Meet the CIVICs 250 Team

Dr. Robert Alexander is the founding director of the Democracy and Public Policy Network (DePo) at Bowling Green State University and the BGSU Poll Director. He previously served as the Wilfred E. Binkley Endowed Professor of Political Science at Ohio Northern University where he was Founding Director of the Institute for Civics and Public Policy. Alexander is the author of four books, including Representation and the Electoral College, published by Oxford University Press.

Dr. Alexander S. Butler is an assistant professor of social studies methods and content in Bowling Green State University’s Inclusive Early Childhood Education Program and the Associate Editor of The Great Lakes Social Studies Journal. His Ph.D. is from Indiana University in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis on Teacher Education and The Learning and Developmental Sciences.

He has extensive experience working with K-12 and higher education students in a variety of contexts. He has been a classroom teacher, wrap-around service provider, coach, senior instructional designer, and Director of the Master of Science in Curriculum and Instruction Social Studies Track at Florida International University. Additionally, he is an expert at curriculum development, having built curricula for K-12 schools, universities, and non-profit organizations across the world (i.e., Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Ghana, and U.S.).

His research focuses on several topics, including: teacher candidates’ beliefs and conceptions of teaching, learning, and historical thinking skills, how social studies is being taught at the elementary level, and educational stakeholder’s perceptions of the Caribbean. He has published in academic journals in the U.S. and internationally and contributed a chapter in Be(com)ing Strange(r): Towards a Posthuman Social Studies (2023), which won the Critics’ Choice Award Winner for 2023 from the American Educational Studies Association. In 2024 he was awarded a Midwest Teaching with Primary Sources grant through the Library of Congress and selected as Caribbean Digital Scholarship Summer Institute Fellow. He is currently the Region 1 Representitive for Ohio Council for Social Studies.

Dr. Savitri Kunze is an assistant professor of history at Bowling Green State University and a co-principal investigator for the CIVICS 250 Scholars Program. A historian of the United States and the world, she studies citizenship, national belonging, statelessness, deportation, and human rights. Her current research examines how law, media, and education have shaped ideas about citizenship, loyalty, and exclusion.

Kristin Schnerer is the Project Manager for the CIVICs 250 Scholar Program, as well as the Outreach Coordinator for the Department of History at Bowling Green State University. In both of these roles, she oversees K-12 teacher recruitment, plans public history programming, coordinates alumni relations, solicits grant support, and manages digital communications. In addition, she is an Adjunct Instructor at BGSU and University of Toledo, teaching civics, history, and future Social Studies teachers.

She holds a Master of Arts in Social Science from Eastern Michigan University with a focus on History and African American Studies, and a Bachelors in Science in Adolescent and Young Adult Social Studies Education from BGSU. She brings more than a decade of experience as a secondary social studies educator across Northwest Ohio, which adds to her understanding of the importance of civics education. Her professional interests center on well-informed news media literacy education, and telling the untold stories of history, and her work across K-12 school environment has helped her understand the importance of building community partnerships, and expanding access to historically informed civic learning.