For the fall 2023 semester, AddRan College of Liberal Arts is pleased to welcome three new professors who hold endowed positions.
- Al and Dawn Hoffman Chair of the American Ideal – Keith Gåddie, Ph.D.
- Hal Wright Chair of Economics – John T. Harvey, Ph.D.
- John F. Weatherly Professorship of Religion – Antoinette DeNapoli, Ph.D.
Endowed positions are made possible through generous philanthropic contributions, including those to Lead On: A Campaign for TCU. The most ambitious fundraising campaign in the university’s 150-year history, the campaign aims to raise $1 billion to strengthen TCU’s people and programs. May 31 marked the end of the strongest year in TCU fundraising history with more than $175 million in gifts received from generous donors. TCU will celebrate the formal close of the campaign along with marking the university’s 150th during Homecoming Week in October.
TCU and AddRan faculty are committed to teaching and research. Through donor support, these faculty shape futures and knowledge while attracting esteemed scholars and bright students to the university. Learn more about each of the three endowed faculty members and how they will strengthen and expand AddRan’s academic experience for students.
Keith Gåddie, Ph.D. 
Al and Dawn Hoffman Chair of the American Ideal, Department of Political Science
Keith Gåddie, Ph.D., is the inaugural holder of the Al and Dawn Hoffman Chair of the American Ideal, a newly endowed position in the Department of Political Science. Established by a former United States ambassador to Portgual, Al Hoffman, and his wife, Dawn, the position was designed to support TCU’s mission of developing ethical leaders by strengthening a culture of political discourse and shared ideological understandings.
“We are fortunate to have the generous support of Al and Dawn Hoffman, who are dedicated to providing a top-notch education and experience to students in AddRan College and TCU,” said Sonja Watson, Ph.D., dean of AddRan College of Liberal Arts. “As the inaugural holder of the Al and Dawn Hoffman Chair of the American Ideal, Professor Gåddie will expand students’ awareness, critical thinking and inquiry in the area of American politics.”
“My thanks to the Hoffman family for their generous gift, which created this platform to study and promote political civility and the greater, general values that make the American nation and represent our aspirations as people,” Gåddie said. “My goal is to enable an inclusive conversation about the ideas and ideals of America and how they take form in our public spaces and shape how we lead our communities.”
Gåddie comes to TCU from the University of Oklahoma, where he worked for more than 25 years. In addition to duties as a political science faculty member, Gåddie held numerous executive leadership positions, including interim associate dean of the Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture and executive faculty fellow, an advisory position to the president of the university.
“At TCU, I’m looking forward to continuing my career mission, in and out of the classroom, of working with smart, capable, curious students and engaging, active alumni,” Gåddie said.
As a scholar, Gåddie focuses on issues of the built environment and democratic values. He is the author of “Democracy’s Meanings: How the Public Understands Democracy and Why It Matters” (2022, Michigan) with Nick Davis and Kirby Goidel, which explores the question of how Americans conceive of democracy and tests the fragility and resilience of the American civic experiment. Another of his works, “The U.S. Supreme Court’s Democratic Spaces” (2021, OU Press), written with research partner Jocelyn Evans, explored the evolution of the Supreme Court’s physical spaces, its institutional evolution and its changing culture as a political and social organization.
Hal Wright Chair of Economics, Department of Economics
John T. Harvey, Ph.D. has been named the Hal Wright Chair of Economics.
Wright ’32 ’34, who endowed the professorship, earned his Bachelor of Arts in economics and Master of Arts from AddRan. Wright taught as an assistant professor of economics and played both baseball and football.
“Professor Harvey is a lead scholar in post-keynesian economics,” Watson said. “He has advanced the teaching of the field and scholarship and published over forty articles and several manuscripts.”
“I am extremely grateful to the Wright family for this incredible opportunity. As Hal Wright Chair, I will strive to build departmental intellectual community, to maintain a safe and welcoming environment for students, and to generally serve as a resource for TCU and beyond,” Harvey said.
“I am especially keen to continue my outreach to the non-economist public via open presentations, blogs and vlogs, and to pass on to my students the skills necessary to do so, including the application of scholarly theory to real-world data and the communication of findings to the lay person in a coherent, honest and respectful fashion,” he added. “Our world is beset by serious and in some cases existential problems and economic policy is a key contributor in each and every case. It therefore behooves us to both continue to develop our intellectual understanding of the relevant forces and to make our findings widely available and clearly understandable.”
Harvey is a professor of economics in AddRan College of Liberal Arts, where he has worked since 1987. His areas of specialty include international economics, macroeconomics and contemporary schools of thought. He is a frequent speaker for civic groups, where he enjoys translating complex economic concepts into language that the lay public can easily understand, an interest that also led to a blog at Forbes.com called “Pragmatic Economics” and the YouTube series "The Cowboy Economist.” John is passionate about TCU's initiative to increase diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and has co-taught “Introduction to Women and Gender Studies,” co-created and co-taught “The Economics of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender,” earned certifications in both TCU's and Columbia University's DEI programs and serves on the AddRan DEI Committee. His research consists of over 40 refereed publications, two edited volumes and two books.
John F. Weatherly Professor of Religion, Department of Religion
Antoinette DeNapoli, Ph.D. has been named the John F. Weatherly Professorship of Religion. This professorship was established in 1959 by TCU Board of Trustees member A.D. Weatherly and his family in honor of his father. The Weatherly family made numerous gifts to the university, and Weatherly Hall of Brite Divinity School is also named in their honor.
“Dr. DeNapoli is a lead scholar in the field of South Asian Religions,” Watson said. “She has published countless articles in top-tier journals and is recognized globally for her work as evidenced by her recent participation in the National Endowment for the Humanities grant-funded 2023 Summer Institute on Women in Buddhism.”
“I am honored to hold the John F. Weatherly Professorship in Religion, as it will provide me an engaged platform to build institutional connections with scholars across disciplinary traditions and organize student-centered events dedicated to raising awareness of the vital role of religion and Asian Studies in the world,” DeNapoli said. “As a Weatherly Professor, I participate in a distinguished lineage of teacher-scholars who have set a high bar for academic excellence. I plan to use the professorship to bridge the academic study of religion with the cultivation of global citizenship and ethical leadership, TCU’s core values; to demonstrate the intersections of religion with issues around gender, race, ethnicity, nation-building and sexuality. I am currently working with scholars in the USA and India to achieve this goal.”
After working as an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Wyoming for seven years, DeNapoli joined AddRan as an associate professor of religion and South Asian religions in 2017, where she focused on asceticism, devotion, mysticism and gender dynamics within religious contexts. She has received prestigious fellowships and awards from the American Institute of Indian Studies, Global Religion Research Initiative with the Center for Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, American Academy of Religion and American Philosophical Society.
DeNapoli has authored 35 articles, essays and book chapters, including “Real Sadhus Sing to God: Gender, Asceticism, and Vernacular Religion in Rajasthan” (Oxford University Press, 2014). She is currently completing a monograph based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with female religious leaders in India entitled “Female Gurus ad Grassroots Religious Feminism: The Modern Struggle for Gender Equality in South Asian Hinduism” (Oxford University Press).
DeNapoli is the editor of two forthcoming anthologies examining the interface between gender and religion. Her latest research project involves an ethno-historical study of the Bodo, the largest ethnic (tribal) group of northeastern India. DeNapoli is the past president of the American Academy of Religion—Southwest.
This summer, DeNapoli was selected to participate in the National Endowment for the Humanities Women in Buddhism: Religion, Politics and the Arts residential institute program at the East-West Center campus in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she engaged scholars across disciplinary fields seeking to bridge teaching and research about Asian religious cultures, such as Buddhism, with the study of gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, language and politics.
