Previous Directors
Lisa L. Miller is Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and has had the privilege of serving as the Director of the Gardner Fellowship since 2017. Professor Miller has enjoyed building on the work of Professors Bathory and Professor Murphy to grow the program’s Alumni Network and Advisory Council, and to expand the program’s reach in SAS. In keeping with the tradition of changing the Fellowship theme to meet contemporary challenges, in 2019, with the help of Gardner Advisory Council, Professor Miller shifted to the current theme, Security and Sustainability.
Professor Miller’s research interests are in law and constitutions, racial inequality, violent crime and criminal justice, democratic accountability and social policy. Her most recent book, The Myth of Mob Rule: Violent Crime and Democratic Politics (Oxford University Press, 2016), explores the politics of crime and punishment cross-nationally. Miller has served as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Oxford and at Princeton University.
Professor Matt Matsuda teaches Modern European and Asia/ Pacific global-comparative histories in the Rutgers-New Brunswick History Department, where he has been since 1993.
He is the author of The Memory of the Modern (1996), Empire of Love (2003), Pacific Worlds (2012), A Primer for Teaching Pacific Histories (2020), and many articles, and is an editor for the Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean (2022). He is also founding editor of the Palgrave Studies in Pacific Histories, currently, 7 volumes ranging over histories of anthropology, science, Oceanian empire, and early modern commodity trading. His next book will be Genetic Drift: Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific (2023).
From 2015-2021 he was the founding Academic Dean/ Professor in Residence at the Honors College-New Brunswick, developing an interdisciplinary academic experience and social innovation curricula for a scholarly community.
He has also previously served as the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program (2012-15) and as College Avenue Campus Dean, as well as a departmental undergraduate vice-chair. Dr. Matsuda took over the directorship of the Lloyd C. Gardner Fellowship Program in 2022.
When possible, he and his wife, documentary filmmaker Lee Quinby, live at the beach in Rockaway, NY. His family is from Japan, Hawai‘i and California, and he lived in in Paris for three years while doing research work for his UCLA Ph.D. He is also a guitarist and songwriter with a 1985 underground album, and still plays with geezer bands.
Professor Andrew Murphy (2014-2017) has fond memories of many wonderful seminar discussions with the fellows: at first, continuing the focus on democracy and democratization inherited from Professor Dennis Bathory's time at the helm, and later introducing a new focus on violence and non-Violence. During his time as director, the year-end conference expanded to involve student poster presentations to foster more extensive dialogue and discussion of student research projects. The Gardner program remains a highlight of his time at Rutgers, and he always enjoys hearing from former fellows.
Professor Dennis Bathory, Founding Director (2011-2014): It was 2011 as I planned the first Gardner Seminar. The Arab Spring blossomed in the desert and led me to a topic on Democracy and Democratic Revolution which quickly expanded to include the theory and practice of democracy elsewhere. Students from across SAS, from STEM departments as well as social science and humanities majors, gathered to talk about and better understand the headlines in newspapers around the world. The energy in the classroom was palpable, the excitement of our visits to the United Nations and Washington, D.C., and the growing camaraderie among the students made for the most challenging and rewarding teaching experience in my 50+ years on the Rutgers faculty.