Jason S. Todd, Ph.D.

I've been teaching both students and faculty how to create portfolios and eportfolios for many years, but I have a bad tendency to ignore my own portfolio. The process of updating this portfolio, as it should, challenges me to think about my growth as a teacher over the years and my sometimes hesitant transition into an administrator. When I last updated this portfolio, I had said that my most specific goal for the following years was to work more closely with students on research. While I still hope to do so, that research will take a different form now that I am a full-time administrator focusing on professional, faculty, and institutional development. However, having developed two popular classes that engage students at the transdisciplinary level, I hope to find in those classes students who want to explore those topics (dystopian and cyberpunk media) in greater depth with me, even as I attempt to make greater in-roads in the world of the scholarship of teaching.

How I Usually Get Introduced

My Eurotrash look, circa 2023

Photo Credit: Jason Todd

The Norman C. Francis Faculty Excellence Medallion

In 2023, I was awarded the Norman C. Francis Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award

Jason S. Todd, Ph.D., is the Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development and the Kellogg Professor of Teaching at Xavier University of Louisiana, where he spends his days helping other faculty get better at theirs. In 2023 he received Xavier's Norman C. Francis Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching. In the classroom, he is best known for two popular transdisciplinary courses — Dystopias, Real & Imagined and Cyberpunk, the Postglobal & the Posthuman — and his short fiction and essays have appeared in the Southern Literary Journal, the Chicago Quarterly Review, the Southern California Review, and elsewhere. Over two decades at Xavier he has also directed the Writing Center, the Quality Enhancement Plan, the Digital Humanities program, and the Core Curriculum. He is currently at work on his second novel.

How I'd Tell the Story

In 2002, the fiction editor at The Atlantic Monthly rejected a story of mine — kindly, and with enough specific encouragement that I chose to read it as a yes deferred. I've been writing fiction ever since, for literary journals in print and online, and I'm currently at work on a novel about a private investigator searching for his ex-girlfriend's missing father.

My poetic look, circa 2007

Photo Credit: Melanie Todd

I came to academia the long way, and I never quite stopped being the writer who wandered in. I studied writing first at Webster University in St. Louis under T. M. McNally, graduating in 1996, with a brief and unlikely detour afterward as an "Electronic Media Specialist" for the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod — a title I've never managed to say with a straight face. Then came the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, where I studied under Frederick Barthelme, Steven Barthelme, and Mary Robison and earned my master's in 2003 and doctorate in 2006.

I meant to be a writer who taught. I became, by degrees, a writer who builds the things that help other people teach. It began plainly enough with first-year composition at Southeastern Louisiana University, but the pattern took hold at Xavier: I ran the Writing Center, then became the university's first QEP Director and built "Read Today, Lead Tomorrow," which reshaped more of the curriculum and campus culture than I expected it to.

My executive look, circa 2014

Photo Credit: Bart Everson

By 2015 I had landed in the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development as Associate Director for Programming, rebuilding workshops and untangling the processes nobody else wanted to look at. When the pandemic closed everything, I helped create #LearnEverywhereXULA, our crash course in teaching online — which won awards none of us were thinking about at the time. I went on to direct the Digital Humanities program and chair the Core Curriculum as its Faculty Director before returning to the Center as Director in 2024. The work now is faculty, professional, and institutional development: helping other people get better at the work.

My grunge look, circa 2022

Photo Credit: Connor Elsea

I live north of New Orleans with my family and a menagerie of pets whose roster changes faster than I can update this page, on land that was historically inhabited by the Bayougoula and Choctaw. In my spare time, when not fixing something around the house or working in the garden or repairing either a car or a riding lawn mower, I serve as the Life-to-Eagle Coordinator for Scouting America Troop 111 in Mandeville and as a merit badge counselor for the Istrouma Area District.