Visiting Scholars and Fellows

Emily Smith

Emily Smith, Community Partner-in-Residence

Emily Smith is the Executive Director of 1708 Gallery. Prior to coming to 1708, Emily was the Curatorial Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts where she worked from 2007 until 2010. Projects at VMFA include the exhibitions, The Ludwig and Rosy Fischer Collection of German Expressionist ArtMatisse, Picasso, and Modern Art in Paris; and Labor and Leisure: Works by African American Artists in the VMFA Permanent Collections. Prior to VMFA, she was Director of Exhibitions at Piedmont Arts in Martinsville, Virginia (2004-2007) and the Assistant Director at Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, Virginia (2003-2004). Smith was an adjunct faculty member in art history at Patrick Henry Community College, Martinsville, VA and was a critic for a Charlottesville, Virginia weekly paper. Smith received a MA in Art History from the University of Virginia in 2002.

Lynn Pelco

Lynn E. Pelco, Senior Scholar

Dr. Lynn E. Pelco is a senior scholar in the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) at the University of Richmond. She joined the CCE in September 2021. Before coming to the University of Richmond, Dr. Pelco served for more than a decade as the associate vice provost for community engagement at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and held an affiliate faculty appointment in the VCU School of Education. She has also held faculty appointments at The College of William and Mary, Penn State University College of Medicine, Bucknell University, and Flinders University of South Australia. Dr. Pelco’s work has been nationally recognized, most recently by the 2020 Barbara A. Holland Scholar Administrator Award from the Coalition of Metropolitan and Urban Universities (CUMU) and the 2018 Outstanding Leader in Experiential Education: Higher Education Award from the National Society for Experiential Education. Her scholarly interests focus on the impacts of community-engagement on student learning and the professional development of community-engaged faculty.

Lauranett Lee

Dr. Lauranett Lee, Visiting Scholar

Dr. Lauranett Lee was the founding curator of African-American history at the Virginia Historical Society, and in 2011, she worked with a team of colleagues to launch a genealogical tool called Unknown No Longer: A Database of Virginia Slave Names. In 2008, she published Making the American Dream Work: A Cultural History of African Americans in Hopewell, Virginia, an oral history project commissioned by the Hopewell City Council. Lee sits on several boards and is engaged in various community service initiatives, and in 2017, Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney appointed her to the Monument Avenue Commission. She also led our University's Institutional History Research Team and advised the Burying Ground Memorialization Committee. She is currently the director of race and justice at Richmond Hill and running for Midlothian School Board.

Diana D'Amico Pawlewicz

Diana D’Amico Pawlewicz, Visiting Scholar

Dr. Diana D’Amico Pawlewicz, historian of education policy, is an associate professor at the University of North Dakota and a visiting scholar in the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement (CCE). In her academic and public scholarship, Diana explores school policy as social policy, the connections between the past and the present, and the ways educational institutions have alternately served as barriers to and conduits for equity and justice. Diana’s first book, Blaming Teachers: Professionalization Policies and the Failure of Reform in American History, received the Outstanding Book Award from the Society of Education Professors. Dr. D’Amico Pawlewicz’s research has been published in an array of leading academic outlets including Harvard Educational Review, History of Education Quarterly, Labor: Studies in Working Class History, and American Educational Research Journal. Diana is currently conducting research for her third book, Pathologizing Blackness, which explores the rise of the national obsession with the idea of the achievement gap and the ways racialized notions of success and failure came to shape the landscape of American schooling. All of Dr. D’Amico Pawlewicz’s work is motivated by the core assumptions that historical knowledge is powerful, disruptive, and practical. As such, Diana is committed to public scholarship. She has written several op-eds and essays in national newspapers and regularly participates in radio and podcast interviews. She is currently a member of the Washington Post’s Made by History editorial team.