I received my J.D. from the University of Tennessee in 2004 where I served as Managing Editor of the Tennessee Law Review. After practicing as a civil litigator and serving as a municipal and community development volunteer in the United States Peace Corps, I received my Ph.D. in Educational Administration and Policy from the University of Georgia in 2013.

I come to education through an untraditional route and I do not take that for granted. I am passionate about education as a tool for personal and societal growth. My main instructional goal is to inspire students to ask “why?” I want students to really interrogate their own assumptions and how they interact with the world and the institutional systems of which they are a part. So often in education, and in life, we get stuck in a rut, doing things the way they’ve always been done. Sometimes that’s because it is actually the best way but often it’s because we haven’t critically examined “the why.”