AUM Faculty & Staff
Directory


Tony Veronese
Assistant Professor - 2D/Digital Arts | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Tony Veronese (Assistant Professor of 2D and Digital Art) holds a Masters of Art and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Dallas in Painting and Drawing. Within the AUM Fine Arts Department, Tony teaches regularly teaches Drawing, 3D Printing, Digital Illustration and Digital Painting. As an exhibiting artist, he has been the recipient of a grant from the MMFA for the community togetherness project, selected as a rising star of Dallas in 2017, and most recently was awarded the Edward L. Robbins prize for his entry in the 2023 exhibition Alabama A-Z.

Courtney A. Waid
Associate Professor and Faculty Athletic Representative

Courtney A. Waid
Associate Professor and Faculty Athletic Representative | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Dr. Courtney A. Waid is currently an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and serves as the NCAA Faculty Athletic Representative (FAR) at Auburn University at Montgomery (AUM). She holds a Ph.D. in criminology and criminal justice from the Florida State University (2010). She has developed and taught courses in in the areas of corrections, juvenile delinquency and justice, victimology, and criminological theory. Her recent research appears in the International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice.


Samuel Wallace
Distinguished Senior Lecturer | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Samuel Wallace has a B.A. in Communication from Lipscomb University and an M.F.A. in Theatre Arts from The University of Louisville. Before arriving at Auburn University at Montgomery, he was a Professor of Theatre at Faulkner University, and an Instructor of Speech and Theatre at Lipscomb University. He has acted in and/or directed shows professionally for theatres in Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, and Alabama. Mr. Wallace began teaching at AUM in 2008, was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2018, and was awarded the Distinguished Lecturer Award for Excellence in Teaching for 2018-2019. In the River Region, he has acted in and/or directed shows for Theatre AUM, Faulkner University Dinner Theatre, Millbrook Community Players, Prattville’s Way Off Broadway Theatre, Wetumpka Depot Players, and the Pike Road Theatre Company.


Wyatt Wells
Professor | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Wyatt Wells, a native of Nashville, Tennessee, graduated from Vanderbilt University with a BA in 1986. Six years later, in 1992, he earned a Ph.D. in American History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. After a year as an instructor at Chapel Hill, he took a position as an assistant editor at the Andrew Jackson Papers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He worked there three years, leaving in 1996 to be the Newcomen fellow in Business History at the Harvard Business School. The next year, he moved to Montgomery to teach at AUM. Wells has been here ever since, although in the 2001-2002 academic year he did serve as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Hong Kong.
Wells’s research has focused on the intersection of government and economics and how the issues involved often spill across national borders. He has published five books and numerous articles on subjects such as the policies of the Federal Reserve during the economically turbulent 1970s, the effort of the United States to impose its ideas about antitrust on the rest of the world during and immediately after World War II, the financial crisis that reshaped Wall Street in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Eisenhower administration’s policies towards public (electric) power, and the bitter debate in the United States in the 1890s over whether to base the currency on gold or silver. He has also produced broader studies on the history and character of capitalism and the performance of the U.S. economy in the decades after World War II. Wells has drawn on this expertise to create upper-level history classes at AUM such as “The World since 1945” and “The History of Money.”
Wyatt Wells is married and has three sons and a dog. In his spare time, he writes fiction.


Val Winkelman
Professor | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Val Winkelman is an Auburn University at Montgomery Distinguished Research Professor and received the Alumni Association Award for outstanding service. She is one of the campus advisors for Omicron Delta Kappa and a member of Alpha Alpha Alpha Honor Society for First Gen students. She is an associate member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society and is a Past Fellow of the International Council of Fine Arts Deans. She has been a Distinguished Guest for the Texas Educational Theatre Association. She is one of the Costume Designers for the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and has been serving as the Associate Artistic Director, Production Manager, and one of the Costume Designers for over 35 seasons at the Texas Shakespeare Festival. Val is the American College Theatre Festival National Co-Chair and former National Chair for Design, Technology and Management. She has been awarded the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival Gold Medallion. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Texas at Austin and named a Distinguished Alumna of the University of North Texas where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree.
Advising for the following
- All students majoring in Communication with a Theatre concentration


Heather Witcher
Associate Professor | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Heather Witcher is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy. Her teaching and research focus on nineteenth-century British poetics, collaboration, and sociability, as well as archival theory and digital humanities. Alongside British Literature II, she teaches courses on Victorian poetry, with special focus on archives and digital creation. She is the author of Collaborative Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: Sympathetic Partnerships and Artistic Creation (Cambridge, 2022), and the co-editor of Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics (Palgrave, 2020). She was the 2016 Amy P. Goldman Fellow in Pre-Raphaelite Studies. Her current projects focus on Pre-Raphaelite poetry and mapping Pre-Raphaelite influence in 19th century Chelsea.


Yowei Kang
Assistant Professor | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Yowei Kang (Ph.D., The University of Texas at El Paso) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication and Theatre at Auburn University at Montgomery. My research focuses on new media design, digital game research, visual communication, new media & political communication campaigns, and experiential rhetoric. My works were published in the International Journal of Strategic Communication, Howard Journal of Communication, Creative Communication, and Intercultural Communication Studies. I also co-edited Asian histories and heritages in videogames (Routledge, 2024). I received government funding to support my research in location-based advertising and consumer privacy management strategies. Taiwan’s Ministry of Education also supported my pedagogical grants to study the integration of gamification and digital game designs into college classrooms. Before joining AUM, I spent over ten years teaching in Taiwan, with most of my courses focusing on multimedia content design and production. In my spare time, I like to play video games and interact with my Maltese and Yorkies


Qiang Zhai
Professor | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Dr. Qiang Zhai received his M.A. degree from Nanjing University (1984) and Ph.D. degree from Ohio University (1991). He has been teaching courses on the history and culture of China, Japan, and Vietnam at Auburn University Montgomery since 1991. His primary field of research is the history of the Cold War in Asia. He has published several books on U.S.-East-Asian relations during the Cold War, including The Dragon, the Lion, and the Eagle: Chinese-British-American Relations, 1949-1958 (Kent State University Press, 1994), China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950-1975 (University of North Carolina Press, 2000). He is a co-editor of The Encyclopedia of the Cold War (Routledge, 2008). He was named a Distinguished Research Professor by AUM in 1997 in recognition of his scholarly contribution to the study of Cold War history.
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