esarey won the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education's Innovation Award for their Course Workload Estimator tool.
Trained as a comparative ethicist, Betsy's research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of moral philosophy, political theory, and the history of religion. Her disciplinary scholarship compares Catholic and Muslim arguments about the nature of political authority within the context of morally and religiously diverse societies. And, more recently, she has explored related questions in the philosophy of education. More specifically, she's been thinking about the nature of professorial and/or institutional authority within the context of politically diverse classrooms.
Insofar as her first love has always been teaching, she has continued to teach courses when her schedule allows. Throughout her career she has taught introductory ethics and religion courses; specialized seminars on sexual ethics and the First Amendment; graduate courses on teaching and learning; and, most recently, a course on disagreement and democratic deliberation.
In May of 2018, she will begin a new position as Executive Director of the Teaching and Learning Collaborative at Wake Forest University.