Meet the Honors Faculty

Michael C. Cross

PhD Applied Physics, USF MS Entrepreneurship, USF BS Computer Science, University of Texas at San Antonio

Q. What is your favorite honors class to teach?

A. Creativity and Innovation

Q. What questions are you asking in your classes?

A. What types of problems do you want to solve? How can you best engage societal issues in your local community?

Q. What is your goal for students you teach and mentor?

A. To best align their activities while in college with their long-term goals.

Q. What personal or professional goals are you pursuing?

A. As an entrepreneur, I’m focused on advancing the programs and priorities of USF as well as my fledgling biotechnology venture.

Q. How are you reaching beyond the classroom?

A. In my courses, we work directly with a community partner to support their goals. These partners include organizations such as the Glazer Children’s Museum and the Tampa Innovation Partnership.

Q. What is the best thing about the JGHC?

A. The students are amazing!

Lindy Grief Davidson

PhD Communication, USF MDiv Divinity, Reformed Theological Seminary BA Communication Arts, Belmont University

Q. What is your favorite honors class to teach?

A. My favorite class is always the one I’m currently teaching. Today, it’s Global Constructions of Disability. In the fall, it will be Health and Culture in the Dominican Republic.

Q. What is your goal for students you teach and mentor?

A. I want students to learn to ask thoughtful and informed questions, think outside the disciplinary box, connect with others who have a different perspective, and continue their curiosity beyond the confines of the classroom and the semester.

Q. How are you reaching beyond the classroom?

A.. I enjoy building and maintaining relationships with international partners such as the Kerolle Initiative in the Dominican Republic and the Wellcome Centre at the University of Exeter, but I also enjoy relationships with our local community organizations such as the WellBuilt Community, AMRoC Fab Lab, and Soaring City. I love to connect students with these organizations for research, service, internships, and experiences that open up new possibilities for everyone involved.

Q. What is the best thing about the JGHC?

A. We are an engaged, insatiably curious, creative, and hopeful community of scholars. Our students infuse us with new life and new ideas every day.

PhD Sociology, Stony Brook University BA Psychology, Gonzaga

Q. What is your favorite honors class to teach?

A. How to Save a Planet

Q. What questions are you asking in your classes?

A. What is the environment? How do we leverage our power to create change in the world? How does politics, economics, society, and our environment impact the world around us and how we interact with it? How do we be engaged citizens? How do we find meaning and purpose? How can we see and challenge the norms and assumptions of our society?

Q. What is your goal for students you teach and mentor?

A. My goal is for my students to have fulfilled and flourishing lives that bring them purpose and value.

Q. How are you reaching beyond the classroom?

A. I engage with organizations in the greater Tampa Bay area related to climate, the environment, policy, race and ethnicity, and LGBTQ issues. I also engage with international organizations such as the United Nations, the European Union, and climate leaders from several different countries.

Q. What is the best thing about the JGHC?

A. Honors is a real community that cares about well-being and is willing to grow and learn. There is always something amazing happening in the JGHC.

Atsuko Sakai

MArch Architecture, University of New Mexico BA Environmental Design, Kyoto City University of Arts

Q. What is your favorite honors class to teach?

A. Home: Designing Where We Live

Q. What questions are you asking in your classes?

A. What determines who you are as a person? What is unique about you?

Q. What is your goal for students you teach and mentor?

A. The main goal for my students is to follow their curiosity through design thinking and its creative process.

Q. What personal or professional goals are you pursuing?

A. To be a great artist.

Q. How are you reaching beyond the classroom?

A. I take students on an Honors Japan study abroad trip and to the construction site for the new Judy Genshaft Honors College building.

Q. What is the best thing about the JGHC?

A. I really appreciate our collaborative community.

Ulluminair Salim

PhD Sociology, University of California San Francisco MPH Public Health, Johns Hopkins BA Social Welfare, University of California Berkeley

Q. What is your favorite honors class to teach?

A. Beasts and Burdens: Survival, Imagination, and Risk in the (Global) South

Q. What is your goal for students you teach and mentor?

A. My goal is to facilitate a process of unlearning in which students no longer depend on being told what and how to think. Further, I aspire to create opportunities for them to draw upon their own wisdom, experience, and creativity as valuable sources of knowledge in our collective sense-making process.

Q. What personal or professional goals are you pursuing?

A. I aspire to develop an Inclusive Excellence Summer Program in Honors to introduce diverse learners to the honors college paradigm early in their high school tenure and perhaps extend their education beyond the classroom.

Q. How are you reaching beyond the classroom?

A. I designed the course “Quebec: A Social Autopsy,” which examines intersections of science, art, and social justice through place-based inquiry. My colleague and I then led 20 students abroad to experience Quebec and become global citizens.

Q. What is the best thing about the JGHC?

A. JGHC fosters a sense of community where faculty, staff, and students have the spaciousness to express and assert our uniqueness.

MEET THE Honors Faculty

Holly Donahue Singh

PhD and MA, Anthropology, University of Virginia BA Religious Studies, Kenyon College

Q. What is your favorite honors class to teach?

A. Fertility and the Future

Q. What is your goal for students you teach and mentor?

A. My goals for students I teach and mentor are to help them explore the worlds we all inhabit and co-create and to prepare them for finding their way to spaces where they can lead from their own zones of genius.

Q. What personal or professional goals are you pursuing?

A. I am continuing to contribute to my professional field of anthropology through writing, reviewing, mentoring, and otherwise being part of scholarly conversations. My book, Infertility in a Crowded Country: Hiding Reproduction in India, is due to be published by Indiana University Press in 2022. Personally, and professionally, I’m always pursuing new opportunities to learn.

Q. How are you reaching beyond the classroom?

A.. I reach beyond the classroom in mentoring students in their own research and professional development, especially helping them consider opportunities abroad and/or in graduate studies. I also coordinate student collaborations with community partners working in the fields of reproductive health and creative expressions of kinship.

Q. What is the best thing about the JGHC?

A. The best thing about the JGHC is the people – students, staff, and faculty.

Thomas W. Smith

PhD Foreign Affairs, University of Virginia MA Foreign Affairs, University of Virginia BA Anthropology, College of William & Mary

Q. What is your favorite honors class to teach?

A. Politics and Literature

Q. What questions are you asking in your classes?

A. How can you get outside your own head and imagine political life through the eyes of others?

Q. What is your goal for students you teach and mentor?

A. I want students to be more worldly, more critical, more skeptical, and to channel that into positive energy!

Q. What personal or professional goals are you pursuing?

A. I am trying to steer my field away from the arcane and the obscure to address real problems in the world.

Q. How are you reaching beyond the classroom?

A. I’m on the board of the Florida Holocaust Museum and the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs. I’m currently trying to get a Danish fishing boat that ferried Jewish refugees to neutral Sweden during World War II placed on permanent display in the St. Pete library.

Q. What is the best thing about the JGHC?

A. Our students’ curiosity.

Catherine Wilkins

PhD Interdisciplinary History, Tulane University MA Art History, Tulane University MA Library Science, USF BA Humanities, USF

Q. What is your favorite honors class to teach?

A. How to Make History

Q. What is your goal for students you teach and mentor?

A. I want students to become more curious about the world in which they live and the origins of our current values, culture, and ideals, and then feel empowered to make change in our society going forward. I think ideally an education should inspire students to care about the community that surrounds them and become responsible contributing citizens within it.

Q. How are you reaching beyond the classroom?

A. I teach several courses that meet off-campus, primarily at museums out in the community. Working with partner organizations like the Tampa Museum of Art or the Gulf Beaches Historical Museum enables us to put our learning to good use, to serve the community and experience in real time the applicability of the information we’re studying in class. These classes also help students connect to the cities we live in, and feel more at home here in the Tampa Bay area.

Q. What is the best thing about the JGHC?

A. Because all the students, faculty, and staff share an intrinsic love of learning and curiosity about the world, we can accomplish a lot together.

Benjamin Scott Young

PhD Philosophy, USF BA Psychology and Philosophy, Eckerd College

Q. What is your favorite honors class to teach?

A. Wander: Perception, Understanding, and Improvisation

Q. What questions are you asking in your classes?

A. What is the good life? What is the choice-worthy path for a self-cultivating being, such as each of us are?

Q. What personal or professional goals are you pursuing?

A. I am fascinated by the question of making philosophy accessible. What sort of social and physical environments let philosophy, understood as the love of wisdom, thrive? Understanding this and cultivating it is at the heart of my professional project.

Q. How are you reaching beyond the classroom?

A.. There is no better classroom than the world itself. I am currently leading a semester abroad program in Exeter, England. We never know ourselves until we meet ourselves on the road. Travel reveals to us the waters we have been swimming in and lets us appreciate, often for the first time, that it is open to us to cultivate our natural, built, and social environments by cultivating ourselves. Travel is, in this sense, nothing other than education itself--or, it is the second movement of higher education.

Q. What is the best thing about the JGHC?

A. The spirit of creativity, compassion, and the love of wisdom.