2024 Participants

  • As an online adjunct professor, Dr. Benita Junette Brown teaches dance history and theory. She has served in the Department of Health, Physical Education, Recreation, Dance, and Sport Management at Virginia State University since 1999.

    Career Achievements

    In 2005, Dr. Brown created Virginia State University's dance curriculum, which includes African-Caribbean Dance, Modern Dance, Jazz Dance, Ballet, Dance Repertory, Dance Composition, and History of Dance and the Black Experience. She is the founding director of VSU's Sankofa Dance Theatre, a performing arts group composed of students who minor in the dance program.

    Awards and Recognitions

    Dr. Brown has received numerous awards and recognitions throughout her career, including the Choreographer's Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, the 5-County Arts Fund from Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, the Presenters Stipend from the Virginia Commission of the Arts, and Virginia's African-American Heritage grant from the Virginia Foundation for Humanities and Social Change.

    Research and Publications

    Dr. Brown's research interests include the study of dance throughout the African Diaspora, specifically performative studies of spiritual and social dances. She has published with Scarecrow Press, Myth Performance in the African Diasporas: Ritual, Theatre, and Dance, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and the Philadelphia Folklore Project's Works in Progress.

    She recently received the Art for Social Change Grant (2022) from the Leeway Foundation and the Credible Messenger Grant (2023-2024) from the Credible Messenger Foundation for Gun Violence in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.


  • Carlyn Ferrari is an Assistant Professor of English at Seattle University.  Her first book, Do Not Separate Her from Her Garden: Anne Spencer’s Ecopoetics (UVA Press, 2022) is a study of poet and civil rights activist Anne Spencer’s environmental ethos. In her research, she explores how Black women theorize the natural world and considers the intersections between Black feminist thought and literary ecocriticism. She is currently working on a project about Black women’s gardens and gardening practices. She hails from the San Francisco Bay Area and holds a Ph.D. in Afro-American Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Outside of the classroom, she lives for Janet Jackson and Prince. She is a writer and a thinker at heart, so you can find her lost in thought and meditating on the brilliance of Rhythm Nation and Paisley Park.

  • Crescida Jacobs, PhD, (she/her) is a professor of History and Humanities and a Faculty Academy facilitator at Houston Community College. She is a first-generation college student whose dissertation focused on Norman women and power in the High Middle Ages. At HCC Dr. Jacobs primarily teaches history and humanities survey courses which focus on issues of women, gender, and sexuality or minority studies. Dr. Jacobs earned an A.A. from Palomar College, California, a B.A. and M.L.A. from Houston Baptist University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Houston. She was born and raised in Appalachia but now lives in the Houston suburbs with her wife and their rescue dogs.

  • Associate Professor

    Assistant Professor Albert Lacson teaches courses that focus on race and ethnicity in US history, including Native American and African American history, race in early America, comparative slavery, and European-Indian relations in colonial North America. In his research, he seeks to illuminate the implications of a fundamental fact of colonial North American history: the continent's native peoples constituted a demographic majority over European colonists. Lacson's dissertation, "Ambiguities of Conquest: Indians and Missionaries in Alta California, 1769-1821," examines Indian-Spanish relations during the period of Spanish colonization in California. Courses Regularly Taught: HIS 100: Making History: The Rise and Fall of New World Slavery HIS 225: Native American History, 1491-1865 HIS 227: African-American History HIS 295: Special Topic: Early American/Native American Perspectives Seminars Taught: HIS 321: Colonial Encounters in North America

  • Isaac Cohen is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at Auburn University. He has two decades of experience working on all aspects of park and urban public space issues from design, fundraising and advocacy to building public spaces to research and community engagement to address critical issues impacting the use of public space. Most recently he was an Associate at Studio Outside Landscape Architecture in Dallas, TX where he worked on projects ranging from built works to city scale equitable development planning. Prior to Studio Outside he worked on a range of projects including Activating Vacancy, an arts and community led placemaking initiative in the Tenth Street Historic District and Race and the Control of Public Parks, an analysis of the relationship between Dallas’ public park system and residential racial segregation. He holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Virginia and a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Studio Art from Vassar College.

  • Trained as an archaeologist and anthropologist, Teri Edwards-Hewitt is an adjunct professor of Anthropology at Montgomery College (Maryland), which is recognized as a HIS and an AANAPISI and is a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Studies at George Mason University. Core classes she teaches include Native North American Cultures and Introduction to Anthropology. She has also taught a range of anthropology courses for UMBC (University of Maryland – Baltimore County). She earned her MA in Anthropology and Museum Studies at George Washington University.

    She was co-principal investigator for the Center for Humanities Research project “Alienation and Belonging in Northern Virginia” which examined the importance of creating community for recent Latina/o immigrants, primarily using oral histories. The project was funded by George Mason University and Virginia Humanities.

    Teri worked as a museum aide and oral historian for the Office of Historic Alexandria, Virginia and was a research assistant on several volumes of the Smithsonian Institutions’ “Handbook of North American Indians.” While the primary focus of her graduate research is on digital humanities and gender; other research interests include oral history; memory studies; how people create communities online and in person; and the long nineteenth century. Publications include “Immigrant Alexandria: An Ongoing Oral History Project” and “#PutYourSticksOut: Public Expressions of Grief on Twitter about the Humboldt Broncos Accident.” She is active in the LGBTQ+ Alliance of Museum Professionals; The Popular Culture Association; and the Nineteenth Centuries Studies Association.

  • DeLisa D. Hawkes is an assistant professor of Africana Studies and an affiliate faculty of the Department of English and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her current book project, Separate Yet Intertwined: Rediscovering Black Indigeneity in the New Negro Renaissance, examines literary representations of Black Indigeneity and its impact on narratives of kinship and citizenship in New Negro Renaissance-era literature. Hawkes’s work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, including J19, MELUS, Women’s Studies, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, Langston Hughes Review, Studies in the Fantastic, North Carolina Literary Review, 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past (2020), and Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion W. Tourgée (2023). She was a 2023-2024 faculty fellow at the Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts.

  • Nazanin Ghaffari is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture (Place- and Community-Based Planning and Design) at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. She is also a Social Science Research Council Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow, where she conducts ethnographic research on how an artist-led Black organization in South Side Chicago operates within traditional managerial logics of civic, commercial, educational, and philanthropic investment, governance, and accountability regimes in a community with a deep history of anti-Black racism. Her teaching and research focus on how exclusion manifests in place design, programming, policing, and management and how artistic interventions and bottom-up innovations can empower historically marginalized communities to advance social, racial, and environmental justice. With a background in architecture, urban design, and urban planning, Nazanin has over a decade of experience with organizations like the United Nations, Asia-Pacific Slum Upgrading Working Group, and grassroots organizations in the Middle East and North America.

  • Katharine Jager is a poet and medieval scholar. She is Professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, and the editor of Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages: Politics, Performativity and Reception from Literature to Music (Palgrave, New Middle Ages Series, 2019), among other publications. Her current scholarship considers the construction of what Imani Perry calls “the fact of a human being,” via questions of bodily sovereignty in late medieval texts, and explores the historical relationship between the late medieval Statutes of Laborers and itinerancy, and their role in shaping 19th century American convict leasing laws (forthcoming, Exemplaria.) She teaches core courses rooted in place: on food justice and ethics, that includes a service learning component at local community gardens; and on reparations and redlining that includes a digital mapping component identifying and reclaiming sites of racial, historic importance on UH-D’s centrally located Houston campus.

  • As both a lifelong student of world history, politics and inter-state relations and a teacher thereof, Stephen’s scholarship and research centers primarily on Africa’s relations within the continent, with the west and comparatively, ‘South-South’, with BRICs and the ‘east.’ He has been in higher education over 15 years; his appointments have included: Assistant Professor of Political Science, Adjunct Professor of Government and Professor of International Relations. The appointments have been at Norfolk State, Hampton University, Old Dominion University, Regent University, the Junior State of America and the Kenya Polytechnic. Stephen graduated in 2013 with a PhD in International Studies from Old Dominion University, holds an MSW (Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis) and a B.Ed. (A) from Kenyatta University. Although his doctoral concentration was GPE (Global Political Economy), his minor was in US Foreign Policy. From dissertation to first book, Peace Corps and Citizen Diplomacy: Soft Power Strategies in U.S. Foreign Policy, most of his recent research and scholarship have focused on Africa’s foreign policy – other countries’ foreign policy towards Africa, Africa’s foreign policy from institutional perspectives (OAU, AU) and more recently, on Regional Economic Communities and their impacts on member countries’ behavior and their citizens’ well-being.

  • Ladi'Sasha Jones (she, her) is a writer, designer and curator from New York. Her research-based practice explores Black spatial histories through text, sculpture and public engagement. She has written for Aperture, Arts.Black, e-flux Criticism, Gagosian Quarterly, and The Art Momentum. Her project, Black Interior Space / Spatial Thought was commissioned by THE SHED (NYC) as a part of Open Call 2021 and was the recipient of a 2021 Research and Development award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. As an arts administrator, Jones held appointments at The Laundromat Project, Norton Museum of Art, New Museum’s IdeasCity platform, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University, and holds a M.A. in Arts Politics from New York University and B.A. in African American Studies from Temple University.

  • Tabitha A. Morgan, Assistant Professor in Community College of Philadelphia’s History, Gender, and English departments, recently 

    received the García-Robles Fulbright award as the US Studies Chair for the North American Studies Program at the University of Veracruz, Mexico. Morgan’s research and teaching centers in working class women’s art and cultural productions, the histories of the Americas, inclusive radical feminism, and the intersection of indigeneity, place-identity, and psychocultural expression. 

  • Dr. Kiana T. Murphy is a scholar-artist and Assistant Professor of American Studies at Brown University.  She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her creative and scholarly work bridges the intellectual traditions of Black speculative aesthetics, Black girlhood studies, Black feminism and queer theory, visual cultures, and Black women writers' archives. In 2022-2023, she was a Huntington Library Mellon Fellow researching in the Octavia E. Butler papers, and is currently completing a manuscript that bridges the speculative worldbuilding practices and archives of contemporary Black women writers and theorists. Her research and creative work is published or forthcoming in The Black Scholar, American Quarterly, Science Fiction and Fantasy Journal, MELUS, the University Press of Mississippi, Oxford University Press, and elsewhere. She is a proud native of Washington, DC.

  • Department of Landscape Architecture

    Assistant Professor

    Nicholas Serrano came to UF from the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University where he holds the Neil Odenwald Professorship. He has a Bachelor of Science in horticulture from North Carolina State University, a Master of landscape architecture from Ball State University, and a Ph.D. in the design program at North Carolina State University. Nicholas has taught introductory ecology, ornamental landscape plants, planting design, and various histories of the built environment at North Carolina State University and Ball State University.  His main research project looks at the history of landscape architecture and urban development of the American South. His writing spans the disciplines of Landscape and Environmental History, Southern Studies, and Material Culture to consider the construction of racial identity through the built environment. His secondary research and teaching interests are in contemporary planting design and horticultural technologies in landscape architecture.

  • Stina Soderling’s research expertise is in Rural Queer Studies, with a focus on the U.S. South. Her writing and research explores questions of queer community-building and place-making, and human interactions with the more-than-human world. She is particularly interested in how time functions in rural and queer spaces. In her methodological practice, she is interested in what mundane tasks, such as bread baking and composting, can teach us, and how working with our hands and physical bodies influences our feminist theorizing.

    Soderling also works in the field of feminist pedagogy. Her writings on pedagogy have been published in Feminist Formations and Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice. She is committed to collaborative research and writing, including working with student research teams. Soderling is a co-founder and facilitator of “Beyond Grading,” a study group on assessment practices for feminist faculty with members at over a dozen colleges and universities.

  • Professor Jose R. Vazquez is a faculty member at Miami Dade College's School of Architecture and Interior Design, where he teaches courses in architecture, interior design, and history. In 2022, he served as the Fulbright-Garcia Robles U.S. Studies Chair in Mexico, lecturing and instructing graduate courses on U.S. architecture and heritage landscapes at the Universidad de Guadalajara. He has curated numerous architectural exhibitions showcasing Miami's historic architecture. As a member of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, he serves on its board of directors. Currently, he is the project director for an NEH Digital Projects for the Public grant titled "Going Overtown: A Digital Project for Miami," which aims to develop a virtual reality immersive experience and website to explore historic African American neighborhoods in South Florida.

  • Ramya is an environmental scholar of North America and South Asia with prior degrees in environmental history, urban design, political science, science technology studies, and journalism. Her research—whether in India or North America—is premised on a central question: what is nature? And how does something become nature? Thus, she is interested in how humans (and non-humans) fashion our familiarities, especially through the lens of infrastructure creation. Ramya researches infrastructure creation/imagination, nature, and knowledge transfers in the 19th and 20th centuries between as well as in North America and South Asia. Her current monograph Islands in the Straits draws upon my award-winning doctoral work on the Detroit River and the North American Great Lakes. Ramya has been published in academic journals like Water History as well as public-facing avenues.

  • Dr. Peter Wang is an Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Kentucky, where he specializes in modern/contemporary art, American art, and the history of photography. Before joining Kentucky, he taught at Saint Mary’s College (Indiana) and Butler University. Wang holds a Ph.D. in Art History from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Wang’s primary research examines the enduring marriage between photography and the American road trip. His recent article in Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art revisits Wing Young Huie’s photographs from his 2001-02 cross-country road trip in the United States in relation to Asian American identity and experience. Wang previously taught Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Art and Asian Americas: Empire, Diaspora, and Identity in the Modern World at Butler University. At Kentucky, he is currently designing a seminar on Race and Representation and developing a second book project on Asian American photography.

  • Meghan Townes (she/her) is an American Studies PhD candidate at Boston University. Her dissertation examines how an assemblage of art-related activities enabled residents of Richmond, Virginia, to contest and negotiate visions of their city’s future in the Reconstruction and New South eras. She holds an M. A. in Public Humanities from the American Studies Department at Brown University and a B. A. in Anthropology from the College of William and Mary. Meghan has worked in museum registration and collections management for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the George Washington Foundation, and, most recently, the Library of Virginia. Her work has appeared in The Oral History Review, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Broadside: The Magazine of the Library of Virginia. 

  • Michelle Diane Wright was born and raised in Frederick, Maryland. She attended Dartmouth College Hanover, New Hampshire. She earned a B.A. in English and Art History. Michelle furthered her career at The Ohio State University where she earned an M.A. in Black Studies and and M.S. in Political Science, and also taught the course Introduction to Black Studies and Introduction to Political Science.

    Since then, Michelle has been involved with a number of projects ranging from journal publications to book design. For five years, she published Natural Alternatives, an Afrikan centered guide for holistic living, enjoying a readership of close to 10,000. She also edited The Case of Marshall Eddie Conway, a book exploring the legal battles of a former Black Panther and political prisoner, and wrote Let's Learn Swahili. Michelle has been published in the Western Journal of Black Studies, the Afro American Newspaper, and numerous other publications nationwide. Her most recent book published in 2007 was Broken Utterances: An Anthology of 19th Black Women's Social Thought. She is currently working on a biography of labor/anarchist leader Lucy Parsons.

    Michelle currently lives in Baltimore with her daughter Alexandra where she teachings history and women's studies at the Community College of Baltimore County.

  • Dan Bacalzo is an Associate Professor and Theatre Program Coordinator at Florida Gulf Coast University. He received both his M.A. and Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and previously taught in the Dept. of Drama at New York University and the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College. He is the former artistic director of Peeling, an Asian American writing/performance collective. He wrote and performed in the solo shows I’m Sorry, But I Don’t Speak the Language and Sort of Where I’m Coming From, and is also the author of Say Something, a one-act play. He worked over 15 years as a theatre editor and critic in New York City, including eight years as managing editor of TheaterMania.com. His academic publications include articles and/or reviews in Theatre Journal, TDR, and The Journal of American Drama and Theatre. Among his scholarly interests are community-based performance and Asian American Theatre.

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