(In order of appearance)
Keynote
Address
Dr.
Stephanie Aisha Steplight Johnson,
Dean of Liberal
Arts and Sciences at Essex County College, Newark, NJ
Dr. Stephanie Aisha Steplight Johnson is an educator who has over 20 years of experience administering academic units and programs at colleges and universities. Her passion has been to work with units to help diverse students to achieve academic success in preparation for career and life success. She is the Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Essex County College (ECC), which includes the Africana Studies Institute, Bilingual Studies, Biology and Chemistry, Humanities, Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, Math and Physics, Social Sciences and the Urban Issues Institute. Previously, she was the South Carolina State University Executive Director of the Academic Success Academy, which served as the base for the newly-created Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) for faculty professional development, the General Education Curriculum (GEC) review efforts, and the planned Early College High School.
Dr. Steplight Johnson formerly served as the Associate Director of the Office of Diversity and Pluralism (ODP) in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources (CANR) at Michigan State University (MSU), where she implemented programs to interest, recruit, fund, and retain diverse graduate students. There, among other efforts, she worked with faculty in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, the Graduate School, the Office for Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives, HBCUs, diverse professional organizations that served Chicano and Native American groups (e.g., SACNAS), as well as African American and other groups (e.g., MANRRS). She was a member of the CANR Office of Academic and Student Affairs Faculty Learning Community (FLC) on Evaluating Excellence in Teaching, and co-authored the article “Evaluating Teaching Excellence Across Diverse Disciplinary Units Within Agriculture Higher Education,” published in the NACTA Journal (2010, March), and she also co-presented a poster session at the MSU Faculty and Organizational Development (FOD) FLC conference.
Previously, she served as the Special Assistant to the Provost and Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) at St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she administered various college-wide faculty development initiatives funded by Title III, the Bush-Hewlett Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. While there, she also taught African American Studies and the Freshman Seminar. At St. Augustine’s College, she was also a member of the Curriculum Council, Honors Council, and Institutional Review Board (IRB), and was appointed as the college’s representative on the Board of Directors for the local non-profit organization, “Strengthening the Black Family.” While at St. Aug, she was also Co-Director of the college’s National Youth Sports Program (NYSP) summer camp (2006 and 2007).
Dr. Steplight Johnson was Project Administrator for the NSF-funded SMART program (Science and Math Access to Resources and Technology) at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). SMART worked with pre-college elementary and middle school students who had special needs, and relative to her job she served on the Executive Board of the Newark Special Education Parent Advisory Council (SEPAC) led by parent advocate Angela McBride. Prior to that her other role at NJIT was Assistant Director of the Educational Talent Search Program which is a Federal TRIO program.
Dr. Steplight Johnson earned a Doctorate of Philosophy in African American Studies from Temple University (1996), a Master of Arts in Counseling, Human Services and Guidance from Montclair State University (1988), and a Bachelor of Applied Science in Engineering and Social Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1984). She received a Fulbright Dissertation Fellowship for Research conducted in Ghana (1994-1995). Her other travels to Africa include studying in Ghana as a graduate student in the summer of 1993 as part of the Temple University African American Studies Study Abroad program; South Africa in May 2007 as a chaperone for students at Saint Augustine’s College in Raleigh; and Kenya as a high school student in the American Field Service (AFS) student exchange program.
Session
Participants
Session
I - Strategies of Defiance
Prof.
Sean O’Connell, Panel Chair (English)
“Civil
Disobedience: The New York City Draft Riots, July 13-16, 1863”
Sean O’Connell is midway through his fourth year at Essex County College as an English Instructor, teaching creative writing, composition, American Literature, Western literature, and reading. He is a lifelong resident of New York City and has always been interested in the historical events that have shaped the America we live in today. He has been published in the New York Daily News, Social Living Magazine and will have his first short story published this coming spring. Prof. O’Connell presented a conference paper entitled “A Way In: Establishing the Importance of Context in Literature in the Community College Setting” this past April at the Transitions and Transactions: Literature Pedagogy in Community Colleges Conference at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Prof. O’Connell is currently the adviser for Phi Theta Kappa, and is a member of several committees within the Humanities Division and the college as a whole. He serves as the Reading Foundations Coordinator for the Humanities Division, and teaches a variety of English courses, among them ENG 085, 096, 101, 102, 169, 215, 221, 222, and RDG 096.
Prof. China Clark, Adjunct Faculty (English)
“How Transcendentalist Thought Transformed the Black Freedom
Struggle
from the Emancipation Era to the Present Day”
from the Emancipation Era to the Present Day”
Prof. Rebecca Williams (English)
“All Men are Brothers: Iterations of Freedom and Masculinity in
the Fiction of Louisa May Alcott and Frederick Douglass”
Prof.
Williams teaches American literature, African American literature, and
composition, effective speech, and reading at Essex County College. She is a
member of Essex County College’s Africana Studies Program Committee, and serves
as faculty advisor to the college’s Gay/Straight Alliance. Prof. Williams is an
elected official in the city of Plainfield, serving as councilwoman for the 2nd
and 3rdWards. She is currently on leave as a MAGNET Fellow in the
Ph.D. Program in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York. Her dissertation proposal is entitled “Blood as Race: Science, Color, and
Ethnological Discourses in Antebellum Writing.” Prof. Williams has presented
papers at a number of academic conferences. This past year, she chaired a panel
she developed titled “Sex, Blood, and Hybridity: The Discourse of Racial
Anxiety in Antebellum Writing” at the 2012 Northeast Modern Language
Association Conference, presenting her paper, “Negrophobia: Rogers, Douglass,
Cartwright, and the ‘Color’ of Blood.” She has also participated in a recent
“State of Black Writers” Conference at ECC, delivering a paper on Guadeloupean
writer Maryse Conde titled “The Persistence of History: Maryse Conde and the
Aesthetics of the Caribbean Imaginary.” Prof. Williams’s other academic
interests include Early American crime narratives, African American modernism,
popular culture, and memoir.
Session II - Envisioning
Freedom
Dr. Eileen DeFreece, Panel Chair (English)
“Emancipation: Illusionary or Evolutionary? A Discussion of
Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth”
Eileen De Freece is an associate professor of English at Essex County College. Besides having earned Masters’ degrees in Creative Writing and English, respectively, she also holds a Ph. D. in Literatures in English from Rutgers University. Dr. De Freece teaches writing and literature courses that explore issues of diversity that include race, class, gender and sexuality. Her doctoral dissertation, “Era Bell Thompson: Chicago Renaissance Writer” focuses on an overlooked, historically suppressed 20th century black woman writer who spent her life as a journalist studying issues of diversity from a global perspective. Dr. DeFreece most recently delivered a presentation entitled “Literary Authenticity in the History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave” at the 2011 “State of Black Writers Conference,” co-sponsored by the Africana Institute at Essex County College and the Frances E.W. Harper Literary Society.
Prof. Mikal Naeem Nash (History)
“Islam and the Search for Freedom and Liberty in America”
Prof. Mikal Naeem Nash (formerly Michael Nash) is an historian of the African-American and African Diaspora experiences and the author of several publications on African-American and Muslim-American History, including his book Islam among Urban Blacks: Muslims in Newark, NJ: a Social History. His essays have appeared in The Muslim Journal; the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought; the Encyclopedia of Muslim-American History; the Journal of Islamic Law and Culture; the Community College Humanities Review; the Muslim Public Affairs Journal; and other academic and popular periodicals. He is a member of the Association for the Study of African-American History and Life, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Islamic Center of Ewing, NJ. August 5 – 9, 2012, he attended the Oxford Round Table conference on Religion and Culture at Oxford University, where he presented a paper entitled “Preserving Our Freedoms and Civil Liberties, Combating and Preventing Terrorism: The History of Islam Among Urban Blacks in New Jersey.” On November 17, 2012, he attended the New Jersey Forum conference, an annual event sponsored by the New Jersey Historical Commission, a state agency, where he presented a paper on the late Imam W. Deen Mohammed and his impact on Muslim thought and communities in New Jersey. Prof. Nash also serves as the Africana Studies Program Coordinator at Essex County College.
Prof. Kelvin D. Clark, Adjunct Faculty (History)
“The Continuum of Emancipation”
Prof. Clark is in his second year at Essex County College as an Adjunct. He teaches African American and United States History, World Civilization, and the College Success Seminar. He also works part-time as a Graduation Coach in the Office of Retention and Recruitment here at ECC. Professor Clark is a native of New Jersey; he grew in Irvington and attended Irvington High School, where he played freshman football. In 2000, his family relocated to Greenville, North Carolina. After graduating as a North Carolina Scholar, he attended North Carolina Wesleyan College where he majored in History and minored in Psychology. Prof. Clark earned his master’s degree in Liberal Studies with a focus in African & African American Studies from Duke University.
Session III - Global
Liberation
Chante Osborne, Panel Chair (Communications Major)
Chanté Osborne is a Communications Major at Essex County College. She is a member of the
Honors Program and has been on the Dean's List for 3 Semesters. She will be graduating in May of this year. She is a scholarship award recipient at Seton Hall University for fall 2013, where she intends to pursue her BA in Communications and a Master's Degree in English.
“Reconstructing History: Representations of Slavery and Freedom
in the
Work of Oscar Micheaux”
Work of Oscar Micheaux”
Prof. Jennifer Wager coordinates the Communications A.A., New Media Technology A.A.S. , and the Digital Media and Electronic Publishing Certificate programs at Essex County College. She is co-advisor to the Gay Straight Alliance, the ECC Observer and the Short Films Club. Professor Wager has taught video production to various arts and youth organizations and has facilitated several community media projects in New York City, including Nuestras Voces, a video series made by and about undocumented immigrant women residents on the Lower East Side. She is also a filmmaker, whose documentary film, Venezuela Rising, screened at various international film festivals, including the Al Jazeera Film Festival and D.C. Independent Film Festival, and was broadcast on several national networks in Latin America. Professor Wager has an M.A. in Communication, Culture and Technology from Georgetown University and an M.A. in Black Studies from Ohio State University. Her honors research, an online annotated bibliography on the work and life of W.E.B. Du Bois, was recognized by the Smithsonian.
Dr. Margaret Stevens (History), Director, Urban Issues Institute
“From the Caribbean to New York City: The Scottsboro Nine and
Civil Rights
in Retrospect”
in Retrospect”
Margaret
Stevens’s personal biography is an admixture of academic scholarship, teaching
experience, military service and community leadership. She is a proud product
of New Jersey public educational institutions—attaining her primary and secondary
education in the Newark public school system and her higher education at
Rutgers College in New Brunswick. She excelled as the co-valedictorian of
University High School in Newark in 1997, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate at
Rutgers College in 2001, and in 2009 she completed her doctoral work in the
Department of American Civilization at Brown University. A veteran of the
United States Army, having been enlisted from 1997 to 2003 as a medic in the
National Guard, Stevens provided medical support in the aftermath of the
September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. Currently, she is
an Associate History Professor and also the Director of the Urban Issues
Institute at Essex County College, where civic engagement and service learning
are the key aspects of the institution’s mission and goals.
Prof. Shelagh Patterson, Adjunct Faculty (English)
“Legacies of Emancipation: Sonic Mapping in Mendi+Keith
Obadike’s ‘Big House/Disclosure’”
Shelagh Patterson is in her third year as an adjunct instructor at Essex County College where she was also an Assistant Director and Scholar/Artist-in-Residence at the Urban Issues Institute. Currently a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh, she researches collaborations in black, queer, feminist, and avant-garde literary communities. She is a recipient of the Mary M. Fay Award in poetry, numerous fellowships and scholarships, and Oxford University Press recently published her essay “Universalizing a Nation and the Adaptation of Trainspotting.” Courses Prof. Patterson has taught include composition, literature, and the history of African American film.
Session IV - Roundtable:
Emancipation as a Keyword
Moderator: Prof. Rebecca Williams
Speakers: Sean O’Connell, Jennifer Wager, Margaret Stevens
Session V - Liberation
Aesthetics “Interiorities: A Poetry Reading”
Moderator: Prof. Yelena Lyudmilova
Participants: Prof. Kevin Hayes, Prof. Billy Tooma, Prof. Rebecca Williams
Prof. Hayes is an Assistant Professor of English, and he has been teaching at Essex County College for twenty-six years. He primarily teaches English 102, English 205, English 215, and English 096, although he has taught most of the English and reading courses offered by the College over the course of his career. Professor Hayes is also a poet with an extensive publication record beginning in 1980. His work has been published in New Blood, Long Shot, Conceptual Vandalizm, Chrome on Fire, Big Hammer, and Napalm Health Spa.
Prof. Billy Tooma, Adjunct Faculty (English)
Billy Tooma has been an Adjunct Instructor at ECC for the past
three years, with his usual courses taught being ENG-101, 102, and 205. In
2011, he saw both the release of his award-nominated documentary, Fly First
& Fight Afterward: The Life of Col. Clarence D. Chamberlin, and the
publication of his second book, Shin's Shadow & Other Stories. In
2012, he completed work on his first novel, A Seemingly Unstoppable Dawn, and
presented a paper on the effects of Disney's monopoly on animation at the CCHA
Eastern Division Conference in Cambridge, MA.
Session VI - Film
Screening Followed by Q & A
Slavery by Another Name, introduced by Raymond Spencer, followed by
Q & A
Raymond Spencer is an actor/film
maker/author/father/producer/writer. Currently a student at Essex County
College, Raymond is one of the stars of Slavery by Another Name.
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