Visiting Scholars and Fellows
Duane Brown, Community Partner-in-Residence
Duane Brown is the director of vocational education at Rise Academy (formerly CHAT). His goal during the fellowship is to research best practices to provide high school students with access to industry recognized certifications, particularly within the context of Richmond’s East End.
Faith Walker, Community Partner-in-Residence
Faith Walker is the executive director of RVA Rapid Transit. Faith joined RVA Rapid Transit as director of community engagement before rising to the head of the organization. Before RVART, she managed the Front Porch Cafe in Richmond's East End. Faith has a long track record partnering with grassroots community leaders, business professionals, and neighborhood residents to advance healthy community outcomes. During her fellowship, she is going to research the diverse community benefits that zero fare transit has had on RVA to help advocate for its continuance in the region.
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, 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.
Judy Pryor-Ramirez, Senior Fellow
Judy Pryor-Ramirez is a clinical associate professor of public service at NYU Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, where she teaches courses on management for public service leaders, leadership for social transformation, gender in the workplace, and community-based participatory action research. She’s also a research and strategy consultant for social justice organizations and networks, where she has moved small and large groups through community engagement, capacity building, and change processes. Her work is informed by academic study at Teachers College, Columbia University, and training at Rockwood Leadership Institute, Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, and CUNY Public Science Project.