Impact — Winter 2022

About the Authors and Editors

Cheryl C. Boots, Ph.D. is a retired Senior Lecturer in Humanities at Boston University’s College of General Studies. She is the author of Singing for Equality: Hymns in the American Antislavery and Indian Rights Movements, 1640-1855 (McFarland, 2013). Her book in progress is When the Spirit Says Sing: Music in the Southern Freedom Movement, 1955- 1965. A trained family and community mediator and trainer, she is a founding member and past Executive Committee Coordinator of the Marblehead Racial Justice Team, a community antiracism organization.

Jean Dunlavy has taught US and world history to university and high school students. She holds a PhD in history from Boston University and has a keen interest in pedagogy.

Suchismita Dutta is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow and a faculty member at the School of Literature Media and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology. She recently completed her PhD in English from the University of Miami where she also held the position of the Composition Program Fellow. Her research and teaching incorporate critical race and ethnic studies, academic diversity policies, and multimodal pedagogies. Suchi was the winner of the University of Miami’s Outstanding Teaching Assistant award 2020-2021. She was also one of three selected presenters at the 2020 Emerging Scholars Symposium hosted by the College of General Studies at Boston University.

Sasha B. Goldman is the Assistant Director for PhD Professional Development within Professional Development & Postdoctoral Affairs (PDPA). In this capacity, she oversees the Core Capacities curriculum and the PhD Progression digital-badging platform for PhD students, and develops regular programming, workshops, and trainings for current doctoral students. Sasha also produces the Vitamin PhD podcast, a unique resource providing career and professional development advice and resources for doctoral students at BU and beyond. During her time at BU, she has served in leadership roles at the departmental and University levels as co-chair of the Office of Research Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee and as chair of the Core Capacities Advisory Group. Sasha joined the PDPA team in the spring of 2020, after completing her PhD in the History of Art & Architecture at Boston University. She is currently a Lecturer in Contemporary art in the History of Art & Architecture Department.

Kelly Opdycke received a PhD in Cultural Studies from Claremont Graduate University in Fall 2020. Her dissertation “Diversity as Contingent: An Intersectional Ethnographic Interrogation of and Resistance Against Neoliberal Academia’s Exploitation of Contingent Faculty in General Education Diversity Courses” utilized historiography, ethnography, and autoethnography to interrogate the use of marginalized contingent faculty in GE courses that deal with race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, immigration, and so on. Her research interests include critical university studies, disability studies, and poor queer studies. Currently, she lectures and organizes with other contingent faculty in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University, Northridge and the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. She hopes for a more care-oriented, less neoliberal university.

Phitsamay S. Uy is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at University of Massachusetts Lowell. She is the author of “From the Mekong River to the Merrimack River: One Lao-American refugee journey through the academy,” which appears in Endo, R. (Ed.), Experiences of Racialization in U.S. Colleges and Schools of Education: Critical Reflections on Inclusion in the Academy (Research in Educational Equality & Diversity Series).