The College of Arts and Sciences is guided by a team of leaders committed to enriching and improving the lives of our students, staff, and faculty. Composed of leaders across the college’s disciplines, the senior leadership meets regularly to discuss ideas, policies, and actions, and advise the dean.
Robert A. Flowers II is the Herbert J. and Ann L. Siegel Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He previously served as Lehigh’s deputy provost for faculty affairs. He is also a professor and the Danser Distinguished Faculty Chair in the Department of Chemistry.
Flowers joined the Lehigh faculty in 2003, serving as chair of the chemistry department until 2015. In 2008, Flowers was awarded the Danser Distinguished Faculty Chair in Chemistry which is given in honor of excellence in research, teaching, and service. He was named deputy provost for faculty affairs at Lehigh in 2016, and officially began that role in January 2017.
His research group is interested in the mechanistic analysis and development of electron transfer reagents in organic synthesis, synthetic applications of proton-coupled electron transfer, organometallic chemistry, calorimetric analysis of intermolecular interactions, and applications of back-scattering interferometry in molecular recognition.
Flowers has published more than 120 peer-reviewed papers, a book, and five book chapters. He has given more than 100 invited U.S. and international lectures at universities and professional meetings.
Flowers taught both undergraduate and graduate courses at Lehigh. At Lehigh, he received the Eleanor and Joseph F. Libsch Research Award in 2012, the Dean’s Award for Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity in 2016, and the Hillman Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising in 2017.
Flowers earned a B.S. in chemistry from East Stroudsburg University and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Lehigh. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society of Chemistry.
R. Michael Burger is a professor of biological sciences who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. His prior postdoctoral fellowships include the Virginia Merrill Bloedel Hearing Research Center at the University of Washington School of Medicine and the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich. He is a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
At Lehigh, Burger teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the behavioral neuroscience program. He served on the Department of Biological Sciences Graduate Committee and the Health Professions Advisory Committee. For three years, Burger served as Chair of the University Faculty Compensation Committee.
Burger's research group investigates the neurobiological basis of hearing and has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Hearing Health Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He has active collaborations with laboratories at the University of Munich, the University of Oldenburg, NEOMED, and the National Institute for Deafness and other Communication Disorders. He serves as Associate Editor at Frontiers in Neural Circuits and The Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology. He is a member of the Editorial Board at the Journal of Neurophysiology.
Dawn Keetley is a professor of English. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in December 1994 in women's literature, feminist theory, and nineteenth-century American literature.
Keetley wrote about nineteenth-century U.S. women's autobiography, fictional accounts of murderous women, and about men's homicidal jealousy and envy. Her most recent publication is Making a Monster: Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston which is a cultural history of the conditions that led a fourteen-year-old boy to torture and murder several small children between 1872-1874. Keetley has also published articles about contemporary Gothic and horror fiction, film and television, including articles about Stephen King's Cell, George Romero's Dead films, FX’s American Horror Story, AMC’s The Walking Dead, and Showtime’s Dexter. She is currently working on a monograph and a collection of essays on Folk Horror.
Keetley runs a website, Horror Homeroom, with Elizabeth Erwin and Gwen Hofmann about all aspects of horror. She is most recently the editor of Jordan Peele's Get Out: Political Horror. She is co-editor with Matthew Wynn Sivils of Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film with Angela Tenga, and The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead with Elizabeth Erwin. Keetly is also editor of We're All Infected: Essays on AMC's "The Walking Dead" and the Fate of Human.
Kelly Austin is a professor of sociology who received her Ph.D. from North Carolina State University in 2012. Austin has served as director of the Health, Medicine, and Society program and Global Studies program at Lehigh, and as a College of Arts and Sciences representative to the Faculty Senate. In 2017, she was awarded the Williamson Prize for innovative scholarship and the CAS Service Award. She also received the Frank Hook Assistant Professorship which recognized her outstanding work fostering personal interaction and mentoring relationships with students.
Austin's scholarship utilizes political economy perspectives to explore the causes of environmental degradation, disasters, and infectious disease in less-developed countries. She conducts cross-national quantitative assessments and qualitative fieldwork on-the-ground in rural Uganda. She enjoys teaching courses on Research Methods, Global Health, and the Political Economy of Globalization.
Jessecae Marsh is an associate professor of psychology who earned her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Yale University.
Marsh teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in cognitive psychology with emphasis in higher-order cognition. She served as director of the Health, Medicine, and Society program at Lehigh for five years. She also served on the Psychology Department’s Undergraduate Committee and the Health Professions Advisory Committee, winning Lehigh awards for her teaching, advising, and mentoring.
Marsh’s research addresses how the beliefs that people hold influence the way they reason and make decisions. She is specifically interested in how people think about cause and effect relationships. Marsh has applied her research interests to the health domain, exploring how laypeople and experts reason about various health issues. Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation. The interdisciplinary nature of her work has led Marsh to collaborate with researchers in different areas of psychology including clinical psychology, developmental psychology, and social psychology as well as researchers in other fields like philosophy, medicine, computer science, and engineering.
Laura Chiles leads a collaborative team that oversees the College’s financial, operational, management, and marketing communications activities. She also provides strategic guidance to the College’s senior leadership on all financial matters, and works closely with departments to assess and anticipate budgetary needs. Prior to serving as executive director, Chiles was the college’s director of administration. Before joining the college in 2010, Chiles had an extensive career in the publishing industry.
