Medieval & Renaissance Studies
and Urban History
New College of Florida
Management
Over the last twenty years I have led teams of varying sizes and types of personnel to great success, from supervising single students and interns to extended rosters of contributors for complex projects.
Chart Your Course
>> Leading the design of a new general-education curriculum
As Director of Chart Your Course (CYC), I recently led a 5-year redesign of New College of Florida’s general-education program, emphasizing integrative learning, transferable skills, and student reflection in line with institutional best practices recommended by the AAC&U's "Key Components of a Contemporary Liberal Education". This involved working with state officials to ensure compliance with state standards; holding focus groups with faculty, staff, and students to incorporate feedback and increase buy-in; working with Student Affairs and Communications & Marketing to establish a culture of skill-building on campus through marketing, advising, and collaboration; designing and running training modules for approximately 90% of regular faculty over 2 years on CYC’s mission, goals, implementation, and assessment processes, including tracking faculty completion and compensation; and working with the College's Division of Institutional Research to analyze aggregate assessment data for CYC courses, as well as presenting the results to a range of stakeholder groups, from accreditors and trustees to administrators and faculty.
The New College Conference on Medieval & Renaissance Studies, 2006–
>> Organizing a large biennial academic conference
In my role (since 2006) as Co-Chair of the Biennial New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, I have organized one of the largest regional conferences in the premodern field with a multi-thousand-dollar budget and approximately 250–300 attendees biennially. This is a large and complex process: on an academic side, it involves organizing the program committee to distribute a call for papers and presentations as well as to review paper submissions and arrange sessions. On the scheduling side, it means reserving spaces, lodging, and catering for several hundred people as well as organizing the program for a 3-day event running five concurrent sessions and accompanied by associated events such as workshops and performances. I was also responsible for tracking the budget; distributing prizes and bursaries; recruiting, organizing, and supervising student interns as well as a staff of 20+ student workers; designing and producing programs, auxiliary materials, and the conference website. I also served as the main "face" of the conference, welcoming attendees, introducing keynote speakers, liaising with vendors, and other efforts.
The Sfera Project
>> Coordinating a collaborative, crowd-sourced research project
I am presently Co-PI of the Sfera Project, a collaborative scholarly effort to translate, contextualize, and study Gregorio Dati's early-15th-century geographical treatise La sfera, or The Globe. This began as a crowd-sourced social-media pastime for medievalists during the COVID lockdown, but has since branched into a major research project with multiple areas of effort, involving volunteer contributors from tenured professors to undergraduate, computer programmers and digital humanists to linguists and archivists. Our efforts will result in both a published print edition of Dati's work (forthcoming from Italica Press in spring 2025) and a multimedia digital edition (probably late 2025) which has received 2 major grants from the NEH totaling over $200,000. As co-PI of the Project, I have spearheaded our successful grant-application work; organized the team's work on multiple fronts, including multiple public presentations about our findings; and acted as formal Project Director for the administration of our NEW grant. I am also leading the team's geospatial analysis, which has involved coordinating the work 10–20 volunteer contributors with a variety of backgrounds in time zones sometimes 12 hours apart.
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