campus news

CAS announces 2023-24 Distinguished Visiting Scholars

Distinguished visiting scholars 2023-2024.

By JACKIE HAUSLER

Published May 24, 2023

Print
Donte McFadden.
“The new cohort is a dynamic group of scholars and artists who will make strong contributions to UB through their projects; engagement with faculty, staff and students; and their interaction with community members throughout Buffalo and Western New York. ”
Donte McFadden, director
Distinguished Visiting Scholars program

Ten highly accomplished scholars and artists will come to UB this fall as members of the newest cohort of the year-long Distinguished Visiting Scholars (DVS) program in the College of Arts and Sciences. Their work will help elucidate social inequality and advance social justice within the university and Buffalo community.

“The new cohort is a dynamic group of scholars and artists who will make strong contributions to UB through their projects; engagement with faculty, staff and students; and their interaction with community members throughout Buffalo and Western New York,” says Donte McFadden, director of the Distinguished Visiting Scholars program.

The members of the 2023-24 DVS cohort and their respective home departments in the college:

Sara Acevedao.

Sara María Acevedo, Global Gender and Sexuality Studies
Acevedo is an autistic Colombian-born scholar-activist and critical educator. Her research is committed to anti-colonial, anti-racist and anti-ableist praxis and is informed by transnational feminisms, subjugated knowledges and post-humanism. She is an assistant professor of disability studies at Miami University, where she advances disability justice across campus. Her work blends critical pedagogy, research and activism in solidarity with historically marginalized communities. Acevedo has received multiple diversity, equity and inclusion awards, including a grant from the Ford Foundation’s Disability Rights Program.

Will Bridges.

Will Bridges, Comparative Literature/Asian Studies
Bridges is the Arthur Satz Professor of the Humanities, associate professor of Japanese and core faculty member of the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies at the University of Rochester. His research and teaching have been recognized by the Fulbright Program, the Japan Foundation, the Association for Asian Studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Claudia Ford.

Claudia Ford, Environmental Sustainability/Indigenous Studies
Ford’s career in international development and women’s health spans four decades and all continents. She is professor and chair of the Department of Environmental Studies at SUNY Potsdam. Ford is a midwife and ethnobotanist, who teaches, conducts research and writes about traditional ecological knowledge, spiritual ecology, entheogenic plant medicine, women’s reproductive health and sustainable agriculture.

Christ Garrison-Harrison.

Christy Garrison-Harrison, History
Garrison-Harrison is an assistant professor of history and women, gender and sexuality studies at Southern University and Agricultural and Mechanical College. Her primary research foci are on the American South, with a concentration on Black women’s political leadership and influence upon economically developing Black communities within the region, Black womanist geographies and the cultural dynamics of white American matriarchy. Her secondary research interests include Afro-Latinx community advocacy and Black women in colonial Europe and America. Outside of research, writing and teaching, Garrison-Harrison is workshopping the peer-mentoring cohort model she developed to support junior faculty.

Sara Acevedao.

Al Heartley, Arts Management
Heartley is a passionate and mission-driven consultant based in Atlanta. A co-founder and partner at Evolution Management Consultants, Heartley studies arts organizations with an eye toward solve today’s most challenging problems. He was previously a co-founder and principal at ALJP Consulting, a search and strategic-planning firm working with arts organizations across the country. He co-founded the firm with a goal of bringing equity and inclusion to hiring and planning. Heartley previously served as managing director of the Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts at Northwestern University, as well as at other theaters across the country.

Sara Acevedao.

M. Nicole Horsley, Africana and American Studies
Horsley is an assistant professor of African diaspora studies and affiliate faculty in women’s, gender and sexuality studies and screen cultures at Ithaca College. Her primary research and teaching centers on the interplay between Black visual culture, sexual economies, Black ontologies, consumption, material culture, dis/ability and sensualism in exploring the politics of pleasure and perversion grounded in close contextual reading practices. Horsley is also a member of the Pleasure Project, a collective of scholars in Canada and the U.S. who were recently awarded an Emerging Projects Award for 2023-24 at the Queer and Trans Research Lab (QTRL) in the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto.

Sara Acevedao.

AJ Kim, Geography
Kim is an associate professor of city planning in the School of Public Affairs at San Diego State University. Kim’s research is focused on immigrant participation in the informal economy and ethnic labor markets, as well as problems of community development and urban inequality more broadly. They have partnered with Los Angeles- and Atlanta-area municipalities and NGOs on planning for immigrant integration, with a focus on the experiences of undocumented/unauthorized Asian, African and Latinx immigrants and refugees. Their research has received grant awards from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, American Studies Association, GT Center for Urban Innovation, UC Center for New Racial Studies (University of California, Santa Barbara) and the UCLA and UC Berkeley Institutes for Research on Labor and Employment.

Sara Acevedao.

Bakari Kitwana, Africana and American Studies
Kitwana is an internationally known cultural critic, journalist, activist and thought leader in the areas of hip-hop and Black youth political engagement. He is the executive director of Rap Sessions: Community Dialogues on Hip-Hop, which for the past 17 years has conducted more than 150 town hall meetings around the nation on difficult dialogues facing the millennial generation. Kitwana has been editor-in-chief of The Source magazine, editorial director of Third World Press and co-founder of the 2004 National Hip-Hop Political Convention. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he co-founded the “Hip-Hop Political Education Summit,” which convened two major virtual gatherings: “The Hip-Hop Political Education Summit on Voter Suppression” and “The Hip-Hop Political Education Summit on Black Men and the Vote.”

Sara Acevedao.

Rosy Simas, Theatre and Dance/Indigenous Studies
Simas is a transdisciplinary and dance artist, and enrolled member of the Seneca Nation, Heron clan. She lives and works in Mni Sota Makoce (Minneapolis). Her knowledge of her Haudenosaunee family and lineage is the underpinning of her relationship to culture and history — stored in her body — which is expressed through her work of moving people, moving images and moving objects that she makes for stage and installation. Simas’ work weaves personal and collective identity themes with family, sovereignty, equality and healing. She creates dance work with a team of Native and diverse artists, driven by movement-vocabularies developed through deep listening.

Salvador Vidal-Ortiz.

Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, Sociology
Vidal-Ortiz is an associate professor of sociology at American University. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and special-collection essays, and will use his time as a DVS fellow to work on his manuscript on Santería, race, gender and sexuality. Vidal-Ortiz co-authored the book “Race and Sexuality” and co-edited, in English, “The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men” and “Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism,” and in Spanish, “Travar el Saber” (“Trans-ing Knowledges”) on education and trans people in Argentina.

The Distinguished Visiting Scholars will bring their impressive resumes to campus in August and collaborate throughout the year to promote diversity, equity and inclusion at UB. The DVS program will engage the entire UB community, providing opportunities for new scholarly, artistic, curricular and pedagogical collaborations and access to scholars’ work through public presentations, performances, exhibitions, guest lectures, workshops and informal social gatherings. 

“As the new director of DVS, I am excited to work with this cohort because I have a lot to learn from them in their multiple areas of expertise,” McFadden says. “I also want to provide a productive and memorable experience that will be a highlight in their professional careers and their personal lives.”

The selection process for the program involved a review of the applications by a committee of eight members including Millie Chen, Art; Luis Colón, associate dean for inclusive excellence, Chemistry; Devonya Havis, Comparative Literature; Lindsay Brandon Hunter, Theatre and Dance; Theresa McCarthy, Six Nations Onondaga, Beaver Clan, associate dean for inclusive excellence, Indigenous Studies; Sara Metcalf, Geography; Yunju Nam, School of Social Work; and Doreen Wackeroth, Physics.

For more information about the program, visit the DVS website.