Meet the Immersion Vanderbilt Team

Director of Field Immersion and Senior Lecturer

LaToya Anderson is a senior lecturer in the Department of Teaching and Learning and director of Field Immersion.

Anderson has 15 years of experience working for Metro Nashville Public Schools, including most recently as the literacy teacher development specialist at Hunters Lane High School. She is passionate about coaching and developing teachers at all stages of experience and is excited about nurturing partnerships among Vanderbilt, community organizations and local schools. She chose to work at Peabody because she believes in the university’s efforts to pursue equity and excellence in teaching and learning.

A Double ’Dore, Anderson received her Ed.D. in K-12 educational leadership and policy and M.Ed. in teaching and learning in urban schools from Peabody in 2018 and 2012, respectively. She also holds a B.S. in elementary education, K-8, from Tennessee State University.

Senior Lecturer of Medicine, Health, and Society (A&S)

Dr. Jaime Bruce received her Master of Arts in Child Life from Mills College in Oakland, CA and her Doctor of Public Health from Boston University in Boston, MA. She practiced clinically as a certified child life specialist prior to transitioning to the academic setting. When she is not in the classroom, she continues to serve patients at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Although this role allows her the opportunity to engage families in all areas of the hospital, Dr. Bruce has developed a particular expertise related to the intensive care experience, children of adult patients, end-of-life care, and sibling engagement.

Dr. Bruce is an active member of the Association of Child Life Professionals, National Council on Family Relations, American Public Health Association, and Southeastern Association of Child Life Professionals. She serves on the Review Boards for both the Journal of Supportive Care in Cancer and The Journal of Child Life: Psychosocial Theory and Practice.

Away from work Dr. Bruce enjoys spending time with her children, traveling and seeking adventure in everyday life.

Associate Professor, Department of Pharmacology; Director of Vanderbilt Center for Addiction Research; Associate Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics

Dr. Calipari received her PhD in Neuroscience in 2013 in the laboratory of Dr. Sara Jones at Wake Forest University School of Medicine where she studied how self-administered drugs altered dopaminergic function to drive addictive behaviors. She then went on to complete her postdoctoral training with Dr. Eric Nestler at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she used circuit probing techniques to understand the temporally specific neural signals that underlie motivation and reward learning. She is currently the Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Addiction Research and an Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University in the Department of Pharmacology. Her work seeks to characterize and modulate the precise circuits in the brain that underlie both adaptive and maladaptive processes in reward, motivation, and associative learning.

Associate Professor of Political Science; Associate Director of Public Policy Studies

Katherine Blue Carroll came to Vanderbilt University in 2001 as the Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Science. Since 2006 she has been a full-time non-tenure track assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, where she directs the undergraduate program in public policy studies and teaches courses on Terrorism, Political Islam, Middle East Politics, and The War in Iraq. From January 2008 through April 2009, she worked as a social scientist on a Human Terrain Team in Baghdad, Iraq. Human Terrain Teams were developed to provide expert social and political advice to brigade commanders and soldiers on the ground in war zones. Since returning from Iraq, she has worked on various aspects Iraqi culture and politics, as well as on the interaction of the American military with Iraqi society. She also works as a consultant for Decisive Analytics Corporation, a defense contractor, and has given several invited talks on her experience in Iraq and on Arab culture and politics to military audiences.

Senior Lecturer, Economics

A&S Faculty Fellow
Senior Lecturer of Culture, Advocacy, and Leadership

Alexander Jacobs is a historian of American thought and culture, primarily focusing on the Cold War era. His research and teaching examine the intersections of political culture, religion, and social criticism. Additionally, he investigates the nature of historical inquiry and the intellectual history of violence.

Currently, Jacobs is revising his book titled The American Counter-Enlightenment: Social Critics and the Uses of Conservatism, which explores the application of romantic and counter-revolutionary ideas in contrarian social thought. His future projects include a study on the problem of evil in twentieth-century American culture, a history of moral arguments regarding the bombing of civilians during wartime, and a synthetic analysis of the connections between conspiracy culture, metaphysical religions, and social thought.

His approach to American Studies integrates his training as a historian of culture with methodologies and ideas from philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies.

Principal Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of Psychology and Human Development

A&S Faculty Fellow
Associate Chair and Principal Senior Lecturer of African American and Diaspora Studies

Dr. Claudine Taaffe is a Senior Lecturer in African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. Taaffe is an ethnographer, who engages critical qualitative methods in her work with African American girls. Her research is centered in examining the ways in which Black girls, who are constructed as “at‐risk”, negotiate spaces of decision‐making, identity, and community‐building using the creative arts. In her work with Black girls, Taaffe focuses on the use of photography and performance texts in the creation and documentation of the stories Black girls tell about their lives in schools. Taaffe is committed to utilizing a cacophony of theories, methodologies, and, ultimately, powerful stories that act as counter-narratives to the myths of a Black girlhood that is considered deficit, in crisis, deviant, and in need of saving. Taaffe considers her work with Black girls to be a purposeful attempt to broaden the aperture into Girlhood Studies and Education by being intentionally inclusive of a Black girlhood that matters. Taaffe is the author of several book chapters on Black girlhood and the use of photography as a disruptive qualitative method in education. She received her doctorate in Educational Policy Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign. She is currently working on her book project, Black Girl Gaze: A Visual (Re)membering of Black Girlhood as an Act of Resistance and is a 2017-2018 recipient of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching Junior Faculty Fellowship.

Deanna Walker has been a Blair faculty member since 1998. An accomplished composer, pianist, songwriter, and producer, Walker studied composition with Morris Cotel and Jean Eichelberger-Ivey at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, and piano with Thomas Uchtmann at Eastern New Mexico University.

Walker has co-written songs that have been streamed over 50 million times on Spotify alone. She brings in major hit songwriters for her very popular Blair Hit Songwriter Series, and some students of the series have gone on to become country songwriting legends, including Jon Nite and Jesse Rice. Several of her Vanderbilt students have gone on to be massive pop hit songwriters, including Michael Pollack and Malibu Babie (Lo Miller).

Walker had had multiple publishing deals in her carrer and works extensively with European artists and producers. Her songs have been recorded by a wide range of artists, from Kenny Rogers to Goldfish. Her music has been featured on American Idol, along with major network television shows and commercials.

Her commissioned work, Family Plot in Four Scenes, for soprano and piano, was chosen for performance at the CMS International Conference in Costa Rica in June 2003. She co-authored the Composition Books, Levels 1-3, for Alfred’s Basic Piano Library, and has given piano clinics and songwriting workshops around the country, in the U.K., and Canada.

Walker has been the national chair of the Music Teachers National Association Composer Commissioning Program, 2003-2005. She has also been a speaker at the national, division, state, and local conventions of MTNA. As a composition teacher, she’s had national, division, state, and local winners of the MTNA Composition Contest.

Assistant Dean for Design, Professor of the Practice of Mechanical Engineering