New Faculty Appointments Announced

Dean Kathleen McCartney announced yesterday the appointment of three new faculty members to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The faculty were selected by search committees in Education Leadership and Organizations; Learning Technologies; and Social, Organizational, and Cultural Contexts of Education led, respectively, by Professors Monica Higgins, Chris Dede, and Hiro Yoshikawa.

The new appointees “will bring important new talents and expertise to our Ed.D., Ed.L.D., and Ed.M. programs and advance our work at the nexus of practice, policy, and research,” wrote McCartney in a letter to the Ed School community. “Please join me in welcoming these terrific new colleagues to HGSE in the coming year!”

The new faculty members are:

Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell joins HGSE as assistant professor of education. She is currently an assistant professor of sociology and organizations at Brown University. Her research focuses on school leaders and social networks, and how schools as organizations build credibility in their institutional environments. She received her Ph.D. in management and organization theory from New York University in 2008.

Karen Brennan expects to receive her Ph.D. in media arts and sciences from MIT this summer before joining HGSE as assistant professor of education. Her scholarly interests are focused on how the computational creation of interactive media serves to provide a meaningful context for young people’s participation and learning, and how broader communities support that learning.

Sarah Dryden-Peterson, a 2009 graduate of HGSE’s Ed.D. program, is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her research focuses on migration, with a particular emphasis on refugee experiences, both in low-income countries (especially sub-Saharan Africa) and among immigrants with refugee backgrounds in the United States. She will be an assistant professor of education.