Isabelle Rucks Petersen joined the Faculty of Leadership and Integrative Studies in 2018 after teaching three years in Interdisciplinary Humanities and Communication at ASU. A passionate advocate for interdisciplinary humanities education, she has taught a wide variety of courses over three decades, spanning a multitude of humanities and social science disciplines in both traditional classrooms and online. Her research and teaching interests have been as diverse as Native American literature, medieval love poetry, comparative religion, cultural history, media studies, and creativity studies.

In a previous position, she co-developed a university-wide, cross-curricular critical thinking program. Two of her recently developed courses for ASU’s Liberal Studies program include an exploration of social activism through the arts as well as an interdisciplinary survey of happiness studies. She is the recipient of multiple teaching awards from various institutions and strongly believes in the intellectually, socially, and personally transformative power of interdisciplinary education.