Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder gave a virtual talk titled “Women in Executive Office: Constraints and Opportunities for Success” to students at Centro Universitario Anglo Mexicano (CUAM), a preparatory high school in Mexico, on September 11.

Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder published a book review of Women and Political Inequality in Japan: Gender Imbalanced Democracy by Mikiko Eto in Social Science Japan Journal, 2023.

Professor of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty Alisa Gaunder published the second edition of her book Japanese Government and Politics with Routledge in February 2023. The second edition includes new information on party realignment, elections since 2017, the effects of the global pandemic, and Japanese foreign policy.

Professor of Biochemistry and Garey Chair of Chemistry Maha Zewail-Foote, Cargill Endowed Associate Professor of Education Alicia Moore, and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder co-presented a virtual session for the Association for American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) 2023 Conference on Diversity, Equity and Student Success. The mission of the AAC&U conference was to explore the complexities of truth within higher education while examining institutional structures and beliefs that impede diversity, equity, and inclusion goals. The presentation, titled “Cross-Institutional CONNECTions: Mentorship, Truth, Belonging, and Retention,” provided an overview of Southwestern’s ACS-funded FOC CONNECT project, which seeks to dismantle barriers to success experienced by early-career faculty of color (FOC) in the academy. The project supports a cross-institutional faculty mentoring program that connects these scholars with senior faculty of color from other ACS institutions.

Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder participated on a panel titled “Fostering Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Faculty Evaluation Processes” at the 2023 American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) annual meeting in San Francisco, CA, January 18-20, 2023. The panel included deans and faculty development and assessment professionals from Furman, Rhodes, Rollins, and Southwestern who shared how the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) addressed the following challenge: how do we honor the complexity of faculty work, the principles of DEI, and the distinctiveness of institutional context while implementing faculty evaluation processes that are, on the one hand, robust, rigorous, and systematic, and on the other, holistic, developmental, and fair? The ACS tackled this challenge through an Arthur Vining Davis grant devoted to improving faculty evaluation processes to, among other things, mitigate bias in student evaluations of teaching, adopt multiple measures of teaching, and assess faculty workloads for equity. The panel shared key lessons learned from developing a faculty evaluation toolkit and some of the strongest resources that support more holistic, authentic, transparent, and equitable faculty evaluation.