CAS New Faculty 2010

Jamie Abaied, Assistant Professor of Psychology, was born and raised near Rochester, NY. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Hamilton College (2004) and her M.A. and Ph.D. (2007, 2010) in Developmental Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Her research investigates the complex processes through which parents contribute to children's stress reactivity, coping, and psychopathology. Drawing from the theoretical framework of developmental psychopathology, her research seeks to account for why children who are exposed to similar parenting experiences follow diverse developmental pathways. She is also interested in the factors that contribute to parenting styles and behaviors over time. She primarily explores these topics in the context of children's exposure to stressful life events, such as peer victimization.

In her spare time, she enjoys knitting, walking her dog, and reading. After 6 years in the Midwest, she can't wait to start hiking and canoeing in the beautiful Green Mountains.

Sarah Alexander, Assistant Professor of English, received her B.A. in English and Japanese (1997) and her M.A. in English (2002) from the University of Oregon. She received her Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University (2010). In 2008/2009, she was a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Fellow.

Sarah’s research focuses on Victorian London and the ways that Victorian writers appropriated economic and scientific tropes to describe their characters, depict their settings, and structure their narratives. Her dissertation, “Victorian Excesses: The Poetics and Politics of Street Life in London,” proposes that a dialectical relationship between deficiency and excess emerged in Victorian literature as a paradigm for representing activity on the streets of London. This paradigm also reflected the ways in which capitalist exchange was troubled by forms of excess. In revising her dissertation for publication, Sarah intends to explore the ways in which Victorian representations of London’s streets employ concepts of energy.

In her spare time, Sarah likes playing with her cat, Basil, watching horror movies, and kickboxing.

Karen Fondacaro, Clinical Professor of Psychology, received her B.A. magna cum laude in Psychology from SUNY Stony Brook in 1982 and her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Vermont in 1988. She is the Director of the Behavior Therapy and Psychotherapy Center, the mental health training clinic for UVM doctoral students in clinical psychology.

Her clinical work and research is focused on two primary areas: Refugee Mental Health and Interpersonal Violence. Interpersonal Violence topics include: child victimization, sexual abuse, trauma, domestic violence, and criminality. In 2007, she established Connecting Cultures, a clinical science program specifically designed to focus on the mental health needs of refugees, immigrants and asylum seekers. She is also co-founder of NESTT (New England Survivors of Torture and Trauma), a collaborative partnership between mental health and legal services for torture survivors. NESTT is based on social justice framework emphasizing community voice, while acknowledging multi-agency professional expertise, and empirically-based intervention and evaluation strategies. NESTT is federally funded through a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families: Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Martha Thomas, Assistant Professor of Political Science, received her B.A. magna cum laude in Economics from St. Francis College in 2003, her Masters in International Public Policy from William Paterson University in 2005, and her Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University in August 2010.

Martha’s research interests centers on the scientific study of trade dispute settlement in regional integration agreements (RIAs). In her research she follows disputes from initiation to termination to investigate how they evolve within different RIAs and to understand the choices made by state and non-state actors at different stages of the dispute settlement process. In her Ph.D. dissertation she focused on one facet of this research agenda, the largely neglected early stages of dispute settlement. She investigated why parties to RIAs choose to have some disputes litigated by the regional dispute resolution body but not others.

Through her research agenda she addresses several important questions in international relations, such as: To what extent does international law matter? Are regional institutions effective in facilitating cooperation and compliance among member states? How do different types of institutional designs impact the dispute process? And, are some designs more attractive as venues for dispute settlement than others?