Troy Sadler is the Thomas James Distinguished Professor of Experiential Learning in the School of Education. He studies how people learn science and how to improve the teaching of science. He is particularly interested in how people think about complex societal issues that connect to science such as climate change, food security, and genetically engineering. He is also interested in how technologies can support learning experiences and has led efforts to design and test two serious games, one related to biotechnology and another related to water resources. He has taught science in middle school, high school, undergraduate, and graduate contexts.

Shane Peterson is originally from Las Vegas, NV. He received a BA in English with minors in editing and creative writing from BYU and a Ph.D. in language and rhetoric from the University of Washington in Seattle. His research primarily centers on the rhetorics of crisis, apocalypse, and precarity, both historically and in contemporary settings. He is particularly interested in how the affective qualities of crisis rhetorics are embodied and enacted in American political spheres, scientific discourses, religious communities, and more public, everyday contexts. He is also interested in developing new pedagogies of crisis, namely on how to teach writing and research during ongoing periods of disruption and uncertainty.

Megan Plenge is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Geological Science. She has always loved teaching science, and particularly loves increasing science literacy by helping people understand the nature of science. She thinks the best way for students to learn how to think like scientists is to address real-world problems. Her approach to science research has been interdisciplinary, including environmental geochemistry, microbial ecology, and water-rock interactions. She loves drinking coffee, reading science fiction books, and commuting on bike or by foot.

The 2024 recipient of the Board of Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, Florence Dore teaches literature courses in Carolina's English Department. After finishing up a BA in English at Wesleyan University, she worked as a waitress and taught eight graders how to diagram sentences, eventually returning to school and earning her doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley in 1999, where she specialized in American modernism with a focus on the fiction of William Faulkner. She has written three books and numerous articles, including one about the relation between rock music and Southern literature.

I have taught at UNC since 2002. My broad area of interest in the United States since 1865, with a particular interest in the American South between 1865 and 1930. I teach courses on the social history of American popular music and on American film. I seem compelled to write books on somber topics, including lynching and torture. Currently I am writing a book on prisoner of war camps during the American Civil War. These topics undoubtedly have contributed to my fascination with American popular music, which provides therapy for my soul.

David Garcia is an ethnomusicologist whose research focuses on the music of the Americas with an emphasis on Black music and Latin music of the United States and with a theoretical focus on race and historiography. Garcia has published two books (Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins, 2017, and Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music, 2016). His current research focuses on the long nineteenth-century history of Latin music and culture in the United States.

Molly Worthen teaches courses in the history of religion and ideology, primarily in the U.S. and Canada. Her latest book is Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Trump (2025). Dr. Worthen has also published courses with Audible and The Great Courses on global Christianity and charismatic leaders. She writes for the New York Times and other outlets about religion, politics and higher education.

Joaquin Drut is a quantum many-particle theorist by training. That means that Dr. Drut spends most of his time thinking about how to calculate and predict the physics of systems of many particles, when they are governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. Some of those systems are studied in labs on Earth, but the most interesting ones are deep inside the most massive stars, where the elements are created at unimaginably high densities and temperatures. Dr. Drut regularly teaches a course on computational and mathematical methods for physics majors, where the importance of abstract linear algebra and generalized Fourier analysis as concepts underlying physical laws are emphasized.

Gabriel Trop has intellectual interests in philosophy from antiquity to the present focusing on theories of art (aesthetics), science, and literature, with a special emphasis on German and French literature in the long nineteenth century. In his teaching, he tends to explore resonances between literature, film, politics, and philosophical existentialism; Dr. Trop has taught previous courses on Freedom and Terror in German Philosophy, and on the films of Christopher Nolan and German Romanticism, for example. As a classical musician (cellist), he is also interested in the aesthetics of music.

Rebecca Walker is Professor of Social Medicine and of Philosophy, and in the Center for Bioethics. She is a philosopher of medicine whose primary focus is on the relationship between moral theories and concepts and various biomedical practices. Her publications include over 30 original research articles and book chapters and her co-edited books are: Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems (2007), Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice: New Conversations Across the Disciplines (2016), and The Social Medicine Reader, third edition, Volumes 1&2 (2019). Prof. Walker teaches medical students during the foundational phase of their curriculum and ethics courses for undergraduate and graduate students.

Michele Rivkin-Fish is Associate Professor of Anthropology. Her research focuses on health and gender in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian societies, and on notions of justice in US health care reform. She is the author of Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Reproduction (2005), and is currently writing a monograph entitled “Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Search for a Liberal Biopolitics.” She is a co-editor of Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice: New Conversations Across the Disciplines (2016). Her teaching in medical anthropology focuses on the symbols, meanings, and political-economies of health and justice globally.

Jane F. Thrailkill is Bank of America Honors Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. A scholar of American literature and health humanities, she publishes widely on the connections among literary study, the sciences, medicine, and philosophy. Her books are Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literature Realism (Harvard UP, 2007) and Philosophical Siblings: Varieties of Playful Experience in Alice, William, and Henry James (UPenn Press, 2021). Since 2016 she has taught third-year medical students at UNC’s School of Medicine. With Prof. Jordynn Jack, she co-founded HHIVE Lab in 2015 and collaborates with colleagues in the health sciences on interprofessional education projects. She has received recognition for her teaching, including UNC-Chapel Hill’s Board of Governor’s Award.

Jeff Greene is the McMichael Distinguished Professor of Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology in 2007 from the University of Maryland at College Park. In his research, he studies the ways people learn using digital resources, and how to help them use those resources more effectively. Specifically, he studies how people can learn to self-regulate their learning, as well as how they can become better critical consumers of what they encounter online and in the world. He has published three books and over 60 book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles. Currently, he is the co-Editor of the American Psychological Association (APA) journal Educational Psychologist. He is the recipient of the Richard E. Snow Award for Early Career Contributions in Educational Psychology from Division 15 of APA, and he is an APA Fellow.

Erianne Weight is a Professor of Sport Administration who studies the intersection of sport and higher education, college sport organizational structure and culture, and the pursuit of expertise. She is the Director of the Center for Research in Intercollegiate Athletics, President of the North American Society for Sport Management, Chair of the UNC Faculty Athletics Committee, and consultant for LEAD1 Association and Collegiate Sports Associates. She earned her Ph.D. in Sport Marketing and Management from Indiana University, and her Master of Business Administration and B.S. in Exercise and Sport Science from the University of Utah where she also competed as a heptathlete and graduate assistant track coach. She is a Research Fellow for the College Sport Research Institute, has published 3 books, over 100 refereed articles and book chapters, has consulted for over 30 organizations, and has given roughly 150 invited and refereed research presentations. She is married to Matt Weight and has two daughters – Aleah and Lillian.

Will Goldsmith is a Teaching Assistant Professor in Public Policy. His research looks at how new electoral coalitions unlocked by the civil rights movement influenced economic development and education policy in North Carolina, and broadly, he is interested in how institutions exacerbate and ameliorate historical inequalities. He teaches classes on making public policy, state and local politics, and conflict and cooperation between the public sector and private sector. Before graduate school, he worked as a high school teacher and journalist. As a 17-year old, he (legally!) cast his first ballot at the Crooked Creek Fire Department in western North Carolina’s McDowell County.

Linda Green is a Teaching Associate Professor in Mathematics. She attended high school at the North Carolina School of Science and Math, received her BS and MS in math from the University of Chicago and earned her PhD in math from Princeton University. Since joining UNC in 2013, she has taught every class in the precalculus-calculus sequence, first-year seminars on topics including voting, topology, and symmetry, and a general education class that applies quantitative methods to societal problems. She has recorded over 300 instructional videos that are posted on her YouTube channel. Linda received Math Department teaching awards in 2018 and 2023 and a University teaching award in 2022.

Benjamin C. Waterhouse is a Professor of History whose research explores the culture and politics of business, particularly in the modern United States. He teaches courses in American business history, modern U.S. social and political history, the history of capitalism, and the history of finance and financial crises. He is the author of three books: Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA (2013); The Land of Enterprise: A Business History of the United States (2017); and One Day I’ll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion that Conquered America (2024). He attended public high school in Bedford, Massachusetts, went to Princeton University, and earned his PhD in History from Harvard University.

Yaron Shemer is Associate Professor of film and Israel cultural studies at The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He earned his Ph.D. in Film Studies from The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel (U. of Michigan Press, 2013). Shemer has also published on the Jew in Middle Eastern Cinema and on Palestinian cinema. His current book project is “Israeli-Palestinian Encounters: National Narratives in Political Cartoons, Cinema, and Translation.” Shemer has also produced and directed documentary films in Israel, Poland, and the U.S.

Michael A. Figueroa is Associate Professor of Music. A researcher of music in the SWANA region and diasporas, he is the author of City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem (Oxford University Press, 2022) and is currently writing a second book, Racial Awakening in Arab America: Performance, Intimacy, and Critique. His articles have appeared in Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, Journal of Musicology, and multiple edited volumes. Figueroa has been Associate Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, Coordinator of the Faculty of Color/Indigenous Faculty Group, and Director of the New Faculty Program.

Jodi Magness (JodiMagness.org) is the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in the Department of Religious Studies. She specializes in the archaeology of ancient Palestine in the Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic periods. Since 2011, excavations that she directs at Huqoq in Israel’s Galilee have brought to light a Late Roman synagogue paved with stunning mosaics depicting an array of biblical and non-biblical stories – a discovery featured in the April 2024 issue of National Geographic magazine. This course incorporates research from Magness’ most recent book, Jerusalem Through the Ages: From Its Beginnings to the Crusades (Oxford University Press 2024).

Seth Kotch, associate professor in the Department of American Studies, conducts research in modern American history (specifically the social history of the criminal-legal system in the American south) and directs the Southern Oral History Program.

Kathryn Hunter Williams received her B.F.A from University of North Carolina School of the Arts and her M.F.A from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a member of PlayMakers Repertory Company she has performed inDoubt, Romeo and Juliet, Yellowman and String of Pearls. She has also worked with Living Stage, The Negro Ensemble Company, Manhattan Class Company and New Dramatist. Kathryn is currently on the faculty of UNC Dept. of Dramatic Art and will continue exploring the ways the theater can provide insight about our differences and promote a better understanding of our community.

She is the performance director for HiddenVoices, a non-profit dedicated to bringing life changing stories into a public forum.