PROFILE

Robert Marx is a PhD student at Vanderbilt University.

Before coming to Peabody, Robert earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, Spanish, and Linguistic Anthropology from Brandeis University and a Masters of Arts in Teaching from Boston University. He was a high school English teacher for five years and the advisor of the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. He also led a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project at the school with a group of students who wanted to examine racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of discrimination at the school.

In Nashville, his research interests, therefore, center around the school as a site for prosocial development, especially for queer and otherwise marginalized students. His primary research assistantship is with Dr. David Diehl, who is exploring various aspects of students’ high school experiences. He is also currently working with Dr. Carol Nixon to evaluate curricular programs in high school English Language Arts classrooms intended to foster social-emotional learning and to design, implement, and evaluate teacher-training programs that empower teachers to intervene and advocate for their queer students. Additionally, he is a research assistant for Dr. Emily Tanner-Smith at the Peabody Research Institute, assisting in the creation of a meta-meta-analysis of universal interventions for youth.