Board Bios
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Bruce Burgett, Chair
Bruce Burgett is professor and director of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell, and director of the UW Graduate Certificate in Public Scholarship. He is the author of Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic, and co-editor of Keywords for American Cultural Studies. He serves on the editorial Read more...
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Kim Yasuda, Vice Chair
Kim Yasuda is professor of Spatial Studies in the Department of Art at University of California, Santa Barbara, and is co-director of the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts. She established the Friday Academy, a temporary instructional environment within the university that maintains its own academic calendar and experimental curricula to conduct Read more...
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Kal Alston
Kal Alston is Senior Vice President for Human Capital Development at Syracuse University and professor in Cultural Foundations of Education and in Women’s and Gender Studies. As Senior Associate Provost, she is invested in helping academic units leverage all resources and create fruitful collaborations, inside and outside of the University, to broaden the academic impact Read more...
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Ron Bechet
Ron Bechet is professor of Art at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans. He is co-author of “The New Hybridity: HOME, New Orleans and Emerging Forms of Community/University/Arts Collaboration.” Bechet serves on the College Art Association, New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, Community Arts Partnerships Institute, Community Arts Convening and Research Project based at Read more...
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Adam Bush
Adam Bush is founding director of curriculum of College Unbound, a college degree program working to create a more just higher education for first generation college students and to influence higher education policy. Bush is also a doctoral candidate in American Studies and Ethnicity Department at the University of Southern California, completing his dissertation, “Passing Read more...
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Dudley Cocke
Dudley Cocke is artistic director of Roadside Theater at Appalshop, the multidisciplinary arts and education center in the heart of Appalachia that was founded in 1969 as part of the federal War on Poverty. He is the author of “The Unreported Arts Recession of 1997” and “Class and Performing Arts.” Cocke is a trustee of Read more...
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Matthew Countryman
Matthew Countryman is faculty director of University of Michigan’s Arts of Citizenship program, and is associate professor of History and American Culture, where he teaches modern U.S. and African-American history and comparative race relations. Countryman is the author of Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia, which won the 2006 Liberty Legacy Foundation Read more...
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Sylvia Gale
Sylvia Gale is associate director of the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement at the University of Richmond, and founding director of Imagining America’s Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) program. At University of Texas where she completed her doctoral work, she played a key role at the Humanities Institute, helping to develop Writing Austin’s Lives: A Read more...
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Amy Koritz
Amy Koritz is director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Drew University, and professor of English. She is the author of Gendering Bodies/Performing Art and Culture Makers: Urban Performance and Literature in the 1920s. She is co-editor of Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina and has written about civic engagement in the humanities Read more...
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Pam Korza
Pam Korza is co-director of Animating Democracy, a program of Americans for the Arts, that fosters arts and humanities activity that encourages civic dialogue and engagement on contemporary issues. Korza is currently working on IMPACT Arts, an initiative to advance understanding of and help make the case for the social efficacy of arts-based civic engagement Read more...
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Sonja Arsham Kuftinec
Sonja Arsham Kuftinec is a Professor of Theatre at the University of Minnesota. She has created and published widely on community-based theatre and theatre as a technique of conflict transformation in the Balkans and Middle East including Theatre, Facilitation and Nation Formation in the Balkans and Middle East (Palgrave, 2009). Her current research focuses on Read more...
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Teresa Mangum
Teresa Mangum, associate professor of English and director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, University of Iowa, has published articles about the ways scholars studying earlier historical periods can undertake engaged teaching and scholarship, including a forthcoming essay in the journal Pedagogy. She is a co-founder of the Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and Read more...
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Randy Martin
Randy Martin is founding director of the graduate program in Arts Politics at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and is chair and professor of the Department of Art and Public Policy. He is the author of Under New Management: Universities, Administrative Labor, and the Professional Turn; Performance as Political Act: The Read more...
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David Maurrasse
David Maurrasse is president and founder of Marga Incorporated, a consulting firm that provides strategic advisory services and research to a range of institutions including foundations, corporations, universities, and government agencies. He is also affiliated with Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and is director and founder of the Earth Institute’s Program on Read more...
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Barbara Ransby
Barbara Ransby is director of the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at University of Illinois at Chicago, and is associate professor in the Department of African American Studies and History. She is the author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. She is currently working on two major research projects: a Read more...
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John Saltmarsh
John Saltmarsh is the Co-Director of the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE) at the University of Massachusetts, Boston as well as a faculty member in the Higher Education Administration Doctoral Program in the Department of Leadership in Education in the College of Education and Human Development. He is the author, most recently, Read more...
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George Sanchez
George J. Sanchez is Vice Dean for Diversity and Strategic Initiatives at the University of Southern California, and professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, and History. He is the author of Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945, and ‘What’s Good for Boyle Heights is Good for the Jews’: Creating Read more...
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Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen
Jack Tchen is founding director of Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute at New York University and co-founder of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. He is also co-founder and senior historian at the Museum of Chinese in America. He is editor of The ‘Yellow Peril’ Reader: Understanding Xenophobia, and author of New York before Read more...
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Anne Valk
Anne Valk is associate director for programs of the John Nicholas Brown Center at Brown University, where she coordinates the Fox Point Oral History Project. She recently published a collection of oral history interviews, Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Jim Crow South, using interviews housed at Duke University. Her research interests Read more...
