2018 Innovative Teaching Honorable Mention: Eileen Zurbriggen

Dr. Eileen Zurbriggen is a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she is also affiliated with the Department of Feminist Studies.  Her research focuses on behaviors in which power and sex are linked (such as rape and childhood sexual abuse), on psychological linkages between power, objectification, and sex, and on media representations of sex, power, and gender.  She is a fellow of SPSSI and the American Psychological Association.

Dr. Zurbriggen teaches graduate statistics and social psychology courses and has helped to build a social psychology Ph.D. program at UCSC that is focused on social justice.  She teaches undergraduate courses about trauma and sexual aggression and supervises undergraduate field study students who are placed in community organizations that work with survivors of trauma.  Her research on power has recently expanded to studying the effects of corporate, governmental, and technological surveillance (and the attendant loss of privacy).  The 2013 revelations from Edward Snowden about the NSA’s mass surveillance of U.S. citizens provided an impetus for her to develop the Privacy and Surveillance course that received this award.  She is grateful that her department supports faculty in developing and teaching novel courses such as this.