Teaching Fellow in Residence

I am an Associate Professor of Musicology at UCSB, and my research focuses on the critical history of opera and early modern music history. In both my research and teaching I explore how musical cultures carry histories, and how our histories and social realities are shaped and inflected by expressive practices. I am the author of Opera’s Orbit: Musical Drama and the Influence of Opera in Arcadian Rome (Cambridge, 2011), former co-editor of Cambridge Opera Journal, and a past director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music at UCSB. Most people have something to say about music, which is why it is a great subject to engage students and create timely and important conversations across the humanities. My areas of expertise and interest have offered a rich source for diverse and interdisciplinary teaching projects. In 2019-2020, I was a faculty fellow in the Engaging Humanities Program (supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) and created one of the program’s Discovery Courses, “Exploring Voices,” that I co-designed and co-taught with three other graduate student fellows. Also in 2019-2020, I participated in the Ondas Faculty Development Seminar, which inspired new approaches for developing inclusive practices and research-based methods in my teaching.

I am an associate professor in political science who has been at UCSB for about 14 years. My research and teaching ranges from research design (especially quantitative methods) to political parties, democratic representation, and political institutions in comparative perspective, especially in the advanced industrial democracies. I have been involved in a variety of campus-level activities, many centered around diversity, equity, and inclusion. In the last few years, with the help of ONDAS, CITRAL, and Instructional Development, I have been working to re-think my pedagogy. I have focused on putting issues of inclusion front and center; embracing active learning and modeling; better utilizing technology judiciously to connect me to students and students to each other; and being explicit about my pedagogy. I look forward to talking with fellow faculty about all of these issues, and more!

A first-in-family college graduate from the Ohio, Kathy earned her PhD with Dr. David Asai at Purdue University studying the biochemistry and molecular basis of cell division and motility. As an NIH Kirschstein Postdoctoral Scholar, she investigated the recognition mechanisms of sperm-egg interaction at SUNY-Stony Brook before joining the UCSB faculty in 1993. A Searle Scholar and NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow, Kathy continues to pursue questions of cellular recognition and signal control and was recognized as an AAAS Fellow in 2018 for that work and her contributions to STEM education. In addition to mentoring students in the research lab and advising, she teaches a variety of courses from small graduate seminars, INT courses, and research methods courses, to large lecture courses and an advanced upper division laboratory course. Committed to student learning and drawing on her first gen experiences, she has also been recognized with the MLPS Teaching Award and considers her students as junior colleagues, inviting them to join in the lifelong journey of learning.