Honors College

Jennifer A. Frey is the inaugural dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa, with a secondary appointment as professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy & Religion. Her academic research centers around questions of agency and moral psychology, with a special focus on the nature of character of virtue and its relation to accounts of human well-being and flourishing. Previously, she was an associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, where she was also a Peter and Bonnie McCausland faculty fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences.  Prior to her tenure at Carolina, she was a collegiate assistant professor of humanities at the University of Chicago, and a junior fellow of the Society for the Liberal Arts. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and her B.A. in philosophy and medieval studies (with a classics minor) at Indiana University-Bloomington.

Frey is a faculty fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, a Newbigin Interfaith Fellow with The Carver Project and Interfaith America, and a member of the Hope in Higher Education project with the John Templeton Foundation. Her academic research is primarily in moral psychology and virtue. She has co-edited a volume titled Self-Transcendence and Virtue with her former colleague Candace Vogler, and she is finishing a volume titled Practical Truth with her husband and colleague, Christopher Frey (forthcoming OUP). A third volume, titled Practical Wisdom, is under contract with Oxford University Press. In 2015, Frey was awarded a multi-million-dollar, interdisciplinary grant from the John Templeton Foundation, titled “Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life.”

Frey frequently writes more popular essays and book reviews in places like Breaking Ground, First Things, Harper’s, Image, The Point, and the Wall Street Journal. She hosts a philosophy, theology, and literature podcast called Sacred and Profane Love.

Matthew Post is assistant dean for Academic Affairs and applied associate professor of philosophy at The University of Tulsa Honors College.

He helped launch and was the director of the first graduate-level K–12 classical teacher formation program in the U.S. and has founded, developed, supervised, and fundraised for other programs serving education reform. These programs include bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs in civics, character education, and educational leadership; alternative certification; programs abroad; a classical lab school; and professional development and curricula for K–12 teachers and schools of character.

Since 2016, the university programs have educated hundreds of students across the U.S., including teachers, school leaders, school network executives, and other professionals who support liberal education. And, from 2019–2022, the professional development team went from serving a handful of schools to over 90 schools nationally and growing.

Post also builds networks to advance and sustain the growth of character education in the liberal arts tradition at the K–12 and higher education levels. His academic writing focuses on key thinkers in the tradition, such as Plato, Cicero, and Hegel, and his field research examines the relationship between school culture and motivation for virtuous conduct in a variety of educational institutions, public and private.

He has spent his career teaching liberal arts and classic texts, having worked in Canada, Japan, and Slovakia in addition to the U.S.

Chiara Palazzolo is a postdoctoral researcher at the Honors College of The University of Tulsa, working with Dean Jennifer Frey. Her background lies in philosophy and music.

Previously, Palazzolo held a post-doctoral researcher position at Roma Tre University. In May 2022, she completed a Ph.D. in philosophy, jointly funded by the University of Roma Tor Vergata and Roma Tre University, under the supervision of Professor Mario De Caro (Roma Tre University & Tufts). Her doctoral thesis, titled “Music as Vocation: Ethics and Role Responsibility of the Interpreter” explored the role responsibility of musical performers and the ontological assumptions underlying such responsibility in Western classical music.

In the spring semester of 2023, Palazzolo taught a course on “Ethics of Visual and Performing Arts” at the Department of DAMS at Roma Tre University. She has been a member of Aretai – Center on Virtues and SIFM (Italian Society of Moral Philosophy) since 2022. In January and February of 2023, she undertook a research period at the University of Glasgow under the supervision of Professor Glen Pettigrove. And, In 2019, she spent a study period at the University of Maryland under the guidance of Professor Jerrold Levinson. Since 2018, Palazzolo has been a teaching assistant in moral philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at Roma Tre University.

Chiara Palazzolo obtained her bachelor’s degree (2013) and master’s degree (2017) in philosophy from the University of Parma. In 2014, she graduated in opera singing from the Arrigo Boito Conservatory in Parma.

Her research interests encompass contemporary virtue ethics, music education, aesthetics, philosophy of music, professional ethics of music, music psychology, and moral psychology. Palazzolo consistently participates in international conferences on these areas and organizes culturalmusical events related to her interests and competences.

Rich Lizardo is a postdoctoral fellow in the Honors College who focuses on the history of early-modern Spain. He received his B.A. in history at Yale University and his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include the study of poverty, charity, and poor laws; theories and practices of punishment; Spanish empire and colonialism; national, cultural, religious, and ethnic identities; and intellectual, religious, and cultural history. Rich has presented conference papers on gendered violence in the laws and literature of Spain’s “Golden Age” of the seventeenth century, on labor and economic reform of the Spanish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and on intellectual responses to the “Hispano-American problem” of the nineteenth century.

He has also edited, copyedited, and/or translated (from Spanish and Portuguese into English) academic articles, chapters, and monographs for various scholars. He has served as an historical consultant for a Marvel animated television series. He has coedited a volume on early-modern hospitals, titled Hospitales durante el Antiguo Régimen. Instituciones benéfico-asistenciales, siglos XV–XIX, with Palermo University Press. And he is currently coediting a volume titled The Contractual Monarchy of the Iberian World, c. 1500–1700: Negotiating Power and Status in the Spanish Empire, under contract with Brill Publishing.

Rich’s recently completed dissertation, titled “Worlds of Spanish Poverty: Theory and Practice from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment,” traces the evolution of ideas, images, and institutions that arose to address the problem of widespread poverty in early-modern Spain. His current research projects include two forthcoming chapters: one on religious confraternities run by ethnic minorities in the early-modern Iberian world; another on the role of picaresque literature in seventeenth-century Spanish governance. In addition, Rich plans to spend his fellowship year at The University of Tulsa working in the Spanish Colonial Manuscript Collection at Gilcrease Museum.