Pivot Points: Mastering Professional and Life Transitions

Description

Instructors

Amy Rutstein-Riley

Amy Rutstein-Riley, PhD, MPH is a highly collaborative leader, seasoned educator, and interdisciplinary scholar. Her current research activities focus on Women’s Leadership in Higher Education, Trauma-informed Leadership, and girls’ and emerging adult women’s development. Prior to joining the Graduate School of Leadership and Change, for the past eighteen years, she has served in a number of roles at Lesley University, including Director of the PhD Specialization in Adult Learning and Development, Dean of the Faculty, Chair of the PhD in Education Studies, Dean of the Graduate School of Education, and, most recently, Associate Provost of Academic Affairs. As an Associate Professor of Sociology, Amy taught undergraduate and graduate courses in a wide range of topics, including Health Care and Society; Race, Class, and Gender; Interdisciplinary Inquiry; Qualitative Research Methods; Body Image; and Ways of Knowing. In the Graduate School of Education, Amy taught courses in qualitative research, adult learning and development, and dissertation seminars. She has mentored many students on the path to completing their PhDs. Her own academic training includes an MPH in Public Health, Epidemiology, and Social and Behavioral Sciences from Boston University’s School of Public Health, and a PhD in Educational Studies, with a specialization in Sociology and Women’s Health, from Lesley University.

Diane Richard-Allerdyce

Diane Richard-Allerdyce, PhD, comes to Antioch University from the PhD program in Interdisciplinary Studies at Union Institute & University, where she taught from 2008 through 2023 and served as Associate Dean and Chair of Humanities & Culture. In 2001, Diane co-founded the Toussaint L’Ouverture High School for Arts & Social Justice, a Florida charter school serving mostly immigrant students from the Caribbean, and served as its Chief Academic Officer for twenty-one years, until its closing in 2022. She also developed and directed Teaching by Heart, a teacher-training program in Haiti, where she traveled frequently from 2009 through 2019. Diane was trained as a poetry therapy facilitator through the National Association for Poetry Therapy, for which she is a past president as well as a longtime member. She is an anti-bias facilitator within the Anti-Defamation League’s “A World of Difference” program. Diane is the author of a scholarly book on the writer Anaïs Nin (Northern Illinois University Press, 1998), as well as several scholarly articles and chapters, most recently on the intersection of psychoanalytical theory with somaesthetic philosophy. Her creative publications, in addition to several individual poems, include a chapbook, Whatever It Is I Was Giving Up (Pudding House, 2007), and a collection of poetry and prose, House of Aching Beauty (EditionsPerleDesAntilles, 2012). Her story “The Gift” appeared in the North American Review (Fall 2019: 304.4): 43-50). (It was inspired, in part, by Wallace Stegner’s “Goin’ to Town”; an interview about her creative process appears at https://northamericanreview.org/open-space/conversation-diane-allerdyce-discusses-her-story-gift-her-partner-rory-spearing ). Her short story “Kochma” appeared in Stories that Need to be Told 2022: A TulipTree Anthology; it was also first-place winner in the UK-based National Association of Writers and Groups (NAWG)’s 2022 Open Competition for Fiction and was republished with permission in The Write Path 2022, NAWG’s Anthology of Award-Winning Writing. Diane lives in Boynton Beach, Florida, with her husband, Rory. She loves teaching yoga, playing the French horn, hosting writing groups, and visiting her kids and grandkids in Asheville, North Carolina, and Sunnyside, New York.