Doctor of Arts in Leadership Faculty
Doctor of Arts in Leadership faculty combine years of professional experience with scholarly activities. Nearly all courses are taught by full-time faculty, who advise and mentor students and chair dissertation committees, as well. Additional dissertation committee members are drawn from a population of over one hundred faculty members and administrators from the College of Graduate & Professional Studies and the College at Rindge, representing dozens of specialties.
Rich Abel
Associate Professor
Ph.D., M.A., American Studies, University of Minnesota
B.A.cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Miami University
Richard M. Abel, Associate Professor in the Doctor of Arts in Leadership Program, received his Ph.D, in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, where he taught humanities, American Studies, and English. His doctoral dissertation, "Scientific Imagination and the American Novel," traces the influence of the emerging scientific disciplines on American novelists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Abel teaches "Leadership through Writing" and "Transforming the Public Agenda," has taught "Leadership and the Creative Imagination" and "Doctoral Seminar" and will be teaching "Leadership Studies." He works extensively with doctoral candidates on dissertations, manages student internships and other research and writing-related independent study. He chairs the DA admissions committee, CGPS governance committee and serves as representative on the Pierce Council.
Abel's extensive leadership career in publishing includes serving as Director and Editor-in-Chief of University Press of New England at Dartmouth College and Director and Publisher of University Press of Mississippi. He has taught courses in editing and publishing, creative writing and American Studies/history and been a researcher in the history of science and technology. He served on the Board of Directors of the Association of American University Presses, as President of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, and has been active in professional and civic organizations.
Allan DiBiase
Associate Professor
Ed.D., Ed.M., Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education, Rutgers University
B.A., Department of Music, Wagner College
Allan DiBiase holds a BA in Music from Wagner College in New York City and Masters and Doctor of Education degrees in the Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education from Rutgers: The State University of New Jersey. His dissertation and academic specialization concern the philosophy of John Dewey particularly in education and aesthetics. Dr. DiBiase was Director of Student Activities and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Philosophy for twenty-five years at the College of Staten Island/City University of New York before relocating to Center Sandwich, New Hampshire in 1996. He is an active musical performer, musical director, performance artist and composer. He is a full-time member of the faculty in the Doctor of Arts program in Leadership at Franklin Pierce University and teaches outdoor, experiential graduate courses year round in the foundations of education in the Master of Education Program at Plymouth State University. Dr. DiBiase has taught courses in Italy and also Shanghai, China. Current research interests involve the historical background of the American philosophical pragmatists.
Allan teaches Leadership Studies, Transformation Through the Arts, and Leadership and the Creative Imagination. He particularly enjoys teaching and working with students who are interested in a qualitative grasp of transacted leadership, which parallels approaches to creating in the arts.
Jim Lacey
Associate Professor and Academic Director
Ph.D., Economics/Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, Union Institute and University
M.A., Economics, Northeastern University
M.S., Management, Lesley University
B.A., American Studies, Merrimack College
Dr. James “Jim” Lacey is an associate professor and academic director in the Doctor of Arts in Leadership Program. Prior to joining the DA core faculty, he supported the Franklin Pierce DA and MBA programs on a part-time basis, where he developed and taught courses, including in the MBA program with Luhansk University, Ukraine. Jim previously taught undergraduate economics and business courses, and was involved in the design and implementation of general education curricula. Jim’s interdisciplinary dissertation research was on postmodern economics and he has been recognized as a Fellow of the American Production and Inventory Control Society (APICS) and is a member of Omicron Delta Epsilon, the International Economics Honor Society.
Before moving to teaching, Jim worked in the high-technology industry in organizations such as Bell Laboratories. His business experience includes finance, marketing, consulting, operations, and industrial research. Beyond the applied research projects he conducted in industry, Jim is the author of several articles, and his current research interests include methodologies for future research and the application of the theory of complex adaptive systems to game theory. During the summer of 2006, he attended the “New Kind of Science” Summer School at Brown University, where he conducted research in game theory. As a reviewer, Jim has provided input into the widely used economics text by Bradley Schiller and to upcoming edition of the interdisciplinary research text by Allen Repko, used extensively in the DA Program.
Jim teaches Organizational Planning, Scenario Planning & Game Theory, Research Methods, Inferential Statistics, and Doctoral Seminar. In addition to serving on dissertation committees as a chair/advisor or reader, he also advises dissertation students in research methods and statistics.
Maggie Moore-West
Professor
Ph.D., Behavioral Sciences, Bryn Mawr College
MSW, Psychiatric Social Work, Smith College
MA, Liberal Education, St. John’s College
BA, Sociology, University of New Hampshire
Maggie Moore-West received her BA from the University Of New Hampshire with a major in Sociology; an MSW in Psychiatric Social Work from Smith College where she wrote her thesis on Alienation and Anomie Among College Students in the Sixties; an MA in Liberal Education from St. John’s College Graduate Institute and her PhD from Bryn Mawr College with an emphasis in behavioral and social sciences and social research methods. Her dissertation, Family, Friends and Partners: The Search for Intimacy and Autonomy: A Network Analysis of the Lives of Working Women, was an ethnographic analysis of women in the workplace.
Maggie worked in postdoctoral research with Dr. Samuel Bloom, a medical sociologist, with whom she developed and implemented the program evaluation of the first problem based curriculum in medical education in the United States. The research focused on comparative curricula and socialization into the medical profession. Her research interests are varied; however she has mostly published in the area of socialization into the professions and innovations in medical education. Her current research, which she is presenting nationally, is focused on the area of cultural studies emphasizing post secondary education and women in doctoral education and dissertation work. She has worked extensively in qualitative research methods: ethnography, oral histories, interviewing, and survey design.
In the Doctor of Arts program, she currently teaches Social Critiques and Qualitative Research Methods with an emphasis on the Oral History, and has also taught Doctoral Seminar, and Leadership and the Creative Imagination. She also advises doctoral students in internships and independent studies and serves as chairperson/advisor for many of the doctoral candidates during their dissertation work.
Carol Nepton
Associate Professor
Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Massachusetts
M.A., Applied Anthropology, Northern Arizona University
B. A., Anthropology, Franklin Pierce College
Carol N. Neptôn earned a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a MA from Northern Arizona University and a BA from Franklin Pierce (then College) in Rindge. She has taught at universities and colleges in Wisconsin, Vermont and New Hampshire. Areas of specialization include North American Indians, Medical Anthropology and culture change. She was the Campus Dean of NAES College on the Menominee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin, a baccalaureate program serving American Indians in urban and reservation locations.
Dr. Neptôn is an enrolled member of the Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi, centered in northern Vermont. She was recruited from Wisconsin to become their Federal Acknowledgement Officer and Director of Research. She worked closely with the state and federal governments and directed Missisquoi River Keepers and supervised other environmental initiatives. She was appointed to two terms as a Commissioner on the Vermont Governor’s Commission for Native Americans. Her interdisciplinary consultant research projects included education, health-care delivery, cultural competency training for foster parents, genetics and ethics, archaeology including paleopathology and repatriation of native remains.
Since returning to her Alma Mater, Carol has an appointment as Associate Professor in the Doctor of Arts in Leadership program. She teaches Research Methods, Cross-cultural Communication, Mastering & Guiding the Process of Change, and the Doctoral Seminar.
