My name is Kevin Caffrey and I’m the Senior Associate Registrar at University of Mary Washington (UMW) in Fredericksburg, VA.  I was born in Queens, NY and raised on Long Island, where I lived for 33 years before relocating with my family to Virginia in 2009.  I earned both my master’s degree (M.A., English) and my bachelor’s degree (B.A., English and Psychology) from Long Island University – C.W. Post Campus.  I’ve been working in higher education since 2000, serving in several different capacities at public and private institutions.  In 2022, I earned my Ed.D. in Higher Education Leadership from VCU.  I’m also a singer/songwriter and have released several independent albums over the past few decades. My latest ones, Alchemy, and its counterpart, Alternative Alchemy, were released in 2022 and 2023 respectively and I’m currently working on another one to be released in 2025.  If you’re out and about at a brewery or winery in Virginia, you may very well catch me playing at one in 2024. 

My areas of interest in research include leadership, communication, empathy, and equity.  Recently published articles include “How Transformational Leadership Can Help Native American Students” (Journal of Educational Research and Practice) and “Speaking to the Head and the Heart: Prioritizing Empathetic Communication in the Post-COVID Workplace” (Business and Professional Communication). I was recently a guest on WOSU’s All Sides and spoke with host Matthew Rand of 89.7 NPR News about workplace culture and returning to the office post-COVID and on Empathy Unbound with Andrew Phipps about empathy in the workplace as well as our personal lives. I’m currently working on a paper on English majors, and hope to explore an artist’s mindset in the workplace in the future. In 2023, I designed and began teaching a freshmen seminar at UMW entitled You Have To Listen To This: Connecting Through Music about why we gravitate towards the music that we do and why sharing music with others is essential to cultivate social and interpersonal connections with others.

In my spare time, I enjoy running, reading, brewing beer, following the Baltimore Ravens, getting very frustrated with jigsaw puzzles, and spending time with my wife Debra and my son Aidan.