Faculty

Eric Zinn

Director, Business Minor Program & Instructor of Business

Eric Zinn is a lecturer and the Director of the Business Minor program. He teaches courses in financial accounting, managerial accounting, business law, and taxation. Mr. Zinn earned a juris doctorate degree from the University of Florida; received master’s degrees in taxation, accounting, business administration, finance, and information systems from the University of Florida and the University of Colorado, Denver; and has a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of the South. Mr. Zinn is also Of Counsel to the national law firm of Kutak Rock LLP and practices in the areas of federal taxation and corporate law.

Myles Elledge

Director, Babson Center

Myles Elledge is the director of the Babson Center for Global Commerce and teaches leadership, strategy, and international business. He serves as a coach and mentor to students interested in charting their path to a range of business sectors or pursuing social impact careers. Prior to joining the Babson Center, Mr. Elledge served in executive roles with a technology start-up, as a global business director with a large non-profit applied research organization, and as a staff economist with a leading international consulting firm. He has served in international roles in Tokyo, Japan, and lead public and private sector consulting projects in 34 emerging market countries. Mr. Elledge holds a master’s degree in public and international affairs, with a certificate in international political economy from the University of Pittsburgh. He completed his bachelor’s degree in global studies from the University of the South.

Tao Song

Assistant Professor, Economics

Before completing his Ph.D. in Economics at University of Connecticut in 2017, Tao Song received a B.B.A. from University of New Brunswick and an M.A. in Economics from University of Alberta in Canada. His primary field of specialization is labor economics with a focus on immigration. Song’s current research focuses on immigrants’ social-economic integration in the U.S. and the skill complementarity between immigrants and natives. He has also done research on other labor economic topics such as the labor supply and demand dynamics during the energy market booms and busts in Canada as well as the Chinese labor market fluctuations at the turn of the 21st century. While his main teaching interests include Labor Economics and Microeconomics, he is also experienced in teaching Macroeconomic courses.

Husnain Ahmad

Associate Professor, Economics

Husnain Fateh Ahmad holds a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Economics from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan. He undertook his master’s coursework and training at the University of Arizona, before transferring and completing his PhD at the University of Iowa in 2014. An applied microeconomist, he specializes in behavioral economics, game theory and industrial organization. His research interests are varied but broadly fall under the umbrella of behavioral microeconomic theory. As part of his dissertation, he applied behavioral game theory to study the phenomenon of over bidding in first and second price auctions, and also modeled self-serving bias in double auctions. After completing his PhD, he returned to his alma mater in Pakistan, and expanded his interests to include more policy relevant questions. In addition to his research in applied theory, he is currently conducting exploratory work in the areas of health economics and the interaction of identity and social preferences on economic behavior.

Beth Pride Ford

Teaching Professor, Economics

Dr. Ford is a Teaching Professor of Economics. She earned her B.S. (1988) and M.S. (1990) degrees in Food and Resource Economics from the University of Florida, and a Ph.D. (1997) in Agricultural Economics from The Pennsylvania State University. Prior to teaching classes at the University of the South, Dr. Ford worked as a Research Associate in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology at Penn State in the area of farm management. Dr. Ford, her husband, Dr. Steve Ford, and their two young children moved to Sewanee in 2000 to assist her parents in managing their family farm in north Alabama. In 2003, Dr. Ford began teaching in the Economics Department at the University of the South. She has taught a wide range of courses at Sewanee, including Introduction to Microeconomics, Introduction to Macroeconomics, Managerial Economics, Environmental Economics, Health Economics, and Money and Banking. Dr. Ford also coaches mountain biking at St. Andrew's-Sewanee School and coordinates a state-level program to get more girls and women riding mountain bikes. In addition to being an avid mountain biker, her other interests include riding horses, hiking, and gardening.

Huarui Jing

Assistant Professor, Economics

Huarui Jing is a 5th year Ph.D. candidate in Economics from the University of Connecticut. Her research fields of interest are in Macro Finance, Asset Pricing, Financial Econometrics, and Machine Learning. She is currently working on machine learning based macro finance projects: distributional robust optimization (DRO) in asset pricing model, robustness study on nonparametric recursive utility asset pricing model, and high dimensional asset pricing model DRO problems. Huarui Jing enjoys teaching courses in Investment Finance, Real Estate Finance, and Financial Econometrics (Derivatives & Fixed Income Securities, Financial Modeling, and Financial Engineering). Prior to pursuing her PhD education in economics, Huarui Jing received her B.A. in Public Economics and Administration and B.S. in Statistics from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. She earned her M.S. in Policy Economics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her personal website is located here.

Scott Wilson

Professor in the Department of Politics and Acting Provost

After twenty years as a faculty member in the Politics Department and Asian Studies Program, Scott Wilson entered the university's administration where he currently serves as acting provost. He joined the Provost's Office as Vice Provost for Planning and Strategic Initiatives in early 2021 and was responsible for strategic planning, academic relations with other institutions, and assisting with the budget. In 1985, he studied abroad in China, just as it was opening up its economy and society, and was so taken by the experience that he made Chinese politics and economy the focus of his research. He has lived in China for more than six years, mainly to conduct research including living in two Chinese villages for ten months.

Mark Hopwood

Associate Professor of Philosophy

I studied philosophy at the University of Oxford and the University of Chicago and I've been teaching at Sewanee since 2014. I offer classes in moral and political philosophy, the philosophy of art, ancient philosophy, and 20th century continental philosophy. In my research, I have published papers on the nature of love, the problem of selfishness, the connection between philosophy and literature, and what it means to see others as fully human.

Andrew Moser

Teaching Professor of Philosophy

When I first began teaching philosophy I was ashamed that I couldn’t offer my students a definition of the subject. No definition seemed able to corral everything that I regarded as properly philosophical under a manageable heading. At the time I was working on a master’s thesis on Gottlob Frege – a late 19th century philosopher whose work focused on mathematics and logic. In one of his books, The Foundations of Arithmetic, Frege laments the fact that mathematics is in such a sorry state that almost no one seems capable of defining its most basic idea, the idea of number. I felt that I was in a sorrier state than the mathematicians Frege described. At least they had some vague idea of their subject – number. I lacked even that. What was the subject matter of philosophy? And how could I justify teaching a subject when I had no idea how to describe the subject I was teaching?