Seven African American Scholars Taking on New Faculty Assignments

Professor Andre Christie-Mizell (Vanderbilt Photo / Daniel Dubois)C. Andre Christie-Mizell, an associate professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, was named senior associate dean for undergraduate education at university. He will take on his new duties at the beginning of the 2016-17 academic year. Dr. Christie-Mizell is an associate professor of sociology at the university. He joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 2010 after teaching at Kent State University and the University of Akron, both in Ohio.

Dr. Christie-Mizell is a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio. He holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in sociology and social psychology from Ohio State University.

RandallJennifer Randall, an associate professor of psychometric methods, has been given the added duty as interim associate dean for academic affairs in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts.

Dr. Randall holds bachelor’s and master’s degree from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. She earned a Ph.D. at Emory University in Atlanta.

Schween, Astrid_1Astrid Schween will join the faculty at the Juilliard School in New York City. She has been a professor of cello in the department of music and dance at the University of Massachusetts since 2004. She will become the cellist of the prestigious Julliard String Quartet. She will be the first woman and the first African American to join the Quartet.

Professor Schween holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Juilliard School. Professor Schween made her debut as soloist with the New York Philharmonic when she was a teenager and has since performed throughout the world.

Campus_042111Erica Armstrong Dunbar was appointed the Blue and Gold Professor of Black American Studies and History at the University of Delaware. In addition to her duties at the university, Dr. Armstrong Dunbar is the inaugural director of the Program in African American history at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the nation’s oldest library. She is the author of A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (Yale University Press, 2008).

Professor Dunbar is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and earned master’s and doctoral degrees at Columbia University.

husonward5Alexia Hudson-Ward will join the staff at Oberlin College in Ohio on July 1 as the Azariah Smith Root Director of Libraries. She currently serves as a tenured associate librarian at Pennsylvania State University. She has been at Penn State since 2006.

Hudson-Ward is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, where she double majored in English and African American studies. She holds a master of library and information science degree from the University of Pittsburgh and is studying for a Ph.D. in managerial leadership in the information professions at Simmons College in Boston.

Phillip+Atiba+Goff_thmbPhillip Atiba Goff was appointed the inaugural holder of the Franklin A. Thomas Professorship in Policing Equity at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. The endowed chair was funded by a $2.5 million donation from the Ford Foundation and the Atlantic Philanthropies. Franklin Thomas was president of the Ford Foundation from 197 to 1996.

Dr. Goff has been serving as an associate professor of social psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a graduate of Harvard University and holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University.

melissamurrayMelissa Murray, a professor in the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, will serve as interim dean of the law school. Professor Murray joined the faculty at Berkeley Law in 2006. She teaches courses on family law, criminal law, constitutional law, and reproductive rights. Professor Murray also serves as the faculty director of the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice at the law school.

Professor Murray is a graduate of the University of Virginia and Yale Law School.

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