Honors College

I was born in Pennsylvania, and grew up mostly in Ohio, where I did my undergraduate studies in Psychology and English Literature at Case Western Reserve University. I then went on to a PhD in Psychology at Stanford University, and from there to a post-doctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, in Berlin, Germany. In 1999, I arrived in Utah as a faculty member in the Psychology department, fell in love with the mountains, and stayed put! My scholarly expertise is in adolescent and young adult identity development – and I am especially interested in the way that telling stories shapes our memories, emotions, and selves across the lifespan – and how those stories are influenced by the listeners in our lives. I joined the Honors College in 2018 as an Associate Dean, and accepted the role of Interim Dean in June of 2023. I welcome conversations with students about their life paths and how Honors and the University of Utah can support them!

Rachel Hayes-Harb is an Associate Dean in the Honors College, as well as a Professor of Linguistics. She served as Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies from 2014-2021. She has also collaborated with the Office of the Vice President for Research to promote high-quality mentoring in the research context through education and mentor community building. Her scholarship focuses on a variety of phenomena related to the acquisition of the sound systems of new languages by adult learners, specifically the development of sound inventories and the sound structure of words. Her research typically involves experimental investigations of the perception of new sounds and words, and the influence of various types of linguistic experience on adults’ linguistic development. She serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Applied Psycholinguistics, and co-directs the Speech Acquisition Lab, where she collaborates with undergraduate and graduate student researchers.

Aaron joined the Honors College in 2014. Previously he worked in student services at the University of Arizona and Southern Utah University. A native Utahn, Aaron grew up in rural central Utah. After completing his undergraduate studies at Snow College and Brigham Young University, he completed a master's degree in Organizational Leadership at Columbia University and a doctoral degree in Higher Education Administration at the U. He enjoys weight training, reading, travel, and spending time with family.

I grew up in Chicago, studied classical music at Chicago Conservatory, then led a precarious double life dashing between the encyclopedia business by day and a punk rock band by night. But I fell in love with the red rocks of southern Utah, so I left behind MTV to live in Springdale, the gateway to Zion National Park.My new neighbors forgave my punkish ways and twice elected me mayor. After noticing significant and useful similarities between musical and political processes, I cooked up the Composing a Community course for the Honors College.
I also practice yoga and meditation, and I teach Radical Quiet.In Navajo legend a coyote, or “songdog,” emerged from a hole in the ground and sang the world into existence. The songdog story, and the feeling of possibility it engenders, has inspired all my work as composer, mayor and citizen. My goal as teacher is to spark that feeling and develop that capability in my students, helping them to become conscious and intentional co-creators—songdogs—singing ourselves and our communities into existence. My work can be found here
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After growing up in New Jersey, I have had managed to live along both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts (Los Angeles and Charleston, SC), in the Allegheny Mountains of central Pennsylvania, amid the corn and soy fields of Illinois, and in the Mile High City at the foot of Colorado’s Front Range. I’m now happy to call the Wasatch Front home. As a proud graduate of flagship state universities (B.A., Penn State; Ph.D., University of Illinois), I am committed to helping my students here at Utah excel amid the hive of innovation, opportunity, and community activity that shapes undergraduate life at a public research institution. As a scholar and teacher, I care about the ways in which literature and film can be situated within a broader ecosystem of cultural narratives shaping human experience. I often attend to the ways and reasons we craft and share stories about health and wellness issues (specifically, addiction and disease risk), and I consider how such stories might resist or reinforce ideological suppositions about who we are and how we are expected to live.

I am from the San Francisco Bay Area in California and grew up in a small suburban city bordered by salt marshes to the west and dry yellow hills to the east. As a diasporic writer, educator, scholar, and mother, I am attentive to how place and identity weave together and shape our sense of selves, communities, histories, and futures. Centered in place-based pedagogy, I encourage students to think critically and creatively about diverse ecologies of place and identity. I aim to help students develop their own practices to read and observe attentively, to find their own ways through a “text” (and college!), and to contextualize their thinking as part of ongoing discourses and histories. At the Honors College, I am also the director of the Ecology & Legacy minor and welcome students to contact me about the integrated minors in Honors, environmental humanities at the U, mentoring, etc.

I have professionally reinvented myself several times over. I started my career as a working journalist in both print and TV and then went to law school with the thought of becoming a network correspondent reporting on the Supreme Court. Along the way, I developed a love of the law and thus began my second career as a practicing lawyer at Utah’s largest law firm. Ideveloped a media law litigation practice where I was able to combine law and journalism by representing many local and national news organizations, including 60 minutes, CNN, the New York Times, the Associated Press, Redbook Magazine and the Salt Lake Tribune. Ask me about my representation of the Globe supermarket tabloid who was sued by Marie Osmond. I have some great stories!After 30 years as a practicing lawyer, I began phase three of my professional career when I was named as the Presidential Honors Professor with a joint appointment at the law school and the Honors College. Nirvana!I believe technology can aid the learning environment and most of my classes incorporate blogs, YouTube and social media in the pedagogy. Check out the links below.
Privacy in a Digital Age
Blog Information Privacy Law video series
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I was born in Ohio but grew up in southern California. I attended Stanford University as an undergraduate and University of Washington for graduate work in English. Soon after receiving my Ph.D., I moved to the University of Utah where I have enjoyed students for over thirty years. Teaching is my passion—I love seeing students expand their thoughts, sharpen their skills, and work together in learning communities. My own teaching has transformed from lectures to group discussion and activities, especially role-playing in Reacting to the Past. I teach in both the Honors and LEAP program where I direct and teach Pre-Law LEAP. I serve as a Distinguished Bibliographer for the Modern Language Association, and am an affiliate of the Bennion Center. My students and colleagues have rewarded me with many teaching awards, including the University Distinguished Teaching Award and Distinguished Honors Professor (twice) and recently the General Education Teaching Award for Innovation.
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I am from Lonoke County, Arkansas and attended the University of Arkansas as a first generation college student. After graduate school at the University of North Carolina and the University of Utah, I joined the Honors community where I have taught writing for fifteen years. I am the author of four collections of short fiction, five novels, and two collections of essays, including the forthcoming Finisterre: Part II of White Indians (Raw Dog Screaming Press). I teach writing as an endeavor that comes like a freight train from the heart; we must care deeply, I believe, about what we write. Student writers see my passion and the resulting workshops throw sparks. We roll up our sleeves. Chalk dust flies (or, more lately, blue squeaky markers). We interrupt each other, raise and lower our voices, get knee-deep in the work and entirely risk making fools of ourselves. I am fulfilled by teaching such workshops--what goes on in our minds and hearts matters. It is a privilege to engage young writers and their craft, the difficulties of which can be downright staggering. My undergraduate Novel Writing Workshop, the first of its kind in the nation, has been featured in USA Today, and several students have published novels at national presses from the year-long class. I am grateful to my students who have rewarded my mentorship by voting me Distinguished Honors Professor, among other recognitions.
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I grew up in Miami, FL (which is actually much more boring than it sounds). After attending Florida State University for my B.A. and M.A. in Creative Writing (with a brief layover between in Eugene, OR), I got married, then moved to Utah to pursue my Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing, fell in love with the mountains, and we haven’t left. I am a novelist (The Late Matthew Brown) and have served as Editor of two different literary magazines (Quarterly West and Western Humanities Review). All of my pursuits—literary, academic, pedagogical—intersect with ideas about identity and the pursuit of social justice. I’ve been teaching in the Honors College for 15 years and the big reason I’m still here is because of the students. Teaching is endlessly challenging, but also endlessly rewarding. There is an incredible power in collaboration—both with writing and discussion—and I use both extensively in my classes. We all succeed when we are a vibrant community exchanging ideas and challenging each other to be our best. In all my classes, we grapple with important questions: about ourselves, our histories, and the world in which we live.
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I grew up in New York and came to Utah to study literature and creative writing. I completed an MFA at the U of U and then went on to the University of Washington to study medieval literature and critical theory. Though I greatly enjoyed that research, I changed course and returned to the U of U to resume creative writing and complete my PhD. While pursuing an academic career, I have maintained my early interest in visual art and music. In addition to publishing fiction and poetry, I have exhibited paintings and recorded albums with a number of local bands. I try to make the various artistic mediums a prominent component of all the courses I teach, particularly in Intellectual Traditions II, III, and VIII. Comparing and contrasting different artistic modalities and relating them to philosophy and the sciences, has been an integral part of my teaching, along with various out-of-class excursions on and off campus. I have greatly enjoyed working with students from various disciplines. My experiences in the classroom have been some of the most exciting and happiest times in my life. Students have been generous enough to select me twice as the distinguished Honors professor of the year.
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Kate is a Postdoctroal Research Associate in the University of Utah Anthropology Department. Her research examines how human economic decisions contribute to ecological disturbance regimes, primarly via the human use of fire. Specifically, she studies how landscape and cooking fires influence human subsistence decisions and create ecological consequences. Her current research is focused on understanding the contemporary social and ecological drivers and impacts of Tribal firewood harvesting on the Colorado Plateau. Additionally, Kate is a has long conducted research and education on dark skies and light pollution, which she frames as an important contemporary dimension of human ecology. As a Dark Sky Scholar, she teaches a course as part of the new Dark Sky Studies minor at the University of Utah. Community engagement is fundamental to Kate's teaching and research philosophy. In an effort to synthesize the goals of applied teaching and research, Kate focuses on community engaged projects to maintain important relationships between contemporary social issues, students, and research projects. Kate has facilitated such connections in the classroom, in the research lab, during field work at places like the Bonderman Field Station at Rio Mesa, and in communities throughout Utah and Navajo Nation. Kate earned her PhD in 2019. Previously, she earned her MS in Anthropology at UU in 2014 and a BA in Anthropology at University of Arizona, Tucson in 2004. She spent the intervening years working for the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management. Issues in public land management, traditional knowledge, and energy heavily inform her research and teaching.

I grew up on the coast of Maine and was educated in New England, Britain and the Pacific Northwest. In all cases, the wild places around me have guided and motivated me. The mountains pointed me toward Utah and they continue to give me wonder mixed with fear — what some call the sublime. Now I am the Director of Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah. My work focuses on human relations to the natural world, and on the extraordinary creative expressions of modernist literature. I’ve been a Fulbright fellow, a Mellon Fellow to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas and I’ve had research fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Calgary Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University.
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I grew up in the mountains of British Columbia and then attended college on the Canadian prairies, at the University of Manitoba. After completing my MA (also at Manitoba), I lived in London and Montreal for several years before moving to the US to begin graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, where I received my Ph.D. in early modern English literature in 2015. In Honors, I teach courses in Intellectual Traditions and writing, and I am currently serving as serving as Faculty Director of the Honors Integrated Minor in Human Rights and Resources, which is currently running tracks in Utah and Mexico. For me, the greatest pleasures of Honors are found in its diversity and interdisciplinarity. I welcome conversations with students about topics relating to the HRR minor, Mexico, my research interests (which historically have focused on the relationship between technology and religion), and whatever happens to be on your mind.

Christopher Patrick Miller (PhD, UC Berkeley) is a poet and interdisciplinary scholar in the humanities with a focus on poetry and poetics, critical theory, and urbanism. His first book of poems, ARCH (Tuumba, 2019), is a writing-through of Vitruvius’s Roman manual for architects for the contemporary Americas. Recently published scholarly work in Poetics Today, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Modernism/modernity has focused on transient culture, democracy and its limitations, literatures of war, and the intersections between politics and language philosophy. He is excited to be a part of the Honors community here at University of Utah.

I grew up near Dayton, Ohio, migrated west to Deep Springs College near Death Valley at seventeen, and never got the open spaces out of my system. I tried from time to time, taking an M.A. degree in history and theology at Duke and a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of higher education at Ohio State. Since 1974, I’ve been a professor (and dean for sixteen years) at the University of Utah, taking time out to lead Deep Springs College from 1995 to 2004. My passion has always been for education in the liberal arts and sciences spirit—to open minds to new ideas and possibilities, to build vigorous learning communities, and to relate learning to life and work. My latest books, Hope, Heart, and the Humanities: How a Free College Course is Changing Lives (coedited with Jean Cheney) and The Electric Edge of Academe: The Saga of Lucien L. Nunn and Deep Springs College explore my philosophies of education and leadership in contrasting ways. I also served on the founding board of directors of the Bennion Center for Community Service, and as editor of the higher education journal The Review of Higher Education (1986-91). I co-edited (with Linda King Newell) the scholarly journal Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (1982-87).
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I was born and raised in rural Utah fascinated by ancient cultures and how humans interact with different ecosystems. I was drawn away from that environment to travel and live in Europe and Asia, picking up languages and cultural insights along the way. I teach HONOR 3200, 2211, and contribute to both the Ecology and Legacy and Human Rights and Resources Integrated Minors. I'm also a fiction writer and editor for the Dark Mountain Project out of the UK, as well as a researcher and published author in the environmental humanities, focusing on queer ecology. I seek to help students come to terms with just how strange and wonderful the human animal is, and can be, and how that strangeness can be harnessed to improve our quality of life.

I arrived at the University of Utah seven years ago from Colorado, where I taught at Colorado State University. I received my Ph.D. at the University of Colorado and grew up in Santa Cruz, California. I am a medieval historian interested in midwifery and childbirth, anatomy and social history, and appreciate Game of Thrones. As a member of the Honors Faculty, I enjoy teaching Intellectual Traditions, Honors Writing, and Reacting to the Past courses. My paper, “Imagining Pregnancy: The Fünfbilderserie and Images of ‘Pregnant Disease Women’ in Medieval Medical Manuscripts,” won the 2013 Delno West Award for Best Paper. I am the incoming President of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, and also do work for the College Board. I also serve as the Director of the Office of Competitive Scholarships.
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Dr. Virginia Solomon: B.A. Stanford University, 2004, Studio Art and Feminist Studies; M.A. 2007, Ph.D. 2013, Art History and Gender Studies, University of Southern California Dr. Solomon’s research interests include contemporary art, curation, gender studies, queer theory, visual culture, subcultures, and alternative forms of politics. Solomon’s research has been supported by a Canadian Art Research Fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada and a Helena Rubenstein Critical Studies Fellowship at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, among others. Their curatorial work includes the exhibition Tainted Love (2009) at the La Mama La Galleria in NYC and Shary Boyle and Emily Duke: The Illuminations Project (2011), realized while serving as the Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Before joining the faculty at the University of Utah, Solomon was an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Memphis and a Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Studies in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons The New School for Design. They teach FF courses in the college around ideas of art, politics, culture, and their points of intersection, and they also are the faculty director for the Thesis Mentoring Community.

I was born and raised in a small town in Argentina. My best childhood memories are in the farm running with dogs, in the sand dunes discovering lizards, and always looking at the ocean for the ever-elusive coastal dolphins. My connection with nature was always present. I studied biology at the public and free Universidad de Buenos Aires, focusing on population ecology, and in 2002 I moved to Utah for a PhD in Biology from the University of Utah studying diet and migration of the southern right whales. As a member of the NGO Instituto de Conservación de Ballenas (Whale Conservation Institute) I spent numerous hours among the whales in Península Valdés, Argentina, which change my life and my view of the interactions between humans and nature. While at the University of Utah I specialized on a particular analytical technique, called stable isotope analyses, that has allowed me to do research in different areas such as animal ecology, human physiology and diet, forensics, food traceability and bio-archaeology in the US and Argentina. After 11 years in the US, I moved back to Argentina as a CONICET researcher and now I live on the coastal city of Quequén-Necochea where I work, walk my dogs and surf!

I joined the University of Utah in 2020, where I direct and teach in the Health in Context Pathway, which provides students with a strong foundation in global health principles, grounded in an appreciation for the social determinants of health. I was born in a small town in North Carolina. As an undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina, I spent a year in Ghana – first as a student studying the history of the slave trade in Ghana, and then as an independent explorer, traveling by bus throughout West Africa and relying on the kindness of strangers. After UNC, I completed a Masters in Gender and International Development at the University of Sussex in the UK and then took a job for the United Nations in South Africa in 1999, and was quickly immersed in the largest HIV epidemic globally, at a time before universal treatment was available. My work for the next four years in South Africa focused on supporting the Government of South Africa to understand and address the gender dimensions of HIV, with specific attention to the role sexual and gender-based violence plays in HIV acquisition. In 2003, I returned to the United States to pursue a PhD in Public Health at UNC. I spent a year in Tanzania as a Fulbright Scholar, where my dissertation research examined factors associated with adherence to antiretroviral therapy. After finishing my PhD, I spent 11 years as a faculty member at Duke University’s Global Health Institute. In my primary appointment in Population Health Sciences, I lead an NIH-funded research program in Moshi, Tanzania addressing HIV stigma as a barrier to prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV (visit my research website). LINK TO FAR

Karleton returned to the University of Utah and joined the Honors College in the Summer of 2019. After completing his undergraduate degree in English at Weber State University, he worked as an academic advisor here at the U in the Department of History. During this time, he also completed a master's degree in Educational Leadership and Policy. He is currently a doctoral candidate at Ohio State University with plans to finish Spring 2022. Karleton enjoys spending time with family and works with all honors students but is the Honors College liaison to the Academic Advising Center, College of Humanities, College of Science, and the College of Education.