Dr. Mary Cooper named program director of Tusculum Honors Program

Dr. Mary Cooper has been named program director of the Honors Program at Tusculum.

Dr. Cooper joined Tusculum in 2016 as visiting assistant professor of political science in the School of Arts and Sciences.

A native of upstate New York, Dr. Cooper received a Bachelor of Arts in international relations from Syracuse University. Her academic and professional experience has had both an international focus, and an interdisciplinary approach – at the intersection of politics and economics. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked for several years at Arthur Andersen’s Office of Federal Tax Services in Washington, D.C., performing economic analyses for multinational corporations in a variety of industries.

She also completed an internship at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a U.S. government agency that provides financing and insurance to U.S. businesses investing overseas.  Her responsibilities included writing development impact profiles and home country impact reports to verify that OPIC supported projects had a beneficial impact on economic development in the host country, as well as net job creation for the U.S. economy.

She earned a Master of Arts in international relations and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. Her dissertation research is in the comparative politics sub-field, examining the politics of creating stock markets in the People’s Republic of China.  She also spent one year as a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center.

Dr. Mary Cooper

Dr. Cooper currently teaches political science courses at Tusculum’s Greeneville and Knoxville campuses, including American government, comparative government, international relations, elections, and history of representative government. In 2018 she will collaborate with Tusculum’s Center for Civic Advancement and accompany a group of students on a spring break service learning trip to Costa Rica.

She previously taught as an instructor at Wesleyan University and Yale University. She also was an assistant professor at The Ohio State University, where she taught classes ranging from large lectures to small sections of honors courses and graduate seminars.

The Tusculum College Honors Program promotes a cross-discipline dialogue between students that includes three core seminar courses. These courses are taught across the semester, every semester, to provide students ample opportunities to participate. Honors students also work closely with a faculty advisor to create an individual plan of study focusing toward their own goals. Students may choose to concentrate on academic research, civic engagement, leadership, or global awareness. Tusculum’s Honors Program creates opportunities for students to challenge themselves, develop their potential, and make a difference in the world around them.

To qualify for the program, first-time students must have a composite score of at least 25 on the ACT or 1150 on the SAT, have a high school grade-point average of 3.5 or higher and rank in the top 10 percent of high school graduating class.

For more information, contact Dr. Cooper at mcooper@tusculum.edu.