For Teaneck, for You! In this two-part community lecture and lab series, diversity and justice scholars provide a platform for understanding and discussing modern community divisions.
In the second part of this series, community leaders and scholars invite the community to build on the initial foundational work from the first session, to collectively plan and develop strategies for developing a more inclusive community.
The broader goal of this series is to build on Teaneck’s historical position as a leader and champion of diversity and equity.
Panel II: March 24 at 7:30 PM | Register
Martha Pitts, Ph.D., Fairleigh Dickinson University, is an Assistant Professor of English and teaches the literature of a multicultural America using texts that engage students with conflicting and competing ideas of Americanness. She has taught at several institutions, including Georgetown University, Howard University, Towson University, and Louisiana State University. Her work has appeared in Staging Women’s Lives in Academia: Gendered Life Stages in Language and Literature (SUNY Press 2017), Patricia Hill Collins: Reconceiving Motherhood (Demeter Press 2014), Callaloo, Times-Picayune, Washington City Paper, Gambit Weekly, and in the Ms. blog. With Professor Barbara McCaskill, from the University of Georgia, Martha is preparing an annotated edition of the memoir Twice Sold, Twice Ransomed (1926) by the black Seattle-based evangelists Emma and Lloyd P. Ray for West Virginia University Press’s series called Regenerations: African American Literature and Culture.
Adam Rudder, Ph.D., Fairleigh Dickinson University, was born in Vancouver and completed his Master of Arts degree in history at the University of Victoria, where he wrote about the Hogan’s Alley community in Strathcona. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Ljubljana where he documented the experiences of people of African descent who arrived to Socialist Yugoslavia primarily through Tito scholarships. He is currently full-time faculty at Fairleigh Dickinson University (Vancouver) where he teaches in the Department of Literature, Languages, Writing, and Humanities. Adam is also a founding member of the Hogan’s Alley Society, which is committed to the research and writing of Black experience in the 20th century British Columbia. He is also a founding member of the BC Community Alliance, an organization that emerged out of a need for more comprehensive approaches to confronting anti-black racism in schools in the lower mainland.
Jordan Nowotny, Ph.D., Fairleigh Dickinson University, earned his Ph.D. in Criminology, Law and Justice from the University of Illinois at Chicago and teaches courses related to restorative justice, post-conflict transitional justice, and critical criminology. His research centers on state crime, international justice reform initiatives, and wrongful conviction. In addition to his role at FDU, Jordan is an advisory board member at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Education at the College of St. Elizabeth, editorial board member for Contemporary Justice Review, and consults on human rights education. His work has been published in a variety of academic journals including Conflict Resolution Quarterly, Contemporary Justice Review, and the Wrongful Conviction Law Review.