My name is Kevin Caffrey and I’m the Senior Associate Registrar and an instructor at University of Mary Washington (UMW) in Fredericksburg, VA.  

A lot of my professional writing has focused on leadership, communication, and empathy within higher education and has been published in Journal of Educational Research and Practice and Business and Professional Communication Quarterly. I’ve been featured in Business Insider, and I’ve discussed my work and research on NPR News, With Good Reason Radio, the Mary Talks lecture series, and Empathy Unbound with Andrew Phipps. I’m also a musician and singer/songwriter and write each week about the creative process so please subscribe at creativehours.substack.com. I’m currently working on a book that will be an extension of a first-year seminar I developed and teach at UMW called You Have to Listen to This: Connecting Through Music. This course focuses on discovering why we gravitate towards the music that we do and why sharing music–and sharing the reasons we like music–with others is essential for cultivating meaningful social and interpersonal connections with others. I’m hoping to get this book published to share with others about what I’ve discovered can be accomplished when we dive in deeper to understand why we love the music that we love and how sharing these reasons with others is a great way to develop understanding, connection, and empathy.

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 (LIU) 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.  As a musician, I’ve 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 hopefully to be released at the end of 2026. If you’re out and about at a brewery or winery in Virginia, you may very well catch me playing at one. 

In my spare time, I enjoy reading, running, biking, swimming, following the Baltimore Ravens, getting very frustrated with jigsaw puzzles and then taking long breaks from doing any, and of course, spending time with my wife Debra and my son Aidan.