Abhishek Amar, Asian Studies
Abhishek S. Amar specializes in the archaeological history of South Asian religions. He is working on a monograph that examines the issues of expansion, sustenance and religious transformation of Buddhism at the site of Buddha’s enlightenment.
He directs a digital research project, Sacred Centers in India, which examines material, culture and texts to unravel the histories of the Hindu and Buddhist cities of Gaya and Bodhgaya, respectively.
Amar has been a member of the Art & Archaeology Group of the Vihara Project since 2018. The project focuses on the study of Buddhist monasteries and their institutional history and subsequent decline in South Asia. This year he organized an international conference on “Monastic institutions and Secularity from the Gupta period to the 15th century.” The gathering was part of the Vihara project based at Japan’s Mie University and hosted by the Bihar Museum, Patna, India. He also presented a paper titled ‘Rethinking Secularity and Governance of Buddhist Monasteries: Insights from the Dasanami Maha of Bodhgaya’ at an international research workshop at the University of Pennsylvania.
Katheryn Doran, Philosophy
Katheryn Doran studies and teaches courses on American philosophy, contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, environmental ethics, and philosophy and film. She co-edited the most recent edition of Critical Thinking: An Introduction to the Basic Skills. She served as guest editor of a special issue of the American Philosophical Association’s Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy that addresses teaching philosophy in nontraditional settings, a role based in part on a panel she chaired and participated in at the APA Eastern Division meetings in 2014.
She was appointed in 2013 to the American Philosophical Association Committee on the Teaching of Philosophy. Doran has run a philosophy book group at Marcy Correctional Facility for many years and serves as the vice chair of the board of Planned Parenthood Mohawk Hudson.
Tara McKee, Psychology
Tara McKee’s research interests focus on families coping with children with varying challenges such as developmental disabilities and behavior disorders and on the impact of such behaviors on the transition to college. McKee is author or co-author of numerous papers published in Journal of Attention Disorders, Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, Applied Social Psychology, Behaviour Research and Therapy, and Journal of the American Medical Association.
Last year, with Kerry Reilly ’14, she published in the open access journal Discover Psychology. “Are individual differences in loss aversion related to ADHD symptomatology?” is based on Reilly’s thesis work on the concept of loss aversion, which is the finding that people tend to be more averse to losses than they are attracted to equivalent gains.
McKee has made several invited presentations and her clinical work has focused on children in school settings and in-patient hospital settings. She conducts assessments for learning disabilities as part of a small private practice. She earned a doctorate and master’s degree in clinical psychology from the University of Connecticut.
Posted June 19, 2025
