Dina Anselmi, who joined the Trinity faculty in 1980, earned a B.A. from Ithaca College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire. Courses taught include \u201cChild Development and a Child Development Lab,\u201d \u201cDevelopment and Culture,\u201d \u201cPsychology of Gender,\u201d \u201cRisk and Resilience in a Changing World,\u201d and various first-year seminars including \u201cChildren\u2019s Development and Children\u2019s Rights.\u201d Her recent research focused on vaccine hesitancy related to COVID; other topics were metacognition in school-age children with teachers at the HMTCA, children\u2019s rights and family decision-making, and language development. Anselmi\u2019s publication credits are many, including as a co-author of Questions of Gender: Perspectives and Paradoxes (McGraw Hill, 1998). She was honored with the College\u2019s Thomas Church Brownell Award for Teaching Excellence in 1994 and the Faculty Mentoring Award in 2025. She was a co-founder of the Trinity College Child Care Center, a director of the Community Learning Initiative, a founder and co-director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, and a co-founder of the Challenge Summer Program, along with being an active member of the College community by serving on a variety of faculty governance and appointed committees.<\/p>\n
Barbara M. Benedict, who was raised in Mauritius, London, the Seychelles, and Berkeley, earned a B.A. cum laude in British history and literature from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Hired at Trinity in 1984, she served as departmental chair for five years. For Benedict, literature is a variegated, rich, complex triumph of imagination and artistry, asking for both close attention and wide context. Her research has always informed and invigorated her teaching: It includes books on 18th-century curiosity, erotic verse, the invention of the literary anthology, sentimental fiction, an edition for Cambridge University Press of Jane Austen\u2019s Northanger Abbey, and some 80 essays, aided by numerous national fellowships; she has also delivered more than 50 invited scholarly lectures and more than 100 conference talks and public lectures. This work prompted her to develop new courses, such as \u201cThe Phenomenon of Literary Popularity\u201d and \u201cCuriosity and Literature.\u201d Benedict feels that teaching is an art that commands the teacher to give personal attention to each student\u2019s insights while painting a vivid picture of literary history that promotes intense and informed class conversations. Her pedagogy thus blended class discussions of texts in detail with lectures and varied writing assignments that included free-ranging research into history and culture. For Benedict, literature best unfolds its beauty and meaning for students when understood as the achievement of a cultural instant that reaches out to all human experience.<\/p>\n
Robert J. Corber, a Trinity faculty member since 1998, taught courses in queer studies\/theory, classical Hollywood cinema, and the history of sexuality. His research focused on the intersection of homophobia, American national identity, and Hollywood cinema in the Cold War era. Corber authored three books, In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (1993), Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the\u00a0Crisis of Masculinity (1997), and Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema (2011), all published by Duke University Press. He also edited a scholarly edition of the 1932 queer modernist novel A Scarlet Pansy (Fordham University Press, 2016) and co-edited Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Blackwell, 2002). He has served on the editorial boards of American Literary History, American Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, and PMLA and is an associate editor of James Baldwin Review. Corber earned a B.A. from Haverford College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.<\/p>\n
Jack Dougherty arrived at Trinity College in 1999 to direct the Educational Studies Program, which he and faculty colleagues developed into a robust interdisciplinary major. He created new courses such as \u201cEduc 200: Analyzing Schools,\u201d where students investigate learning and inequality while doing participant observation in Hartford public school classrooms, and \u201cEduc 300: Education Reform Past & Present,\u201d which draws on historical and policy analysis to understand system-wide change. In his \u201cEduc 308: Cities Suburbs and Schools\u201d seminar and research project, more than 25 students co-authored publications and\/or presented their work at national conferences. Dougherty also served as a faculty director of the Community Learning Initiative and the first faculty director of the Liberal Arts Action Lab, and he led the team that launched the Center for Hartford Engagement and Research (CHER) in 2018. More recently, students in his \u201cEduc 206: Data Visualization for All\u201d course partnered with local organizations to dig into their data on various topics (affordable housing, public health, environmental justice) and help tell their stories on the web with interactive charts and maps. Dougherty and his spouse, Beth, recently relocated to Boston.<\/p>\n
Sean Fitzpatrick joined the Trinity faculty in 2018 following a 35-year career in law, business, and government. He taught courses in public management, leadership, and urban history and culture. These included a first-year seminar called \u201cReading the City\u201d that he described as \u201cspeed-dating through the liberal arts,\u201d with each class examining the evolution of American cities through a different academic discipline, ranging from architecture to music and poetry. Given his varied professional background, his teaching has focused on helping his students make the connection between their scholarly interests and the real-world opportunities they can create. Fitzpatrick left his mark on the City of Hartford as well: While serving under former Mayor Luke Bronin, he led the successful completion of the prior administration\u2019s troubled stadium project, Dunkin\u2019 Park, now the award-winning home of the Double-A Hartford Yard Goats. He later spearheaded the renovation of historic Dillon Stadium as a soccer pitch for a new USL franchise, Hartford Athletic.<\/p>\n
Robert Fleming earned an A.B. in biology from the College of the Holy Cross. He went on to Brandeis University, where he studied development and genetics in the development of flight muscles in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and earned a Ph.D. Fleming did postdoctoral research at Yale University, studying cell-to-cell communication during fruit fly development. In 1992, he was appointed assistant professor in biology at the University of Rochester, where he continued to examine cell-to-cell communication and Notch signaling. Fleming was promoted to associate professor in 1997. Four years later, to interact more directly with undergraduates and to take advantage of smaller class sizes, he came to Trinity as associate professor in biology. Fleming was\u00a0granted tenure in 2004 and promoted to full professor in 2012. He continues his studies on mechanisms that regulate the Notch signaling pathway using the fruit fly as his research organism.<\/p>\n
Katherine Lahti earned a B.A. in Russian language and literature from Wesleyan University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literature from Yale University. She held teaching positions at Yale, Brigham Young University, and Bowdoin College before joining the Trinity faculty in 1990 as assistant professor of language and culture studies. She later was named associate professor and then full professor in addition to serving as director of the International Studies Program. Lahti\u2019s classes were an exploration of the edges of human possibility, be it Dostoevsky\u2019s questions about morality or issues of meaning in linguistics. Her research was a reporting of her wanderings in Russian culture, and it was always her hope she could lead her students to where she has been and what she has found.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dina L. Anselmi Associate Professor of Psychology Dina Anselmi, who joined the Trinity faculty in 1980, earned a B.A. from Ithaca College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire. Courses taught include \u201cChild Development and a Child Development Lab,\u201d \u201cDevelopment and Culture,\u201d \u201cPsychology of Gender,\u201d \u201cRisk and Resilience in a Changing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":0,"parent":8131,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-8557","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n