New Faculty Experience Expands Academic Offerings

From 3D art to a concentration in outdoor education, the College’s new hires and transitioning faculty are opening up new areas of study and professional connections for their students. Principia College’s new faculty are bringing rich field experience that is expanding new opportunities and areas of expertise at the College.

Dr. Sarah Andrews—Political Science
While not a new faculty member, Dr. Sarah Andrews is on a new teaching path having transitioned from global studies to political science. Dr. Andrews (US’03, C’07) has taught at the College for four years. Her move to political science helps round out that department’s expertise with a focus on comparative politics. She plans to teach African politics and make it a regular class offering as well as leading an abroad program to Malawi in 2023 to help students analyze developmental and cultural differences across urban/rural divides.

Dane Carlson—Art/Art History
Dane Carlson joined the studio art faculty full time this year as an assistant professor after a year as a visiting professor in 2020–2021. Carlson brings an eclectic mix of expertise to the new Voney Art Center’s 3D studio, including a master’s degree in landscape architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, experience teaching climate adaptation design at Harvard, and a background in fabrication.

While you are likely to find Carlson working with students in the 3D studio, he also plans to integrate his students’ indoor studio work with the land management work happening outside on Principia’s 2,600-acre campus. “I love how the College is actively engaged with the land,” Carlson says. “The land is so beautiful, and it feels like the future of a much larger engagement between the institution with patterns of anticolonial thought and practice.”

Jordan Coughtry—Theatre
After two decades of acting experience on stage, television, and in commercials, Jordan Coughtry (C’02) has returned to the College Theatre Department—the very spot where he first decided to make a career out of acting. As an assistant professor of acting, Coughtry has already made an impact by leading his students through the first theatrical performance of the new academic year—“Airness” a play by Chelsea Marcantel about a group of air-guitar enthusiasts.

After graduating from Principia College, Mr. Coughtry traveled the country and took part in acting apprenticeships (such as the acclaimed Williamstown Theatre Festival) before moving to New York City. He joined the actors’ union in 2008 and worked in regional theatres before receiving his MFA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He continued acting in television shows and commercials in Chicago and has been active in Shakespeare festivals from Arkansas to New Jersey in dozens of roles from Puck to Hamlet and from Henry V to Romeo.

Kim Davis—History
Principia College faculty recruiters took notice of Kim Davis when she wrote an op-ed piece for the western Massachusetts newspaper The Berkshire Eagle in response to a New York Times opinion piece “How does a baby bust end?” about the declining American birthrate. Shortly after the paper published the opinion piece, History Department Chair Dr. Peter van Lidth de Jeude called Davis and shared what the department was looking to do in the next few years. That call was the first step of an extensive hiring process that led Davis to accept a teaching position in the History Department. Davis is helping modernize Principia’s History Department course offerings. This year, she’s teaching “Foundations of a Globalized World” and “Immigration and Acculturation (a history of United States Immigration). After taking time off to support her young children, Davis  earned her M.A. in history from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and will soon be resuming her PhD work.

Jenna Fisher—Mass Communication
With a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and 15 years of experience as a reporter in the Boston area, including a seven-year stint as an editor and writer for The Christian Science Monitor, Fisher is teaching mass communications and public relations classes for the College’s Mass Communications Department. Fisher’s focus is collaboration, supporting Principia’s relationship with The Christian Science Monitor, and helping students “understand the media landscape in a deeper way.”

“I’m excited to be here and to work with students to think critically about the forms of media they interact with every day and how that shapes our culture,” Fisher says. “I’m passionate about media literacy and want to help educate people about how to consume media and look at it in a way that is productive.”

Dr. Dave Oakes—Educational Studies
“The education here changed my life in many ways,” says Professor of Educational Studies Dr. Dave Oakes. Dr. Oakes (C’78) returns to the Elsah bluffs with a passion for outdoor and environmental education and more than four decades of experience teaching and working with students and educators in Maine and around the world. Dr. Oakes holds an EdD in education administration from California Coast University. And he’s the director and president of the Center for Ecological Living and Learning in Hope, Maine, which he co-founded with his wife, Sue Hall Oakes (C’78).

Dr. Oakes is hoping to build on renewed student interest in the outdoors that has been sparked, in part, by the lockdowns and isolation of the global pandemic. He’s looking forward to developing “a full-fledged outdoor education program” at the College that will “give students the skills to work in positions at nature centers, environmental education centers, summer camps, etc. . . . and to become co-facilitators in business and industry, job training, education, and communications.”

Steven Savides—Mass Communication
Originally from South Africa, Steven Savides (C’95) comes to the College with a strong footing in both the world of mass communication and theology. He’s currently completing his dissertation for the University of Notre Dame’s Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and their Department of Theology. His dissertation focuses on the history of how Western, modern culture entered South Africa, transformed the society along hierarchical lines of race, gender, and class, and on how the country is working to unseat its colonial imagination.

Savides holds a master’s degree in theological studies (with a focus on peace studies and conflict resolution) from Harvard Divinity School and a master of divinity degree from Andover Newton Theological School. In addition to his work as a pastor and conflict-transformation consultant, Savides worked as a journalist for Pretoria News, launched a South Africa Exhibit magazine, and worked for The Christian Science Monitor in Boston.

Principia College is currently hiring new faculty members. Please visit https://www.principia.edu/jobs for more information.