Visiting Scholars and Fellows
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, 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.