Meet the New AddRan Faculty for 2026-2027

The TCU AddRan College of Liberal Arts is proud to recognize our newest faculty members for the 2026-2027 academic year.

Ryan Brown, Assistant Professor of French

Brown comes to TCU from the University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate in romance languages and literatures in 2025. He studies the French Enlightenment and is particularly interested in celebrity autobiographies from the 18th century. He examines them through a “law and literature” lens and asks how writers use different types of evidence (documents, eyewitness testimony, personal confessions) to convey truthful accounts of their lives to readers. He is a passionate teacher, having received the Dean’s Award for Graduate Student Teaching Excellence at the University of Chicago. He is excited to teach French language, culture and literature classes at TCU and to prepare students to become global citizens.

Maxwell Bullard, Assistant Professor of Economics

Bullard joins TCU with a doctorate in economics from Texas A&M University. Trained as an empirical microeconomist, his research spans public, labor and behavioral economics, with a focus on causal inference and how policy and institutional factors shape child and family outcomes in historical and contemporary contexts. His recent work examines the long-run and intergenerational effects of place through the Orphan Train Movement, how deadlines and legal constraints like abortion access shape birth mothers' search for adoptive families and how job loss leads to adverse health outcomes. Going forward, he plans to explore how economic policy can improve child welfare systems and family well-being, alongside work on historical child welfare policy. Bullard comes to TCU with teaching experience in public economics and will teach core courses and applied microeconomic electives.

Kelly Burke, Assistant Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice

Burke joins TCU from the University of Texas at El Paso, where she was an assistant professor of social and legal psychology since 2022. She received her doctorate in social psychology and a minor in statistics, methods and measurement from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research takes an interdisciplinary approach, applying psychology, criminology and criminal justice to better understand factors that influence law enforcement decision making, public perceptions of law enforcement and juror decision making. She is excited to join the TCU community this fall, where she will teach courses in data analysis and the social psychology of crime. 

Stephanie Cardwell, Assistant Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice

Cardwell joins TCU as an assistant professor of criminology and criminal Justice. A first-generation college student from Alabama, she earned her doctorate in criminology from the University of Texas at Dallas and comes to TCU from the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she served as an assistant professor. She was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at The University of Queensland in Australia. Her research examines developmental and life-course criminology, with interests in school truancy, juvenile delinquency and violence prevention. She is passionate about student learning and mentoring and strives to create engaging classroom experiences that help students develop critical thinking and analytical and research skills that support their academic success and future careers.

Martín Gandur, Assistant Professor of Political Science

Gandur studies political institutions, with a particular interest in courts and the separation of powers in environments marked by hostile interbranch politics. His research often explores how judicial review of government action shapes public support for courts and the health of democracy more broadly. Gandur teaches courses on law and courts, as well as comparative democratic institutions. He earned his doctorate in political science at Florida State University and his law degree at Universidad Nacional de Tucumán (Argentina).

Emma Schroeder, Assistant Professor of Political Science

Schroeder joins TCU from the University of Notre Dame, where she completed her doctorate with focuses on American politics and political methodology. Her research examines gender in U.S. politics, particularly in legislative institutions. She is especially interested in how increases in the number of women in office influence the legislative behavior of women and men legislators and in analyses of ways that women’s ambition for office can be increased. Her research primarily examines these questions at state and local levels. She is looking forward to teaching courses at TCU on American politics as well as on gender, legislative and state politics.

Haley Wilbert, Instructor I in History

Wilbert is an applied microeconomist whose research sits at the intersection of demography, health, labor and economic history. She earned her bachelor’s degree in economics from Brigham Young University in 2018 and her master’s and doctorate in economics from the University of Notre Dame in 2024 and 2026, respectively. Her current research examines how planned and unplanned cesarean deliveries affect women’s subsequent fertility decisions. She also uses the Census Tree, the largest-ever database of record links among historical U.S. censuses, to study how family size and birth order shape intergenerational mobility. Prior to graduate school, she taught middle school math for two years.

Hope Williard, Assistant Professor of Economics 

Williard joins TCU from Hampden-Sydney College, where she taught premodern history. She is a social and cultural historian of the late Roman and early medieval Mediterranean world between the fourth and eighth centuries. Her first book, Friendship in the Merovingian Kingdoms (Arc Humanities Press, 2022), and articles in leading journals such as Early Medieval Europe explore the social impact of literary culture during a time of great change, asking how late-antique people used the former to cope with the latter. Her current research projects focus on epistolary culture and the materiality of texts, late antique textiles and the pedagogy of digital history. She is excited to introduce students to the ancient world and its wonders in class, through study abroad opportunities and via the college’s Classical Studies minor.