School of Business
Mark West
Mark West is a graduate of Stetson University. He is a certified public accountant in Florida. He currently teaches courses in Introduction to Financial Accounting and Introduction to Managerial Accounting. Before entering academia, Mark joined the finance and regulatory reporting division at Deutsche Bank shortly after the office opened in Jacksonville. He has been a senior team lead for numerous audit engagements in both public and governmental accounting.
Megan Young
Megan Young is an instructor in the School of Business Administration at Stetson University, where she has taught undergraduate courses since 2017. Megan is a Florida State certified teacher and a Stetson alumna. Her professional background includes secondary education and administration, higher education administration, training and development, entrepreneurship, and management.
College of Arts and Sciences
Fazal Abbas
Sean Beckmann
Growing up Dr. Beckmann enjoyed science and nature and always wanted to be a veterinarian. While a student at Stetson University he had the opportunity to engage in projects and internships that introduced him to field biology and research. This changed his trajectory to pursue a career in research. While in graduate school at the University of Miami he had the opportunity to teach a number of classes and engage a number of undergraduates in his research on phylogeography of small mammals. This experience drove him to pursue a career in undergraduate education and research. Prior to coming to Stetson University, he spent several years teaching and conducting research with undergraduates at another liberal arts university. His work with students has resulted in numerous conference presentations, posters, and publications with former students.
Sarah Cramer
Sarah Cramer is a Brown Visiting Teacher-Scholar Fellow in Sustainable Food Systems. Her current work examines the transformative potential of elementary school gardens within both the food system and public education system. Other research interests include critical studies of gender in agriculture, scholarship of teaching and learning, and place-based environmental and food system education. She enjoys bringing her background in non-formal, experiential education to the college classroom, and has received grants to study critical food system pedagogy. Additionally, she demonstrates her commitment to the everyday praxis of food system transformation through engagement in alternative food networks, beekeeping, gardening, and food preparation and preservation. She earned her PhD in agricultural education and her M.P.H. from the University of Missouri and earned her BA in biology from Truman State University.
Catherine Day
Catherine Day is a geographer who studies agricultural responses to climate change. Catherine’s recent work has looked at the diverse vulnerabilities of farmers in the semi-arid U.S. Southwest. In studying the ways that agriculture is vulnerable to economic and social changes as well as climatic shifts, she works to find ways to prepare farming for the future. Her past work focused on agricultural change in Niger, West Africa.
Andrew Eisen
Andy Eisen, who earned his PhD from the University of Illinois, is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Stetson University. His first experiences teaching in prison was with the Education Justice Project at the University of Illinois as a graduate student, where he worked closely with a talented group of incarcerated English Language Instructors. In 2015, he co-founded the Community Education Project with two Stetson professors. He has taught three semester-long classes with the CEP and various workshops, ranging from immigration history to transatlantic slavery. He coordinates classes, clearances, and other issues at the prison and recently helped organize the first Gathering of Southern Prison Higher Education Programs. At Stetson University, Eisen is Assistant Director of Honors Program and he teaches in History Department.
Martha Goshaw
Martha is a native of West Virginia and knew very early that she wanted to be a teacher. A pair of excellent high school teachers convinced her that mathematics was her area. After graduating from West Virginia Wesleyan College, she began her teaching career in several public high schools in West Virginia and Virginia. With her master’s degree from West Virginia University, she began teaching at Piedmont Virginia Community College. It was in this position that she realized higher education was her dream and she began work on an Ed. D. in mathematics education at the University of Virginia. At Piedmont, Martha taught every course from College Algebra through Differential Equations, and she also served four years as department chair. She was the first math faculty to incorporate the use of graphing calculators, to use interactive instructional materials, and to create online websites for her individual courses.
Martha came to Florida in 2000 and held a full-time tenured faculty position at Seminole State College. At Seminole she was the first mathematics faculty member to develop and teach an online course. For the last ten years of her career at Seminole she taught business calculus and introductory statistics, both online and in a hybrid format. She retired from Seminole in December 2014 but missed the classroom and the interaction with students and faculty. When an opportunity to teach as an adjunct at Stetson arose in August 2016, she quickly accepted. In 2018 she was appointed as Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics.
Her passion is teaching those math courses for which there are direct applications, thus making it more enjoyable and interesting for her students. She likes to use technology where possible to enhance her courses. She also incorporates the history of mathematics whenever possible in her classes.
D. Elise Gruber
Dr. D. Elise Gruber is a Visiting Assistant Principal in the Department of Education at Stetson University. Prior to her tenure at Stetson, Dr. Gruber served public K-12 education for 34 years as a gifted and English teacher in Seminole County Public Schools; a middle and high school principal of three separate schools in Seminole County Public Schools and Orange County Public Schools; and an Executive Area Director for Orange County Schools, where she supervised 28 K-12 schools. In addition, she was a coordinator of gifted programs for the Department of Defense Dependents Schools in Germany and has taught education and leadership courses at the university level since 1984. Dr. Gruber’s school principal experience includes opening an urban Title 1 high school, and leading secondary schools in increasing Advanced Placement, AVID, fine arts, student leadership and curriculum business partnerships and programs. She was named OCPS’s Arts Principal of the Year in 2012 and received Commendations for her work in the Department of Defense Dependents’ Schools in 1988, Dr. Gruber presents at the state and national level on issues relating to Advanced Placement, gifted education, education leadership and human resources.
Yohann Ripert
Yohann Ripert is currently completing two projects: the first is a book translation of the posthumous volume of Leopold Se’dar Senghor’s essays on education and culture, entitled Education & Culture (Paris: Presence Africaine, 2013); the second is a monograph entitled Global Negritude: Confidential Conversations Across the Ocean. Global Negritude explores a set of recently declassified cables that reveal how Le’opold Se’dar Senghor engaged with Cold War cultural politics to strategically transform vestiges of colonial exploitation into postcolonial weapons.
Committed to public service, Ripert also worked as a translator and interpreter for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues from 2013 to 2016, was an International Fellow at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and a French-American Next Generation fellow at the Consulate of France in New York. In addition to his academic career, Ripert is a concert pianist and graduate of The Juilliard School. He has appeared as a soloist with the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, the Juilliard Lab Orchestra, the New Juilliard Ensemble and as a chamber musician in prominent festivals such as Focus!, ChamberFest and Kneisel Hall. A champion of Spanish music, Ripert has performed the entire Iberia cycle by Albeniz as well as the complete piano music by Manuel De Falla throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.
Kelly B. Smith
Kelly Smith received her PhD and MA in political science from Brown University. She is currently examining the ways in which bureaucratic networks facilitate policy learning among bureaucrats and legislators during the diffusion of policy and its consequences for states as laboratories of democracy. Previously, Smith was a postdoctoral research associate on the education standards research team at the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy at Brown University.
Rachel Tuning
Danielle Devoney
Kirk Roberson
School of Music
Chadley Ballantyne
Bass-baritone Chadley Ballantyne has sung leading roles in productions of Rinaldo, Madama Butterfly, Falstaff, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, Le Nozze di Figaro, Elijah, The Pirates of Penzance, Cendrillon, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Sweeney Todd, Street Scene, Gallantry, and The Father in Neely Bruce’s Hansel and Gretel. His most recent appearances were in Opera Orlando’s productions of Le Nozze di Figaro and All is Calm. Dr. Ballantyne is a frequent guest speaker on the topic of applying vocal acoustic pedagogy for both classical and CCM techniques. He has presented his work at the 2017 Pan-American Vocology Association Symposium in Toronto, Canada, the 2017 West Central and Central Region NATS Conferences, the 55th NATS National Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, the VASTA/PAVA 2018 Joint Conference in Seattle, Washington, the National Opera Association 2020 Southeast Regional Conference, and at the 56th NATS National Virtual Conference. He is a co-in structor at the Acoustic Vocal Pedagogy Summer Workshop held at the New England Conservatory of Music. Chadley is a contributing author to The Evolving Singing Voice: Changes Across the Lifespan, by Prof. Karen Brunssen. Ballantyne is Assistant Professor of Music, Voice at Stetson University. He has previously served on the voice faculties of the University of Northern Colorado, the Theatre Conservatory of the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University and North Park University. Dr. Ballantyne holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Drake University, and a Master of Music degree and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Illinois.
Alexander Martin
Alexander Martin joined the School of Music faculty in August 2018 as Assistant Professor of Music Theory. He teaches core music theory courses, aural training and upper-division theory classes. Before coming to Stetson University, he was a Graduate Teaching Fellow at the Brooklyn College-Conservatory of Music, where he taught tonal harmony and musicianship at the undergraduate level and advanced tonal analysis at the graduate level. Dr. Martin’s main research concerns Schenkerian analytical approaches to text-music correspondences in Robert Schumann’s songs. A novel claim made by his research is that certain structural features in the music tend to be coordinated with certain broadly construed themes or ideas in the text in predictable and recurring ways.
Dr. Martin has presented his research nationally at Society for Music Theory, regionally at Music Theory Southeast, South Central Society for Music Theory, Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic and at several local conferences in and around New York City, Montreal, and Vancouver. His most recent work is on text-music correspondences involving insertions and ellipses in Schumann’s op. 39 Liederkreis.