Biography
Professor Taylor joined the Department of Economics at Willamette University in Fall 2005. Since June 2020, in addition to maintaining her academic appointment, she also serves as the Associate Provost for Academic Finance.
The Associate Provost for Academic Finance is responsible for providing leadership and support in the planning, coordinating and deployment of University financial resources. She works collaboratively with the University community to advance the University’s strategic budgeting efforts and the strategic alignment of the College of Arts and 快活视频s, the Atkinson Graduate School of Management, the College of Law, the Pacific Northwest College of Art and the Computing and Data 快活视频 Committee of Studies. The Associate Provost supports and advises the Provost, the Deans of the Colleges and the leadership of other academic and administrative units on campus, in strategic budgeting, resource planning and the allocation and use of financial resources. The Associate Provost serves in a key role to connect the academic units of the university to the financial operations and planning administrative units.
She holds a PhD in Economics from Colorado State University. For her dissertation, she completed an ethnographic field study in Krasnodar, Russia where she studied how households were adapting to the change from the Soviet planned economic system to the current market-based system. Her areas of research include the transition of the Russian economy in the 1990s, the contemporary Russian economy in the Putin era, social capital, the military retirement system, and various research projects on the practice of forensic economic analysis.
At Willamette, Professor Taylor’s teaching responsibilities have included An Introduction to Economic Inquiry, Macroeconomic Theory, and the Senior Seminar as well as a number of elective courses including Comparative Economic Systems and the Political Economy of Oil. Most recently, Professor Taylor developed a new elective titled “From Plan to Market”—a course on Soviet and Russian economic history.
Professor Taylor is also an affiliated faculty member of the International Studies Program.
Prior to completing her graduate studies, Professor Taylor worked for several years as an investigator at the Chicago Board of Trade’s Office of Investigations and Audits, where she was responsible for investigating potential instances of fraudulent or improper trading in the CBOT’s financial and agricultural futures and options markets.
In addition to her PhD, Professor Taylor also holds a Master’s Degree in Economics from DePaul University as well as two Bachelor’s Degrees – one in Economics and one in Russian, from Goucher College.