Belmont University’s Department of Political Science has added two new faculty members for the fall 2003 semester.
Nathan D. Griffith joins the Belmont faculty as an assistant professor of political science. His teaching and scholarly interests include Constitutional Law and the Judiciary, Political Economy, and Methodology.
Griffith received his B.A. degree from Belmont in 1995 in International Relations, and his M.A degree from the University of Virginia in 1997 in Foreign Affairs. He is in the final stages of completing his Ph.D. work in Political Science at the University of Indiana.
Vaughn May, Ph.D. joins the Belmont faculty as an assistant professor of political science, and will direct Belmont University’s involvement with the Washington Center Intern Program, which works with The Washington Center to place Belmont students in individualized internships in the Washington, D.C., area, for which they may earn college credits.
Dr. May’s teaching and scholarly interests include American Politics and Government, Southern Politics, and Latin American Politics.
Dr. May received his B.A. degree in political science from the University of Alabama-Huntsville in 1991, and his Ph.D. degree in political science from Vanderbilt University in 1996. He was an associate professor of political science at the University of Tennessee-Martin from 1996 to 2002, where he was awarded as the outstanding undergraduate professor and adviser by the university’s College of Business and Public Affairs in 2002.
As of the Spring Semester of 2003, Belmont had fifty-five students enrolled as Political Science and Political Economy majors, and political science students are significant contributors to the Belmont community, winning campus-wide Crabb Writing Award, for the best written paper completed within a class setting, eight of the last eleven years. Some of those winners have also captured the Tennessee Political Science Association Undergraduate Paper Award, and Belmont political science students are well represented in the annual Belmont Undergraduate Research Symposium each Spring Semester, presenting their senior thesis research.
Several of Belmont political science students have presented at national research conferences, and in 2002 a group of Belmont political science students received the award for Best Paper Presentation at the Southeastern Political Science Association meeting.
