Advisory Board
Advisory Board members of the Center are chosen by the Provost on the recommendation of their deans. They advise the Director on policy and procedures, identify symposia and faculty fellowship themes, participate in the organization of conferences, and serve as a review panel for grant proposals submitted to the Center for funding.
2024-2025 Advisory Board Members
Jaime Goodrich
Director of the Humanities Center
Jaime Goodrich is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Center at Wayne State University. She is also Series Editor of The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. She specializes in early modern literature, with a particular focus on early modern women writers and religion, especially Catholicism. In recovering the neglected and lost voices of marginalized female authors, she aims to extend the boundaries of the canon and to demonstrate the value of early modern women's writings for our contemporary era.
Sarah Abramowicz
Associate Professor, Law and Edward Wise Research Scholar
Sarah Abramowicz is an associate professor of law at Wayne State University Law School. She has taught courses on family law, contracts, and law and literature. Her scholarship focuses on the history of child custody law and of adoption, and on the place of childhood in the troubled intersection between family law and other areas of law, especially contract law. Her work has appeared in the Fordham Law Review, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities and University of Colorado Law Review and has been selected for the Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum and for the Columbia/Georgetown/UCLA/USC Law & Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop.
Dr. RAS Mikey Courtney
Assistant Professor, Theatre and Dance
Dr. RAS Mikey Courtney is an Emmy awarded dance professional whose life mission is to spread universal understanding to communities and cultures globally by sharing his gift of the expressive arts. He is co-founder and CEO of Fore I’m a Versatile Entertainer (F.I.V.E.) LLC. He holds a B.F.A. in Dance from the UARTS in Philadelphia, an MA in Ethnochoreology and Ph.D. in Arts Practice Research from University of Limerick in Ireland. His research investigates movement as cultural knowledge and embodiment as central theoretical concepts. Dr. RAS has developed an embodied practice, Ethio-Modern Dance and recently contributed a book chapter ‘Embodied Cultural Knowledge in Practice: An Ethio-Modern Dance Case Study of የቡና ዓለም (YeBuna Alem/A Coffee World)’ in Routledge Companion to Anthropology of Performance (2024). Professionally Dr. RAS has collaborated with artists and companies from around the world, including Pilobolus, Raven-Symoné, Major Lazer, The Marley Family, Chronixx, AfroFlow, the African Union and more.
Dr. RAS is also an established singer/songwriter, collaborating with his Producer, Kenny Allen, on three major releases RASoul (2018), Love Year (2020), and THIN LINE (2023).
Anne Duggan
Professor, French
Anne E. Duggan is Professor of French in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Wayne State University. Working between the French early modern tale tradition and twentieth- and twenty-first century French fairy-tale film, her most recent books include the second revised edition of Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies: The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France (2021), the edtied volume A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in the Long Eighteenth Century (2021), and the coedited and translated work, Women Writing Wonder: An Anthology of Subversive Nineteenth-Century British, French, and German Fairy Tales, with Julie Koehler, Shandi Wagner, and Adrion Dula (2021). With Cristina Bacchilega, Professor Duggan is co-editor of Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies and she is series editor of The Donald Haase Series in Fairy-Tale Studies at Wayne State University Press.
Shannan Hibbard
Assistant Professor, Vocal Music Education
Shannan Hibbard serves as Assistant Professor of Vocal Music Education at Wayne State University. She teaches undergraduate music education courses and coordinates student teaching experiences in vocal and general music. Prior to her appointment at Wayne State, she served as adjunct faculty for graduate and undergraduate music education courses at Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan-Flint, respectively. A classroom music teacher for over two decades, Dr. Hibbard taught general, vocal, and instrumental music in public, charter, and private schools in the city of Detroit. At the end of her tenure with the Detroit Public Schools Community District, she was the recipient of the Coleman A. Young Foundation’s 2022 Fred Martin Detroit Educator of the Year Award.
Donovan Hohn
Professor, English
Donovan Hohn is the author of The Inner Coast: Essays (W. W. Norton, 2020) and Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea, a New York Times Notable Book and runner-up for both the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. His essays have appeared in such publications as Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Lapham's Quarterly, and The New Republic. A recipient of the Whiting Writer’s Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, Hohn spent a number of years editing essays, fiction, and literary journalism at Harper’s Magazine. He has taught nonfiction in the MFA program of the University of Michigan and is now Director of Creative Writing at Wayne State University in Detroit.
Sharon Lean
Associate Professor and Chair, Political Science
Sharon F. Lean is associate professor and chair of the Department of Political Science. She joined the Wayne State faculty in 2005. She is the recipient of Wayne State's 2016 Outstanding Graduate Director Award and the 2011 President's Award for Excellent in Teaching. From May 2018 to August 2021, she served as associate dean of the Graduate School. Dr. Lean specializes in the comparative politics of Latin America and regularly offers courses with short-term study abroad in Mexico.
Howard Lupovitch
Professor of History and the Director of Cohn-Haddow Center for Judaic Studies
Howard Lupovitch is professor of history and director of the Cohn-Haddow Center for Judaic Studies. He specializes in modern Jewish History, specifically the Jews of Hungary and the Habsburg Monarchy. He recently completed a history of the Jews of Budapest and is currently writing a history of the Neolog Movement, Hungarian Jewry's progressive wing.
Anita Mixon
Assistant Professor, Communication
Dr. Anita Mixon received her doctoral degree in Communication from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she specialized in Rhetoric and minored in Gender and Women's Studies. Her research examines institutional rhetoric via the intersections of race, gender, and identity-formation in urban enclaves. Her dissertation, “Women Speaking in and for Institutions: A Rhetorical History of the Politics of Respectability in Black Chicago, 1919-1939,” explored the early twentieth century Chicago urban enclave, Bronzeville. She interrogated the ways in which Black women utilized agency, decorum, and respectability politics to navigate the church and labor.
Monique Oldfield
Librarian IV, Collections and Scholarly Communication
Monique Oldfield is a Librarian in Purdy Kresge Library. Monique specializes in Social Work, Sociology, Gerontology, Anthropology, The Foundation Center and the Honors College.
Tam Perry
Professor, Social Work
Tam Perry is a professor in the School of Social Work at Wayne State University. She received her PhD in Social Work and Anthropology from the University of Michigan. Her ethnographic research addresses housing transitions of older adults from a network perspective. As health, mobility and kin and peer networks alter, she explores how older adults contemplate their homes and its contents. She studies housing transitions because, while aging in place is often preferred and cost-effective, inevitably some older adults will undertake the emotional and physical labor, as well as the negotiation of medical, financial and long-term care infrastructures, involved in relocation. Her research has been supported by the National Institute on Aging, the John A. Hartford Foundation, the University of Michigan and Wayne State University.
Francesca Pernice
Associate Professor, Educational Psychology
Dr. Pernice is an associate professor and director of the Counseling Psychology M.A. program in the Division of Theoretical and Behavioral Foundations located in the College of Education. She instructs graduate courses in the area of adult psychopathology, ethics, and educational psychology. She serves as advisor for PhD students in the School Psychology PhD Concentration and Learning and Instructional Sciences PhD concentration within the department of Educational Psychology.
Thomas Walker
Professor, School of Information Sciences
Tom Walker joined the School of Information Sciences after serving at Long Island University, where he was the interim dean of the libraries and associate dean and director of the Palmer School of Library and Information Science. Walker received his doctorate in information studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds a bachelor's in music from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a master of arts in library science from the University of Chicago. He also holds a master’s in music history, literature and theory from Northwestern University.