Dr. Denise M Horn is Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences of Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island.

From 2021-2024, Dr. Horn served as the Campus Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Wenzhou-Kean University in Zhejiang Province, China and Associate Dean, Kean University in Union NJ.

Before joining Wenzhou-Kean University in September 2021, Dr. Horn served as the Associate Dean of the Gwen Ifill College of Media, Arts and Humanities at Simmons University in Boston, Massachusetts. At Simmons, she also served as Associate Professor and Department Chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations, and as the Acting Chair and Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies.

Dr. Horn is an International Relations scholar. Her work explores the relationship of civil society development to democratic growth, focusing on women’s transnational activism and trends in global development strategies, such as social entrepreneurship. Her research spans the globe: Dr. Horn’s work has been based on field research in Moldova, Estonia, Thailand, Indonesia, and India. Her current research focuses on the effects of US and Japanese family planning aid in Southeast Asia.

She is the author of Democratic Governance and Social Entrepreneurship: Civic Participation and the Future of Democracy (Routledge 2013) and Women, Civil Society and the Geopolitics of Democratization (Routledge 2010), several peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters in edited volumes.

Believing that theory should be supported by praxis, for the past 15 years Dr. Horn has facilitated student workshops in social entrepreneurship and community development in Thailand, Indonesia, India, South Africa, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil.

Dr. Horn was a 2014 Fulbright Senior Scholar, conducting seminars in Foreign Policy at Universitas Andalas, in West Sumatra, Indonesia. In fall 2018, Dr. Horn was a Visiting Associate Professor at Osaka University, Osaka, Japan. She long served on the editorial board for Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and is the past Chair of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies section of the International Studies Association.