Denise Horn

Denise is a mover, a shaker and a world traveler. When Denise isn’t traveling for teaching and research, she calls Boston, Massachusetts her home. She is an Assistant Professor of International Affairs at Northeastern University, and received her PhD from Rutgers University.

Denise is the author of Women, Civil Society and the Geopolitics of Democratization (Routledge 2010) and the forthcoming book Democratic Governance and Social Entrepreneurship: Civic Participation and the Future of Democracy (Routledge 2012). Her research explores the relationship of civil society development to democratic growth, focusing on transnational activism and trends in global development. She has conducted field research in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and India. Denise also directs the Northeastern University Global Corps Practicum, which introduces students to social entrepreneurship in countries such as India, Indonesia and Thailand.

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Most Recent Articles

March 6, 2011
Growing Up in Academia
I have friends who are well advanced in their (non-academic) careers—they are senior managers, higher-ups in government bureaucracies, established account and movie executives. They pay mortgages, have children, talk about their investments and have all the trappings of late 30-something, early 40-somethings that we generally associate with that population. They are grown-ups. Despite being in the same age cohort, however, I don’t feel like a grown-up, really. I feel more like a grown-up in waiting.
February 6, 2011
Barefoot Teaching
I’m preparing for my fifth trip to India, my second with students. I run the Global Corps Practicum program in Hubli, Karnataka State, a month-long workshop on community development and social entrepreneurship. Students are paired with Indian students, and together they conduct the field research and organizational building necessary to solve community problems. I work closely with a well-known organization, the Deshpande Foundation, which funds the program, provides the much-needed community links, and gives our work credibility within the community.
January 19, 2011
Stop Thinking You're the Smartest Person in the Room
From the archives - this post was originally published at http://uvenus.org on 3.01.2010. I’m in the unenviable position of preparing my dossier for “third year review”–that time where I get to tell my colleagues what I’ve managed to accomplish in the hectic time of early tenure track, to show that I can “produce” while also teaching, creating new programs, traveling, engaging in “service” for the university, holding it together enough to have intelligent conversations…
January 13, 2011
Battling With the System
A familiar truism about academia is that the battles are so big because the stakes are so small. Academics will fight over anything, from journal rankings (and which journals “count”), which department can use the word "rhetoric" in course titles, to who gets the credit for a big idea. For the most part, I've kept out of such battles because I need my energy for other things.
November 18, 2010
Leading Them "Over There"
When I was in college in North Carolina, no one really thought much about "abroad" experiences. If you did go abroad, you went to Europe to study French or, as in my case, to learn Spanish in Madrid. The norm was to think of your career aspirations as a domestic endeavor. At the time, the Peace Corps seemed only to want engineering and nursing students, so it wasn't a viable option for an arts-n-science student.
October 17, 2010
Conversations that Count
Today I received the first royalty check for my first book, Women, Civil Society and the Geopolitics of Democratization. It was an exciting moment--payment for my work! Knowing someone actually bought my book! A little extra cash when I wasn't expecting it! It made my morning that a whopping 130 copies of my book were somewhere, out there, in the world. I am, I told myself, part of the academic conversation.
September 12, 2010
Dear Professor, I Want To Be Your Friend
Boston, USA. In the six years of teaching at my university, I’ve gotten to know my students on a variety of levels—the rather impersonal environment of the classroom, the closeness of international travel, and now, in a completely unexpected way, as future colleagues, as a mentor and, yes, as friends.
August 5, 2010
Be Careful What You Wish For
My career has always been important to me, but I never wanted it to dominate my personal life. Early on, I instated my “8 o’clock” rule: if it’s not done/read/written/graded by 8:00 pm, it would have to wait until the morning. This was the time when civilized people had a glass of wine and ate dinner with someone they loved.
July 13, 2010
The Class That Never Ends
My graduate department gave particularly brutal comprehensive exams. For our major field, we were expected to answer three questions in a 24-hour period. Our advisers claimed that it was never intended to be an all-night exam, but for hyper-competitive and insecure graduate students, the tradition was to prove your mettle by staying up all night, writing erudite, thoughtful and, by four in the morning, incomprehensible essays.

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