Isabel Geathers (BA, Washington University in St. Louis; MA/PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is currently the Senior Associate Director of the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers (IRT) at Phillips Academy, Andover as well as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University.

While at Penn, Isabel designed and taught a number of original courses, including Interracial Intimacies, The Contemporary Fairy Tale, and The American Tragedy.  She has also taught and assisted in courses on globalization, modernism, and literary theory. Her dissertation, “Tragedy’s Black Eye: Theorizing the Tragic in Contemporary African American Literature,” examines the critical currency of mapping the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of tragedy when race is centralized as a key marker of American tragic consciousness, and it was completed under the direction of Prof. Thadious Davis

As a teaching and research fellow at Princeton University, Isabel’s scholarly interests lay in African American literature, American literature, and tragedy studies, with attendant interests in genre theory, aesthetics, trans-cultural mythologies, critical race theory, and trauma theory.  She has taught courses on women’s leadership and the American Civil Rights movement. As a Senior Director at Phillips Academy, Isabel creates programming around issues of diversity, inclusion, equity, and social justice as well as manages institutional directives and practices for diversifying teaching and faculty pools.