Teaching in Action: An Open Classroom Spotlight Series

Title: Psychopharmacology
Date/Time: 9/9 • 2:45–4:00 PM

Location: Garland Hall 160

Dr. Meredyth Wegener is a Senior Lecturer in Neuroscience teaching upper level courses that emphasize reading primary literature, critical thinking, case studies, and scientific communication skills. Topics for these courses include neurophysiology, pharmacology, neurological disease, and a seminar on the neurotransmitter GABA. She earned her B.A. in neuroscience from University of Virginia and her doctorate in neuroscience from University of Pittsburgh. She completed her dissertation after conducting research into adolescence and reward learning using awake-behaving electrophysiology in the laboratory of Dr. Bita Moghaddam at the Center for Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh. Before beginning graduate school, Meredyth worked as a research assistant at the University of Maryland School of Medicine under Dr. Geoff Schoenbaum MD, PhD, and Dr. Patricio O’Donnell MD, PhD.

Title: The Modern British Novel
Date/Time: 9/10 • 10:10–11:00 AM
Location: Benson Hall 200

Elizabeth Covington is the Associate Chair and Senior Lecturer of the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies as well as Senior Lecturer in the English Department. She earned her Ph.D. in English literature from Vanderbilt. Elizabeth has published articles in Genre and Journal of Modern Literature, and she is currently working on a book about experimental psychological theories of memory and the emergence of modernist literature in Britain. She teaches a wide variety of classes in GSS and English. Read more.

Title: Being Human
Dates/Time: 9/11 • 11:00 AM–12:15 PM
Location: Murray House 208 (Commons)

Sarah E. Igo is the Andrew Jackson Chair in American History. She received her A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University.  As Dean of Strategic Initiatives for the College of Arts and Science, she led and implemented a far-reaching curricular reform that will launch in Fall 2025: the A&S College Core.  She also co-directs the Open Dialogue Visiting Fellows Program. Igo was the inaugural Faculty Head of E. Bronson Ingram College and is a former director of Vanderbilt’s Program in American Studies. 

Professor Igo teaches and writes about modern U.S. cultural, intellectual, legal and political history, with special interests in the human sciences, the sociology of knowledge, and the public sphere.  

Igo’s most recent book, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2018), traces U.S. debates over the meaning of privacy, beginning with “instantaneous photography” in the late nineteenth century and culminating in our present dilemmas over social media and big data.  Winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History from the American Philosophical Society, the Merle Curti Award for Intellectual History from the Organization of American Historians, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize from the Phi Beta Kappa Society, The Known Citizen has been warmly reviewed in venues such as The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, Dissent, and the New York Review of Books.  The book was honored for “Exemplary Legal Writing” from the Green Bag Reader & Almanac and named one of the “Notable Non-Fiction Books of 2018” by the Washington Post. 

Igo's first book, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Harvard University Press, 2007), explores the relationship between survey data—opinion polls, sex surveys, consumer research—and modern understandings of self and nation.  An Editor’s Choice selection of the New York Times and one of Slate’s Best Books of 2007, The Averaged American was the winner of the President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association and the Cheiron Book Prize as well as a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award of the American Sociological Association.  In addition to these books, Igo is a co-author of Bedford/St. Martin’s American history textbook, The American Promise.

Igo has held fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Whiting Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  In 2012-2015, Igo was awarded a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to pursue training at U.C. Berkeley's Law School and Center for the Study of Law and Society.  Igo has been a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, a visiting fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, and a Havens Center Visiting Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the recipient of Vanderbilt’s Chancellor’s Award for Research, the Early Career Award from the Journal for the History of the Behavioral Sciences and the Forum for the History of the Human Sciences and the 2015 best paper award for “overall excellence and relevance to the practice of privacy law” of the Privacy Law Scholars Conference.  

Professor Igo co-directed a multi-year project, the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education, funded by the Teagle Foundation. She has been a fellow of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a member of the Social Science Research Council Working Group on the Transformation of Public Research Universities, and a participant in the National Young Faculty Leaders Forum at Harvard University’s Center for Business and Government.  Igo teaches a wide range of courses in modern U.S. history at both the undergraduate and graduate level.  She joined the Vanderbilt history department in 2008 from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was Associate Professor of History and the recipient of the Richard S. Dunn Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Title: Exploratory Core: Ethics and Power in Digital Culture
Date/Time: Thursday, 9/11 • 9:30–10:45 AM

Location: Calhoun Hall 219

Brian DeLevie is a digital artist, designer, author, and former Associate Professor of Design at the University of Colorado Denver. During his twenty-year tenure at the university, he served as the Co-Founder and Director of The Comcast Center for Media and Technology and the Center for Arts as Systemic Change, Chair of the Department of Visual Arts, and Head of the Digital Design program. As Associate Director, Brian liaisons with departments and colleges across the Vanderbilt campus and supports consultations, syllabus and course design, experiential education, workshops, teaching observations and programs such as New Faculty Teaching Academy. He also serves as a Senior Lecturer for The Department of Cinema & Media Arts.

Brian’s body of creative and artistic works investigates themes of technology, memory, history, and Holocaust issues and has been exhibited and screened widely nationally and internationally and led to a Fulbright Fellowship to study the influences of Film, Television, and the Internet on German culture. With a Masters of Fine Arts in Electronic Arts/Design and an Ed.D in Leadership for Educational Equity in Higher Education, Brian has researched, presented, and published numerous papers investigating the confluence of design, memory, innovation, culture change, and experiential educational practices in higher education.

Title: Leadership Theory and Behavior
Date/Time: 9/15 • 7:30–9:00 PM CT
Location: Online

Eve Rifkin is a senior lecturer in Peabody’s Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations. Her primary assignment is in the Leadership and Learning in Organizations program, an innovative educational doctoral degree program that supports mid-career professionals across a range of industries. Dr. Rifkin holds an Ed.D. in leadership and policy from Vanderbilt and is the co-founder of City High School in Tucson, AZ. Dr. Rifkin has over 25 years of experience in designing schools both nationally and globally; informing state-level policy; and supporting professional learning communities of both teachers and school leaders throughout the country. 

Title: Being Human
Dates/Time: 9/16 • 8:00–9:15 AM
Location: Commons Memorial House 117

Paul Stob is Professor of Communication Studies and Director of the Program in Culture, Advocacy, and Leadership. He is also inaugural Director of the A&S College Core.

His research and teaching focus on the intersection of rhetoric and intellectual culture, with particular emphasis on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in the United States. He is the author of William James & the Art of Popular Statement (Michigan State University Press, 2013) and Intellectual Populism: Democracy, Inquiry, and the People (Michigan State University Press, 2020). He is co-editor (with Angela Ray) of Thinking Together: Lecturing, Learning, and Difference in the Long Nineteenth Century (Penn State University Press, 2018).

Paul’s current book manuscript, which will be published in 2025 by Counterpoint Press, is titled Empire of Skulls: A Story of Phrenology, the Fowlers, and the Secrets of the Human Mind. The book explores the rise of practical phrenology in the United States via the work of one family, the Fowlers, who not only built a cultural empire around the science but made it central to various reform movements.

In addition, Paul is a co-author (with Stephen E. Lucas) of The Art of Public Speaking (McGraw-Hill Higher Education), a popular public-speaking textbook used around the world.

Title: ES1151 – Engineering Ethics
Day/Time: Wednesday • 1:15–2:30 PM

Lynne Cooper, assistant professor of the practice of engineering management, joins Vanderbilt from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory after a 28-year career where she led the JPL Proposal Center. A former captain in the U.S. Air Force, Cooper’s role at NASA included working on multiple Mars missions, re-engineering the New Product Development process, and leading applied artificial intelligence research. She also managed the successful Mars Helicopter Proposal, which led to the Ingenuity Helicopter’s historic flight on Mars.

Prior to joining Vanderbilt, she served as an industry faculty member for engineering management at the University of Southern California’s Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and at Washington State University in the Department of Management, Information Systems, and Entrepreneurship.

Title: Being Human
Date/Time: 9/18 • 1:15–2:30 PM
Location: Commons Memorial House 117

Benigno Trigo was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He is currently Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Vanderbilt University. His publications include Malady and Genius; Self-Sacrifice in Puerto Rican Literature (2016), Remembering Maternal Bodies (2006), Subjects of Crisis: (2000), Noir Anxiety (Co-authored with Kelly Oliver 2003), as well as two edited collections: Kristeva’s Fiction (2014) and Foucault and Latin America (2002). He has served his community as a member of the board of directors of the Luis A Ferré Foundation and of the Ponce Museum of Art.