- Clinical Associate Professor
- Education
- Email: esther.enright@uri.edu
- Office Location: Chafee Hall Room 705-A
Biography
Dr. Esther A. Enright is a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Rhode Island. She was hired in 2026 to launch URI’s transdisciplinary Ed.D. in Education program. Dr. Enright has over 25 years of professional experience across middle and high school education, first response medicine, and higher education. Dr. Enright has extensive experience using justice-oriented frameworks to design and implement graduate programs for practicing and developing professionals.
Dr. Enright’s scholarship spans the fields of preK-12 and higher education. Dr. Enright’s research interests center around the positioning of university-based professional preparation programs within the higher education system, and how a better understanding of that embeddedness could inform justice-oriented approaches to program recruitment, admissions, curriculum building, and faculty development. Additionally, Dr. Enright studies leadership in public systems within predominantly rural states. Currently, Dr. Enright is working with colleagues in their Governance Lab to study the changing landscape around shared governance, leadership, and planning in public higher education. Additionally, Dr. Enright is working with a transdisciplinary group of experts studying equity in access to early college, dual, and concurrent enrollment, in particular in STEM-M.
Education
- Ph.D., Education, University of Michigan, 2016
- M.A., Higher Education, University of Michigan, 2015
- M.A., Political Science, Hebrew University, 2009
- B.Sc., Secondary Education (social studies) and History, University of Wisconsin, 2003
Selected Publications
Enright, E. A., Billings, M., Harris, N. F., & McNaughtan, J. (2026). “It was a perfect storm!” The case of navigating shared governance at Struggling State University during a fiscal crisis. New Directions in Higher Education. 2026(213): 15-23. http://doi.org/10.1002/he.70013
StPierre, T., Gillon, K., & Enright, E. A. (2026). When Good Intentions Collide: The Hidden Cost of Concurrent Enrollment. Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership. OnlineFirst.
Enright, E. A., & McNaughtan, J. (2025). To R1 or Not to R1? Considering faculty voices at a striving research university. Innovative Higher Education. 2026(51): 1121-1147.
McNaughtan, J., Enright, E. A., & Harris, N. F. (2024). A seat at the table: A conceptual model to frame shared governance from the perspectives of faculty senate presidents. Higher Education Policy. 38, 797-821.
Enright, E. A., & Toledo, W. (2023). What type of citizen am I? A study of preservice elementary teachers’ civic identities. Journal of Social Studies Education Research. 14(1): 83-109.
Enright, E. A., Toledo, W., & Wright, K. L. (2023). Advancing civics-specific disciplinary writing in the elementary grades. Journal of Writing Research. 15(1): 41-71.
Enright, E. A., & Wieczorek, D. (2022). Advancing a democratic pedagogy and supervision framework: An Illustrative case of teacher questioning in secondary mathematics instruction. Journal of Educational Supervision. 4(3): 17-45.