College of Arts and Humanities
Dr. Michael Thrasher
Professor of Music
Michael Thrasher is a nationally recognized academic leader, administrator, and scholar
with more than 25 years of experience in higher education. As Dean of the College
of Arts & Humanities (formerly Communication & Fine Arts) at Troy University, he leads
a dynamic and diverse academic unit encompassing the fine arts, humanities, and communication/journalism
fields. He is responsible for overseeing the College's financial planning, strategic
orientation, fundraising efforts, faculty development, and curricular innovation.
Prior to joining Troy, Thrasher held leadership positions at institutions such as
Florida State University, the University of Texas at Tyler, and North Dakota State
University. His extensive administrative portfolio includes service as Associate Dean,
Interim Dean, and Director, with a consistent record of advancing academic excellence
and institutional effectiveness.
Throughout his career, Thrasher has led major initiatives in accreditation, interdisciplinary
collaboration, student success, and faculty governance. His efforts have led to approximately
$10 million in new funding for the institutions he has served. Recently, he collaborated
with Troy faculty colleagues in obtaining a $449,000 Mellon Foundation grant focused
on documenting the artistic contributions of Alabama's immigrant communities.
An internationally recognized advocate for musician health and wellness, Thrasher
has published in journals such as Medical Problems of Performing Artists, The Clarinet, and Journal of Band Research, and is an associate editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Musician Health Advocacy. His work reflects a commitment to fostering well-being and resilience in arts education.
Thrasher's scholarly engagement is global in scope. He received a Fulbright International
Education Administrators Award to Germany and has presented internationally at conferences
in Europe and the U.S. He was recently named Editor of The Clarinet, the official journal of the International Clarinet Association.
In recognition of his commitment to service and leadership, Thrasher received the
2024 Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award, which recognizes those who “act as humble servants,
placing service to others before self-interest.” He has also served on the boards
of the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra and East Texas Symphony Orchestra, and as Minister
of Music at Immanuel Baptist Church in Tallahassee. Nationally, he serves as a Visiting
Evaluator for the National Association of Schools of Music (NASM).
Thrasher holds a Bachelor of Music Education degree from Northwestern State University
and both the Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees from the University
of North Texas. He also holds professional certificates in fund development (Rice
University) and crisis leadership in higher education (Harvard Kennedy School).
Prof. Tori Lee Averett
Associate Dean, College of Arts and Humanities
Tori Lee Averett brings a strong and committed voice for collaboration and integration
of different ideas, people, and groups in and through the arts, education, and community.
She holds the B.M.E. and M.S. in Vocal/Choral Music Education and the B.S. in Theatre
from Troy University, and she holds the M.F.A. in Playwriting and Poetry from Georgia
College. Tori is an accomplished performer, director, choreographer, writer, musician,
and teacher. She has presented at regional and national festivals and conferences
in the areas of education, theatre, arts integration, and creative writing, and regularly
serves as a resource person for artists and educators. She has received national and
regional honors from the Kennedy Center-American College Theater Festival, and she
is a national recipient of the Chair Academy's 2021 Idahlynn Karre Exemplary Leadership
Award. Tori was selected by the Alabama State Board of Education to represent Theatre
in the Alabama Arts Course of Study revision, approved and adopted in 2018. Tori is
an active artist and performer, a singer/songwriter with two original albums released
and several more in production. Her research interests include arts integration, interdisciplinary
and multicultural arts, and diversity and inclusion through the arts and arts education.
Tori directs the Summer Spotlight performing arts series, coordinates the Summer Arts
Academy in Pietrasanta, Italy, leads the Pied Pipers children's theatre troupe, directs
various productions, and heads up the Integrated Arts program. Tori is a member of
the Troy Arts Council Board of Directors, and she serves as a resource person for
the Johnson Center for the Arts and several other local and community arts, civic,
and education organizations. She currently serves as Department Chair and tenured
Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Troy University, as
well as Associate Dean for the College of Arts and Humanities. Tori is a proud native
of Brundidge, Alabama.
Greg Skaggs is an active artist who has shown his work throughout the south and southwest
and internationally. Notably, he was selected to show nationally in New American Drawings
and regionally in Drawing on Alabama, both showcased up-and-coming talent from the
United States and throughout the South. Selected works were also chosen for “Urban
Wild” at the Contemporary Museum of Art in Mobile, Alabama, and “Uncommon Territory
– Contemporary Art in Alabama” at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art. Skaggs was selected
to be a part of a group show at the Ogden Museum of Art in New Orleans. He is also
a member of IC3 (International Center of Collaboration and Creativity), which has
worked on projects in Halmstad, Sweden. He served on the Board of Trustees at the
Wiregrass Museum of Art from 2008 – 2015 and currently serves as the Vice-President
for Communications for FATE (Foundations in Art: Theory and Education). Skaggs also
was appointed to serve on the curriculum board for Advanced Placement–The College
Board (associated with Educational Testing Services) and spends part of his summer
as a reader for AP Studio in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Other exhibitions include a solo show at the Birgit Nilsson Galleri, Örebro Konstskola,
Örebro, Sweden; and collaborations with McMaster's University in Hamilton, Canada.
Skaggs has also collaborated with artists from Örebro, Sweden; London, England; Tel
Aviv, Israel; and Bremen, Germany.
Born in Longmont, Colorado – to the parents of oil tycoons and cattle barons – and
living much of his life in Texas and Oklahoma, Greg Skaggs serves as Professor and
Chair of the Department of Art & Design at Troy University. Greg holds undergraduate
degrees in Graphic Design and Art Education, and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from
the University of Oklahoma.
Kirk Curnutt joined the faculty of Troy University's Montgomery campus in 1993 and
was for the first stretch of his career the youngest tenured professor in the system.
During his twenty-two years in the capital city, he helped developed first the television
distance learning initiative and then the English department's online major and its
writing courses. In 2016 he relocated to the Troy campus to oversee English offerings
throughout the entire system. Thanks to his time in Montgomery, his research interests
have focused on F. Scott Fitzgerald. For many years he served on the board of the
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery and since 2013 has served as the executive
director of the international F. Scott Fitzgerald Society. He is the author of several
works of fiction and criticism on not only Fitzgerald, but also Toni Morrison, William
Faulkner, the 1970s, and popular music. He teaches both online and on the Troy campus,
focusing on creative writing, American literature, senior seminar, and—finally, after
many years of begging the School of Music to permit him—the history of rock ‘n' roll.
Allen E. Jones, Ph.D.
Chair, Department of History & Philosophy
Patterson Hall 222
(334) 670-3512
ajones@troy.edu
In August 2020, Jones published Death and Afterlife in the Pages of Gregory of Tours: Religion and Society in Late
Antique Gaul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). Bishop Gregory of Tours was a prolific
writer of hagiography and author of a ten-book history popularly called the History
of the Franks. Jones argues that elements of Gallic society informed Gregory's decisions
to compose in the genres he did. Parents and other relations instilled in the youth
a belief that it was imperative to trust the saints in order to overcome the ills
of the age. It was the prospect of dying that convinced young Gregory to enter the
clergy. The happenstance of warfare raging about the diocese during the early years
of Bishop Gregory's episcopacy compelled the budding hagiographer to also write history.
Death figures prominently in both kinds of writings. Jones contends that the miracula
and historia reveal how the author mused about signs pertaining to individuals' deaths
and speculated about the eternal fates, both heavenly and infernal, for many characters
in his text. Not least among those whose afterlife prospects Gregory investigated
and sometimes proclaimed were members of the royal Merovingian family in whose courts
the bishop circulated. Around the twentieth year of Gregory's episcopacy, death deprived
the writer from putting the corpus into final form.
In 2009 Jones published Social Mobility in Late Antique Gaul: Strategies and Opportunities for the Non-Elite (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press; reprinted in paperback, 2014).
The work investigates the extent to which people who were not part of the power structures
of Gaul impacted society as they pursued their own goals. It details how particular
groupings of non-aristocrats--from lesser clerics and beggars registered at local
churches to physicians and folk healers--cooperated and contended with others, adopting
strategies not unlike those of society's elites to improve their lot in life.
Robbyn Brooks Taylor is the director of Hall School of Journalism & Communication,
where she also teaches undergraduate, master's and doctoral students. She earned both
her B.S. in Broadcast Journalism and M.S. in Strategic Communication from Troy University
and completed her Ph.D. in Communication at Regent University. Dr. Taylor specializes
in mobile journalism and multimedia journalism techniques, and also works with the
department's broadcast, advertising and public relations students. Dr. Taylor was
the student publications adviser for Troy's student newspaper, The Tropolitan, and the school's yearbook, The Palladium until June 2022 when she became the school's director. Before joining the Hall School's
faculty, Dr. Taylor worked as a photojournalist at WSFA in Montgomery, a reporter
at WNCF in Montgomery, a reporter, mobile journalist, columnist and editor for Freedom
Communications in Northwest Florida (The Destin Log, The Northwest Florida Daily News and The Crestview News Bulletin), an international spokesperson and media coordinator for People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals in Washington, D.C. and as managing editor of The Messenger in Troy. Dr. Taylor has garnered awards for her journalism writing both in Florida
and Alabama, and has won top paper awards from divisions in the Southern States Communication
Association, the National Communication Association and the Religious Communication
Association. Dr. Taylor is currently the immediate past-chair and nominating representative
of the Political Communication Division of the Southern States Communication Association,
the president-elect of the Southeast Journalism Conference and on the editorial board
of Artifact Analysis.
Dr. Hui-Ting Yang is Professor of Piano at Troy University John M. Long School of
Music, where she serves as the Director and the Coordinator of Applied Studies.
As an active performer and educator, she has performed, lectured, and conducted master
classes throughout the Czech Republic, Korea, China, Taiwan and the United States.
In summers 2015, 2016, and 2018 she was invited to give recitals, lectures, master
classes, and to teach applied piano in several schools in China, including at the
Sichuan Normal University, Sichuan University of Science and Engineering, Nanjing
University of Arts, Nanjing Normal University, Southwest University, Chongqing Normal
University, Guangzhou Normal University, and Shandong University at Weihai. She also
performed Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with the Symphony Band as the first concert
of the Steinway Artist Concert Series at Troy University in April 2015. In 2018 she
collaborated with the Symphony Band again performing the Shostakovich Piano Concerto
No. 2 and Bernstein's Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs. In September 2012 she recorded three
chamber works by Ladislav Kubík with mezzo-soprano Phyllis Pancella and violinist
Karen Bentley Pollick. In November 2016 Dr. Yang and Ms. Pancella performed a recital
in celebration of Kubik's seventieth birthday in Prague and recorded several his works,
including 24 HAIKU for mezzo-soprano and piano, and Gong for mezzo-soprano, alto flute,
piano, and electronics. In June 2010 she performed seven solo recitals throughout
the Czech Republic, including performances at the highly acclaimed Cesky Krumlov International
Music Festival and the Artist Concert Series in Děčín.
She has also performed at numerous conferences and festivals including “The Days of
Contemporary Music” festival in Prague, Parma New Music Festival, the Festival of
New Music at the Florida State University, the Society of Composers Inc. National
Conference, International and National Conferences of the College of Music Society,
and the Florida State Music Teacher's Association Annual Conference. Her recordings
are available through Kum Seoung Records, Parma, Arco Diva, and Neos.
In Spring 2022, Dr. Yang was selected as a Troy University Chancellor's Fellow and
has been an advocate of the faculty/staff training and readiness in student mental
health crisis since then. She is the recipient of the 2016 Steinway & Sons Top Teacher
Award and the recipient of the Orpheus Award from the Iota Nu Chapter of Phi Mu Alpha
Sinfonia Fraternity at Troy University in 2018. She also received the Troy University
2009 Faculty Senate Excellence Award.
Hui-Ting Yang is a Steinway Artist and an inductee of the Steinway and Sons Teacher
Hall of Fame 2023. To visit the Steinway & Sons Artist roster go to: http://www.steinway.com/artists/hui-ting-yang
Dr. Kelly Suero is Chair, Associate Professor of Spanish, and Coordinator of Troy
Online Spanish. She is the author of Technology and Gendered Genre Evolution in Latin America: Writers, Bloggers, Activists,
and Floggers and “Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo: Breakthrough DNA Advances in the Fight for Human Rights,”
which details her collaboration with the five-time Nobel Peace Prize-nominated group,
Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. Her other works include several articles and two Spanish-language
textbooks, Nuestra Voz: An Introduction to the Spanish Language and ¡Aprendamos! Spanish for Beginners. Dr. Suero's research interests encompass Technology in Literature, Southern Cone
Literature, Literary Genres, Human Rights, Latin American Politics and Policy, and
Indigenous Studies. Alongside her scholarship, she has received the Ingalls Award
for Excellence in Classroom Teaching, a once-in-a-lifetime award nominated and voted
on by students at Troy University. Dr. Suero is also an avid supporter and leader
of study abroad programs; since her appointment at Troy, she has led programs to Argentina,
Uruguay, and Peru.
Dr. Leora Waldner
Associate Dean for Strategic Innovation
Professor of Public Administration
Troy University
Atlanta, GA
lwaldner@troy.edu
(404) 954-1287
Dr. Martin Olliff
CAS Campus Coordinator
(Dothan Campus)
Professor of History
Troy University
500 University Drive
Dothan, Alabama 36303
molliff@troy.edu
(334) 983-6556 ext. 21327
Celia Lotierzo
Administrative Assistant, College of Arts and Humanities
(334) 808-6805
clotierzo@troy.edu
Marie Herndon
Administrative Assistant/Operations, College of Arts and Humanities
(334) 670-3869
mherndon@troy.edu
