COLFA Deans
Dr. Emran El-Badawi, Dean
Dr. El-Badawi is Professor and interdisciplinary scholar of history, language and culture. He has served as Dean since July 2024, following his role as Chair, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, University of Houston, where he was also Director of the Middle Eastern Studies. His goal is to promote COLFA on a national stage, especially by fostering: research, scholarship and creative activity; graduate studies; marketing, recruitment and retention initiatives.
He is recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Henry Luce Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and other international and local organizations. His publications include five books and dozens of peer reviewed articles, chapters and entries.
Dr. El-Badawi has lived on four continents, and he has made hundreds of international media contributions. He has consulted for several industries, including law, government, and oil and gas.
Dr. Tara Shelley, Associate Dean of Research and Faculty Excellence
Dr. Tara O’Connor Shelley is the inaugural Associate Dean of Research and Faculty Excellence for the College of Liberal and Fine Arts (COLFA). She also serves as Director of the Institute on Violence Against Women and Human Trafficking in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Public Administration at Tarleton State University. Dr. Shelley received her Ph.D. in Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University and her MS in Justice, Law, and Society from the American University. She previously worked as an Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Crime and Justice (CSCJ) in the Department of Sociology at Colorado State University.
Prior to joining academia, Dr. Shelley worked for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), and the Justice Research and Statistics Association (JRSA). Dr. Shelley has over 30 years of professional research and evaluation experience involving 30 federal, state, local, and privately funded research grants. During her career, she has worked with over 60 international, federal, state, and local criminal justice agencies on assorted projects. As an academic, she has generated over $1.6 million in research funding, and $677,850 of this was generated while at Tarleton. Before entering academia, she worked as a project director, assistant project director, or project associate in the nonprofit research sector on projects amounting to an additional $1.5 million in revenue.
More recently, she received funding from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), U.S. Department of Justice, on two projects: Assessing an Innovative Response to Intimate Partner Violence Related Strangulation, and Illegal Marijuana and Drug Related Violent Crime in North Texas. She has 44 technical reports related to the results of her evaluation research, has co-edited two books, and has authored over 43 journal articles, book chapters, and magazine/newsletter articles. In 2020, Dr. Shelley received the University Faculty Excellence in Scholarship Award and the prestigious designation of Fulbright Scholar from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. In 2024, she also received recognition as a Fulbright Specialist. In 2025, she received the COLFA Faculty Excellence in Scholarship Award.
Dr. Ben Sword, Associate Dean of Teaching and Student Excellence
Dr. Sword is an Associate Professor of English with a specialization in Rhetoric. He has published and presented work in the areas of Disability Rhetoric, Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, Discourse Analysis, and Composition Pedagogy.
Dr. Sword’s most recent scholarly work includes the delivery of the keynote address at the annual Trends in Teaching Composition Conference. He presented “Palimpsest Pedagogies: Remembering Composition’s Past to Envision Its Future” at this annual meeting of Rhetoric and Composition educators and scholars. Dr. Sword also collaborated with two colleagues from regional institutions to present, “Revisiting Terri Schiavo’s Death Twenty Years Later Through Kenneth Burke’s Psychology of Form” at the Kenneth Burke Society’s triennial conference.
Since joining Tarleton in 2005, he has served in several administrative roles including: Associate Dean, Director of the University Writing Center, and Interim Department Head of the Department of English and Languages.