Connie Steel Ph.D., serves as the Humanities Education Evaluator on the Educational Program Assessment Team.  She divides her time between the Life Worth Living Initiative at the Yale Divinity School’s Center for Faith and Culture and the Poorvu Center’s AI Initiatives.  Her Life Worth Living roles include building evaluation plans for an international network of faculty, designing and implementing professional development for teaching, and developing data management systems to track and report on longitudinal outcomes.  She co-chairs the Poorvu Artificial Intelligence Working Group and hosts the AI Coffee Talks for Humans series.  Connie’s work is driven by existential questions around what it means to be human as well as teaching interests in building student capacity to articulate answers to these questions.

Connie’s prior experience in program management includes ten years of faculty development and graduate student mentorship for core and writing flag courses at the University of Texas at Austin. Her teaching in the humanities spans offerings such as “Life Worth Living,” “Intro to Reading, Writing, and Research,” “Rhetoric of American Identity: Gender, Race, Ethnicity,” “Principles of Rhetoric,” and “Literature and Artificial Intelligence.”

Connie earned a doctorate in English with specialization in the History of Rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin. She was awarded a Mellon Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) Fellowship at Carnegie Mellon’s Eberly Center, and a Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Pre-Dissertation Development Fellowship.