Speakers

Nicole N. Aljoe

Conference Co-Chair | Professor of English & Africana Studies; Faculty affiliate, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program; Faculty affiliate, NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks; Dean’s Leadership Fellow for Public Engagement, Diversity, and Research, College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University

Co-Chair of the Women of Color in the Academy Conference

Professor Aljoe’s research focuses on 18th and early 19th Century Black Atlantic and Caribbean literature with a specialization on the slave narrative and early novels. In addition to teaching in these areas, she has published articles on these topics in American Literary History, The Journal of Early American Literature, and African American Review. In her monograph Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1836 (Palgrave 2012) and in the co-edited collections Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas (UVA Press, 11/2014) and, most recently, A Literary History of the Early Anglophone Caribbean: Islands in the Stream (Palgrave/Springer, April 2018), she explores the myriad ways in which subaltern voices appear in the archives. Currently, she is at work on two new projects that extend this research in productive ways: the first examines representations of Caribbean Women of Color produced in Europe and England between 1780 and 1840. And the second explores relationships between narratives of black lives and the rise of the novel in Europe and the Americas in the 18th century.

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Patricia Davis

Conference Co-Chair | Associate Professor of Communication Studies, College of Arts, Media and Design, Northeastern University

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Patricia Davis (Ph.D. University of California, San Diego) is a critical/cultural studies scholar whose research and teaching lies at the nexus of rhetoric and media studies. She studies public memory, identity, race, gender, and representation. Her book, “Laying Claim: African American Cultural Memory and Southern Identity” (University of Alabama Press, 2016) won the Best Book Award from the American Studies Division of the National Communication Association in 2017, and from the Critical/Cultural Studies Division of the National Communication studies Association in 2018. Her essays have appeared in The Southern Communication Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, and The Journal of Intercultural and International Communication, as well as a number of edited collections. She is currently working on a book foregrounding the corporeality of black women’s bodies with respect to rhetorics of respectability. She has taught courses on public memory, media ethics, race and gender in the media and popular culture, and communication and diversity.

David Madigan

Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, Northeastern University

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David Madigan is provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Northeastern University. In the role, he serves as Northeastern University’s chief academic officer and leads its nine schools and colleges, research enterprises, information technology services, and libraries. Madigan also collaborates with the senior vice president for finance in order to set the university’s budget and financial priorities.

A native of Ireland, Madigan received both his bachelor’s degree in mathematical sciences and his PhD in statistics from Trinity College Dublin. In his career, he has written over 200 publications in areas such as Bayesian statistics, text mining, Monte Carlo methods, pharmacovigilance, and probabilistic graphical models. He has also advised 18 PhD students. In 2012, Madigan was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; he has been a leading researcher in the fields of healthcare and Big Data.

Isabel Martinez

Conference Co-Chair | Associate Professor, Sociology and Anthropology; Director, Latinx, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University

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Dr. Isabel Martinez is a Latinx youth immigration scholar whose research has primarily focused on the transnational lives of unaccompanied immigrant teenagers from Mexico/Central America. She is currently developing the New York Latinx Comedy Project, an oral history project that situates Latinx voices within a history of the NYC stand-up comedy industry. She is the founding director of the Unaccompanied Latin American Minor Project (U-LAMP) and is the Fall 2022 CMAS Visiting Scholar at UH.

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Mary Jo Ondrechen

Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Northeastern University

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Prof. Ondrechen’s research group specializes in theoretical and computational chemistry and computational biology. Areas of interest include: 1) Understanding the fundamental basis for enzyme catalysis; 2) Functional genomics – prediction of the functional roles of gene products (proteins); 3) Modeling of enzyme-substrate interactions; 4) Drug discovery; and 5) Bioinformatics.

With the sequencing of the human genome and the genomes of hundreds of species of interest, Structural Genomics (SG) projects have now reported over 12,000 new protein structures. The next question is: What do these structures actually do? Prof. Ondrechen’s group is developing methods to predict protein function from structure.

Crystal Williams

President, Rhode Island School of Design

Crystal Williams believes that education, art and design, and commitments to equity and justice are essential to transforming our society. Williams has more than two decades of higher education experience as a professor of English as well as serving in catalytic roles overseeing diversity, equity, and inclusion at Boston University, Bates College, and Reed College.

Also an award-winning poet and essayist, Williams has published four collections of poems and is the recipient of several artistic fellowships, grants, and honors. Her work regularly appears in leading journals and magazines nationwide.

As RISD’s 18th president, Williams is helping to drive meaningful change centered on expanding inclusion, equity, and access in order to enhance a genuinely rich learning environment that consists of diverse experiences, viewpoints, and talents.