MDS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Teaching Associate Professor
Dina Hornbaker is a Charleston native with a background in Agriculture and Natural Resources. In 2021, she switched gears when she began working as a Community Partnership Coordinator for Solar Holler. She is passionate about maps and the great outdoors as she continues to create positive impacts for central Appalachian communities. Dina enjoys hiking and foraging during her spare time, although she tends to shy away from sharing her GPS coordinates of her favorite morel patch.
Job Titles:
- Program Manager and Senior Academic Advisor
Job Titles:
- Teaching Assistant Professor
Dr. Jayme Scally comes to Multidisciplinary Studies from the Honors Program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa where she served as faculty for six years. She is originally from Baltimore, MD and has lived and studied in England, Ireland, Spain, and South Africa. Her research focuses on the development of intercultural competence in various settings, including through study abroad, intentional campus programming, and through media. Jayme's dissertation focused on a comparison of the three main study abroad models in US undergraduate education and assessed their program structures to ascertain which best support the development of intercultural competence, as well as the influence of administrative support and varying student motivations. Other work has investigated the idea of "internationalization at home" including a look at the relationship between Fundamental British Values and Arabic complementary schools and a focus on the mismatch between Global North and South institutions in higher education exchange programs that results in further propagating the inequity such programs are meant to address. A scholar-practitioner, Jayme has also worked in careers and study abroad advising, welfare and student support in the US and UK.
Jayme would like to collaborate with others on research around accessibility, engagement, and identity development in higher education and in teaching that helps students view issues from new perspectives or those that they might not think to use in a given environment, particularly with focus on civic engagement and social justice. She is also eager to develop and incorporate short-term study abroad programs into her teaching and would love to work with anyone else with similar goals or experience creating such a course.
Education:
B.A. History, Gettysburg College
M.Ed. Higher Education Administration, Vanderbilt University
Ph.D. Education, University of York, UK
Certificate in Disability and Diversity Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA
Job Titles:
- Teaching Assistant Professor
Raeanne Beckner, from Bridgeport, West Virginia received a dual major in Journalism and Multidisciplinary Studies. She served as a student ambassador for the Reed College of Media and New Student Orientation Leader. She served in multiple roles with The Daily Athenaeum, including managing editor and culture editor. Beckner is also involved in Omega Phi Alpha and the West Virginia Innocence Project. She was selected as a Milan Puskar Leadership Scholar, Eberly College Scholar and has been on the President's List every semester. She is sponsored by the Professional Greek Council (PGC).
Job Titles:
- Author
- Board Member for the Pittsburgh Youth Ballet
- Teaching Associate Professor
- Writer
Renée Nicholson is an author and scholar primarily interested in the health humanities. Nicholson earned a MFA in Creative Writing from WVU and a BA degree in English/Creating Writing from Butler University.
Renée Nicholson is a celebrated writer, educator, and expert in narrative medicine. She is the author of the memoir Fierce and Delicate: Essays on Dance and Illness, and a collection of poetry, Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center. She is also co-editor of the award-winning anthology Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives of Illness, Disability, and Medicine, and she served as consulting writer for the memoir Off Belay: One Last Great Adventure. Her creative writing and her scholarship have appeared in over a hundred magazines, journals, and anthologies, including Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal, where Nicholson serves as a contributing writer. Her writing has also earned numerous nominations and awards, including the 2022 Nassau Review Prize for Prose. In 2011, she served as the Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Penn State Altoona.
Nicholson's research includes two interdisciplinary Narrative Medicine projects "The Value of Expressive Storytelling/Writing on Quality of Life," which was conducted in collaboration with WVU School of Medicine and funded by grants from the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute, and the Humanities Center. These projects served nearly a hundred patients in Appalachia living with cancer and with HIV. This work, as well as her acclaimed writing, earned Nicholson the 2018 Susan S. Landis Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts at the West Virginia Governor's Arts Awards, and the 2019 Eberly College of Arts and Sciences' Outstanding Public Service Award. She is also the 2020 winner of the Nicholas Evans Award for Excellence in Advising at WVU.
In addition to her writing and research, Nicholson has served as a board member for the Pittsburgh Youth Ballet, chair of the fundraising committee for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra series at WVU, assistant director and director of the West Virginia Writers' Workshop, and director of WVU's Programs for Multi- and Interdisciplinary Studies. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and the Dance Critics Association, and is an American Ballet Theatre Certified Teacher, funded through a grant from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts.
Nicholson earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from WVU, a Bachelor of Arts degree in English/Creating Writing from Butler University, and a Certificate in Narrative Medicine from the Program for Narrative Medicine at Columbia University.
Job Titles:
- Program Director
- Director of Multidisciplinary Programs
- Professor
Dr. Davidson is also a professor in the Department of Philosophy. He has taught about twenty different courses covering a broad range of topics. His teaching responsibilities at WVU include the areas of ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law. He is interested in the question posed by Paul Ricoeur concerning how to live "the good life, with and for others, within just institutions." And he is especially interested in questions about the relationship between the values of economic markets and other forms of valuing, which ultimately boils down to the question, "Should everything be for sale?" He is especially interested in mentoring pre-law students who are studying philosophy with the goal of pursuing a career in law. In the future, he hopes to develop seminar courses focused on specific figures of interest, such as Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Judith Butler.
Job Titles:
- Teaching Assistant Professor
Dr. Thaddeus Herman holds a PhD of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership with a dual concentration of Philosophy of Education and Global Studies in Education and a minor in Global Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has lived extensively abroad in India helping to implement new curriculum in various institutions of higher education throughout the western Indian state of Maharashtra. He is fluent in Persian and his research broadly focuses on historical and modern educational connections between Iran and India. His recent research focuses on how a Bahá'í inspired school in Maharashtra began by Iranian Bahá'í refugees functioned during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Thaddeus is a two-time FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies) Fellow in Persian and utilizes the language in his research.
Dr. Herman is interested in collaborating with other scholars of globalization and those who incorporate a global lens within their research. He is also interested in collaborating with scholars from a variety of disciplines to invite them as guest lecturers into the classes he will teach. Collaborating with the Human Rights Commission of Morgantown, the Greater Morgantown Interfaith Association, and any units on the WVU campus which focus on global issues is of great interest to him.
Education:
PhD of Educational Policy, Organization and Leadership with a dual concentration in Philosophy of Education and Global Studies in Education and a graduate minor in Global Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.