The School of Public Affairs (SPA) at American University is pleased to welcome 14 new faculty members this academic year. These scholars will focus on teaching and scholarship in a variety of areas within Public Administration, Public Policy, Government, Justice, Law & Criminology, and Terrorism and Homeland Security Policy. They include:

John Boman: John joins AU as a Research Professor in SPA’s Justice, Law & Criminology department and the Center for Research and Collaborative Partnerships. A quantitative criminologist who specializes in crime policy (especially surrounding the use of narcotics), Dr. Boman’s research has been funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of Education, and the National Science Foundation. Many of his ~90 peer-reviewed papers appear in top-tier specialty and general science journals, including Criminology, International Journal of Drug Policy and Nature Human Behaviour. In his free time, Dr. Boman is a volunteer firefighter. Dr. Boman’s PhD is from the University of Florida (2013), and he has previously held professorships at Bowling Green State University and the University of Wyoming.

Jori Breslawski: Jori is an Assistant Professor in SPA’s Department of Justice, Law, and Criminology and a fellow at the Centre on Armed Groups. A political scientist who earned her PhD from the University of Maryland, her research examines political violence, migration, and humanitarian aid in conflict-affected areas. Her work has been published widely, including in the American Political Science Review, World Development, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, and International Studies Review, among others.

Jonathan Colner: Jonathan is an Assistant Professor in SPA's Department of Government and focuses his research on local institutions and machine learning. Specifically, his interest is in developing new tools and datasets for measuring the policy-making activities of city councils, as well as understanding how electoral institutions such as Ranked Choice Voting affect those activities. He received his PhD in Political Science with an emphasis in computational social sciences from the University of California - Davis. Before coming to American University, Jonathan was a Data Science Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at New York University's Center for Data Science.

Joshua Ferrer: Joshua joins SPA as Assistant Professor in our Department of Government. His research studies the challenges to democratic elections in the United States, with an emphasis on state and local politics and election administration. His work has been published or is forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals such as The American Political Science Review, The American Journal of Political Science, The British Journal of Political Science, and The Quarterly Journal of Political Science and has received coverage from major news sites including The Economist, NBC, NPR, PBS, CBS, Bloomberg, USA Today, CNN, and The Guardian. He earned his MA and PhD in Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He also holds a Master of Arts degree in Politics from the University of Otago and graduated Summa Cum Laude from Amherst College with majors in Political Science and Music.

Hala Furst: Hala joins SPA’s faculty after 15 years in federal service. She is the first Director for Strategic Partnerships at our Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL), enabling organizational partners of all types to adopt proven prevention methods, and will oversee the CARE Centers and facilitate the growth of the CARE Corps. Before joining PERIL, she was the inaugural Associate Director for Strategic Partnerships at the DHS Center for Prevention Programs and Partnership, leading efforts to engage with national level stakeholder organizations to educate and raise awareness about the public health informed approach to targeted violence and terrorism prevention. Hala began her career as a Presidential Management Fellow (PMF) and completed the Excellence in Government Fellowship with the Partnership for Public Service before becoming a Senior Fellow and Co-Coach for subsequent classes of Fellows. She holds a J.D. from Roger Williams University School of Law in Rhode Island, and a B.A. in Theatre from the University of Minnesota.   

Rachael Goodman-Williams: Rachael is an Assistant Professor in SPA's Department of Justice, Law & Criminology, where she is currently teaching a senior capstone in victimology. She is a community psychologist by training and is committed to conducting community-engaged research. Broadly speaking, her research focuses on community responses to sexual assault at the intersection of medical, legal, and advocacy systems. More specifically, she studies alternative reporting methods available to sexual assault survivors who seek some degree of system engagement without making a police report at that time. Her research is funded by the Office on Violence Against Women and conducted in partnership with victim/survivor-serving agencies in Montgomery County. Her most recent articles have been published in Sexuality Research and Social Policy, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, and Journal of Forensic Nursing. 

Victoria Gurevich: Victoria Gurevich joins SPA as a Senior Researcher in PERIL. She holds a PhD in Political Science from The Ohio State University and previously worked at the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3). Her published work explores public opinion toward ideologically motivated violence in the United States, with particular attention to differences in attitudes based on the motives behind extremist acts. More broadly, Victoria’s research interests include radicalization, extremism, violence prevention, post-conflict repatriation, and rehabilitation.

Trace Lasley: Trace Lasley is a Senior Executive-in-Residence in SPA’s Department of Justice, Law & Criminology. In addition to leading SPA’s Professional Development Workshop series and the Public Servant Planning and Skills Network, he researches illicit organization behavior, homeland security policy, and the intersection of strategy, policy, and emerging technology. His research has appeared in Conflict Management and Peace Science, Risk Analysis, and Third World Quarterly. Dr. Lasley held various roles with the U.S. Department of State, the National Security Council, and the Department of Homeland Security. He prepares students for careers in national security, emphasizing practical experience through hands-on activities, practicum projects, and a robust professional network. He shares his expertise on homeland security and curriculum development at industry and academic conferences including the Center for Homeland and Defense Security and the Federal Academic Alliance.

Keunyoung (Eli) Lee: Eli is an Assistant Professor in SPA’s Department of Public Administration and Policy. He holds a PhD in Public Policy and Management from the University of Southern California. He also earned master’s degrees in public administration from Seoul National University and the University of Southern California. His research focuses on how agency resources and political environments shape the attitudes and behavior of public employees. He is particularly interested in the role of agency reputation in influencing organizational outcomes and employee decision-making, and his research aligns with the fields of behavioral public administration, bureaucratic politics, and public management. His work engages with scholarly conversations published in outlets such as the Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory, Public Administration Review, The American Review of Public Administration, and Presidential Studies Quarterly. Prior to entering academia, he founded and led Nesal-Nessal, a Korean social enterprise addressing issues such as income disparity and urban decline.

Fielding Montgomery: Fielding Montgomery is a Research Assistant Professor in SPA's Department of Justice, Law & Criminology and a senior researcher at PERIL. His research is primarily focused on mapping online extremism, especially as it relates to the manosphere in his role with the Gendered Violence Division. Fielding has also conducted several rhetorical analyses on the intersections of popular and political culture, examining the place of horror, sci-fi, action, and anime films and television within politics and extremism. His book, Horror Framing and the General Election: Ghosts and Ghouls in Twenty-First-Century Presidential Campaign Advertisements, focuses particularly on the use of the horror genre in modern televised political campaigns. His articles have appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Women's Studies in Communication, the Journal of Popular Film & Television, International Political Science Review, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, and Philosophy & Rhetoric. Fielding previously taught at the University of Maryland in the Department of Communication, where he also received his PhD in Communication, with an emphasis on Rhetoric & Political Culture. 

Ashley Nellis: Ashley joins SPA as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Justice, Law & Criminology. She is a nationally recognized scholar in the study of punishment in America's criminal legal system, and her research focus on life sentences and long-term imprisonment is cited widely because of its unique contribution to the field of criminology and its broad accessibility to policymakers, advocates, litigators, and the public. She is the author of two books and eight book chapters. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals and law reviews, she regularly appears in the media, and she presents regularly before numerous professional and academic audiences.

Daniel Relihan: Daniel is a Research Assistant Professor in SPA's Department of Justice, Law & Criminology and Deputy Director of Research at PERIL. His research focuses on developing and testing evidence-based interventions to prevent extremism and build community resilience against harmful narratives. His expertise spans psychological inoculation, political polarization, morality, social identity, emotion, and the psychology of radicalization, with particular emphasis on translating social science into scalable solutions. At PERIL, he will develop psychological inoculation interventions that demonstrate significant effectiveness in randomized controlled trials, to help people recognize and resist manipulation tactics in extremist content. His broader research examines how social identities, political cues, and moral emotions shape responses to societal threats and crises. His work has been published in leading journals including Scientific Reports, Political Psychology, and PNAS Nexus.

Sarah Souders: Sarah joins SPA as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Administration & Policy. She received her PhD from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, where she focused on public finance. She focuses her research on education finance and policy, state and local finance, and public policy analysis. Her research has appeared in The Journal of Human Resources, The Journal of Urban Affairs, and AERA Open.

Meredith Welch: Meredith is a Postdoctoral Fellow at SPA’s Postsecondary Education and Economics Research (PEER) Center, where she conducts research at the intersection of labor economics, the economics of education, and consumer finance. Her current work focuses primarily on the returns to educational investments and the causal impact of student loan policies on borrowers’ labor market outcomes and financial health. She holds a PhD in Public Policy from Cornell University and a BA in economics and Spanish from the University of Michigan. Prior to pursuing her PhD, she worked as a policy analyst and researcher at the College Board and the Education Trust.