Director

Dr. Prudence Layne is Associate Professor of English at Elon University, where she has worked since 2005. She is an experienced global educator, administrator, academic and scholar, highly skilled at developing and implementing programming that guides students to recognize the realities of privilege and social exclusion developing and implementing programming that guides students to recognize the realities of privilege and social exclusion and actively engages students in personal growth and discovery. As a requested speaker and workshop leader/facilitator, combine the social and intellectual domains to include the broadest audiences possible. Teaching, mentoring, and research specializations reflect a commitment to raising awareness, fostering inclusion and diversity, giving voice to marginalized groups, and providing opportunities for students, faculty, staff and community partners to incorporate these values into their respective learning, pedagogy and work. She is the co-editor of Global Innovation of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: Transgressing Boundaries. Switzerland Springer International Publishing, 2014. At Elon, she has served as a Service-Learning Scholar, Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning Scholar and a Sustainability Scholar. She is also a charter member of Elon University s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest honor society.

Freedom Scholars Faculty

Dr. Lauren Guilmette has been Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Elon University since Fall 2019. She spent the previous five years as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University after graduating with her doctorate from Emory University in 2014. Her areas of research specialization include affect theory, 20th century continental philosophy, feminist philosophy, queer theory, and applied ethics geared to service-learning and community engagement. Her areas of competency and interest include philosophy of disability and critical disability studies, critical philosophy of race, social and political philosophy, and the history of philosophy.

Dr. Joel T. Shelton is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Policy Studies and Coordinator of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) minor. He teaches courses in international political economy, international relations, and comparative politics, as well as interdisciplinary courses in the PPE minor, the International and Global Studies program, and the Elon Core Curriculum. His research focuses on the political economy of governance, development, and statecraft in historical and theoretical perspective. His published work includes a single-author monograph, Conditionality and the Ambitions of Governance: Social Transformation in Southeastern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), a co-authored text, Research and Writing in International Relations, 3rd ed. (Routledge, 2019), and several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on a variety of subjects, including the role of crisis discourse in shaping policy decisions in the European Union; the appropriation of classical economic ideas in contemporary schools of economics; the idea of the public purpose in political economy; and the advance of resentment politics and the decline of the public trust in the United States and Europe.