Public Voices Greenhouse

Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity

The OpEd Project at Connecticut College is sponsored by the College's Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity.

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Connecticut College is proud to be the first liberal arts college to take part in the Public Voices Greenhouse through The OpEd Project. In a unique partnership, a cohort of faculty from Conn and Brown University will work together to build their profiles as public intellectuals.

Overview

Over a three-month period, 11 faculty from Connecticut College and 10 from Brown University are taking part in the first Public Voices Greenhouse offered between a large research university and liberal arts college. The OpEd Project is a national initiative “founded to increase a range of voices and quality of ideas we hear in the world.” Journalists associated with The Project work with major universities, foundations, and nonprofit organizations to increase the public impact of the nation’s underrepresented thought leaders.

How it works

The Public Voices Greenhouse program matches professional journalists with faculty in a highly creative, experimental environment designed to surface and cross-pollinate ideas. Thought leaders from each institution will meet with mentors March 10 and 11, April 28 and June 2 to “think more expansively about their knowledge, why it matters, and how to use it.” Participants will apply these skills to generate ideas for publication in top media outlets.

Impact

The OpEd Project has a nearly 100 percent placement rate for participating faculty in media outlets, which have included The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN and Inside Higher Ed.

Public Voices Scholars

Lauren Anderson

Associate Professor of Education, Chair of the Education Department

Lauren Anderson's research interests are situated at the intersections of education policy, teacher education, and K-12 school and classroom practice. In particular, she explores how teachers and school leaders make sense of and mediate federal, state and local policy in the context of their daily work. Lauren teaches courses focused on educational foundations, urban schooling, literacy pedagogy and elementary teaching.

Waed Athamneh

Associate Professor of Arabic Studies in the Department of Classics

Waed Athamneh is a specialist in Arabic literature. Her work focuses on modern Arabic literature and 20th-century Arab politics. Her book on the major literary movements and new directions in modern Arabic poetry is forthcoming with University of Notre Dame Press.

Sunil Bhatia

Professor of Human Development, Chair of the Human Development Department Acting Chair of the Education Department

Sunil Bhatia is an internationally known professor in the field of psychology and human development. He specializes in understanding the development of self and identity within the context of racism, migration, globalization and formation of transnational diasporas.

David Canton

Associate Professor of History, Director of the Africana Studies Program

David Canton believes that African-American urban history illustrates the impact of racism, classism, and sexism in the black community. It also provides insight to the origins of 20th century black urban poverty, civil rights struggle, black class formation, and black community development.

Sheetal Chhabria

Associate Professor of History

Sheetal Chhabria (Ph.D. Columbia University) is a historian of South Asia whose research and teaching focus on the production of poverty and inequality. Her research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and the American Historical Association.

Sandy Grande

Professor of Education, Director of the Center for the Critical Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE)

As a teacher and scholar, Professor Sandy Grande centers her work in the belief that education is the heart of a critical democracy. Rather than reject matters of politics, Professor Grande views teachers as the link between the education of an informed citizenry and the imperatives of democracy. She asserts that education cannot be reduced to technical or “training” models but must address questions of power, subjectivity, and the possibility of collective agency, through the foundational disciplines of the liberal arts.

Afshan Jafar

Professor of Sociology, Chair of the Sociology Department , Bodies/Embodiment Pathway Coordinator

Afshan Jafar’s research and teaching interests include globalization, transnational women's movements, the Muslim diaspora, gender, media, and the body. Professor Jafar regularly teaches, Introduction to Sociology; Gender, Culture, and the Body; Sex Gender, and Society; Sociology of Globalization.

Eileen M. Kane

Associate Professor of History, Director of the Global Islamic Studies Program

Eileen Kane is a historian of modern Europe, and her research looks at the relationship between Russia and the Middle East. As an undergraduate, she spent a life-changing year studying in Moscow in 1991-2, the year the USSR was dissolved. Living in the dorms of Moscow State University with students from across the socialist world and the Soviet Union, she became aware of the many different ethnic and religious groups that had lived under tsarist and then Soviet rule, and yet were barely mentioned in her history classes in the U.S. Her interest in the non-Russian peoples of the USSR carried her after college to Istanbul, Turkey, where she spent two amazing years (1995-7) on a Fulbright Scholarship, learning Turkish and studying migrations from the Caucasus to Anatolia. She received her PhD in history from Princeton in 2005.

The OpEd Project

Sponsored by the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, with generous support from the Office of the Dean of Faculty and the President’s Office.

For questions please contact:

Sandy Grande, Director, CCSRE

Sunil Bhatia

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