Dr. Brenda A. Allen became the 14th president of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania on July 1, 2017. A proud alumna, she leads the nation’s first degree-granting Historically Black College and University (HBCU), founded in 1854. Her presidency has focused on strengthening Lincoln’s liberal arts foundation to prepare students for 21st-century challenges. Before returning to Lincoln, Dr. Allen served as Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at Winston-Salem State University. Earlier, she held leadership roles at Brown University and Smith College. She began her academic career at Yale University. Dr. Allen holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Lincoln and earned her master’s and Ph.D. in psychology from Howard University. Committed to Lincoln’s mission, she envisions a university rooted in tradition yet forward-looking—equipping graduates to lead and thrive globally.
Matt Brim is Professor of Queer Studies at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research explores the problems of academic elitism and the unequal distribution of resources across the university world, focusing on Queer Studies as a field that both reproduces and disrupts class stratification and race sorting. He is author of Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University and James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination, and he is coeditor of Queer Precarities in and Out of Higher Education, Queer Sharing in the Marketized University, and Imagining Queer Methods. Brim is Executive Director of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies, the first university-based LGBTQ research center in the U.S. He received his Ph.D. in English from Indiana University and his B.A. from Wabash College.
Chris Gilliard is a writer, professor and speaker. His scholarship concentrates on digital privacy, and the intersections of race, class, and technology. He is an advocate for critical and equity-focused approaches to tech in education. He is currently a Just Tech Fellow at the Social Science Research Council. His work has been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, EDUCAUSE Review, Fast Company, Vice, Wired and The Atlantic.
Daniel Greene is an Associate Professor in the College of Information at the University of Maryland and Vice President of United Academics of Maryland AAUP-AFT, the union for all UMD faculty. His ethnographic, historical, and theoretical research focuses on how the future of work is built and who is included in that future. His first book, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, was published by the MIT Press in 2021. It received the McGannon Prize for best book of the year on media and activism. His research has been published in such journals as New Media & Society, Social Studies of Science, and Research in the Sociology of Work. Greene also serves on the AAUP’s National Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Academic Professions. He lives online at dmgreene.net
Laura Hamilton is Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. Broadly, her interests include higher education, organizations, social class, gender, intersectionality, family, and mixed research methods. Hamilton earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Indiana University in 2003 and 2010, respectively, and her B.A. in sociology from DePauw University in 2001. She is co-founder of the DataHub and the Higher Education Race & the Economy (HERE) Lab with colleague Charlie Eaton. Hamilton is the author of Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, equally-authored with Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College and Beyond, and Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities, equally-authored with Kelly Nielsen.
Lisa Henderson is professor and recent past dean (2019-25) of the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University. From 1994-2019 she was Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also served as Chair from 2009-13. From 2005-09, she was director of CISA, the Five College Center for Crossroads in the Study of the Americas. She is a radio producer by early training, co-founder of the International Communication Association’s LGBTQ Studies Interest Group, and 2011 recipient of the Roy F. Aarons Award for outstanding contribution to GLBT education and research from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Her book Love and Money: Queers, Class, and Cultural Production (NYU, 2013) was a 2014 finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. New work considers artist/scholar collaboration and multi-modal research practice–how scholars use images, sound, music, code, and performance to create knowledge on campus and off. With colleagues on five continents, she currently co-leads a project to develop guidelines for the academic support of multi-modal scholarship.
Jim Lovelace ’79 is a Senior Vice President and portfolio counselor of Capital Research Global Investors, a division of Capital Research and Management Company, with responsibilities for The Investment Company of America (ICA), Capital Income Builder (CIB), American Mutual Fund, and American Funds Insurance Series – Blue Chip Income and Growth. Jim is also Vice Chairman, Principal Investment Officer, and a Director of CIB; Vice Chairman, Co-Principal Investment Officer and a Director of ICA; Principal Investment Officer of the American Funds Target Date Retirement Series; and a Senior Vice President of AMF. Professionally, Lovelace is a Chartered Financial Analyst and a member of the Los Angeles Society of Financial Analysts and the AIMR. Philanthropically, he serves on the Boards of the California Institute of the Arts, the Idyllwild Arts Foundation, Swarthmore College and the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Lovelace holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Swarthmore College.
John Marx is Professor of English at UC Davis and Vice Provost for Academic Planning, Aggie Square as of 2022. He is the academic lead on a team bringing to fruition a 25-acre innovation campus in Sacramento. Marx has served in numerous leadership roles for more than a decade, including Interim Vice Provost and Dean for Undergraduate Education in 2022-23, Interim Director of the University Writing Program and Writing Center starting in 2021, and Chair of the Department of English 2016-21. A member of several editorial boards and journals, Marx currently serves as Associate Editor for the academic journal Novel: A Forum on Fiction. He is the author of Media U: How the Need to Win Audiences Has Shaped Higher Education, The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire and Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890-2011. He also was an American Council of Education Fellow from 2018-19. Marx earned both a Ph.D. and a master’s degree in English literature from Brown University and a bachelor’s degree from the Gallatin School of New York University.
Shannon Mattern is the Director of Creative Research at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. Previously, she held tenured full professorships in media studies, anthropology, and art history at The New School and the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching focus on media architectures, information infrastructures, and urban technologies. She is the author of four books and the (co-)editor of four collections about urban technology, knowledge infrastructures, maps, and maintenance. She was the 2025 Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress and the 2025 Design Indexer in residence at the Cooper Hewitt. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.
Alexandra Minna Stern is dean of the UCLA College Division of Humanities. In this role, she has prioritized strengthening programs in urban, public, environmental and health humanities. Most of Stern’s research has focused on the uses and misuses of genetics in the United States and Latin America. She is the author of the award-winning Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America; Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America; and Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination. Stern has faculty appointments in the UCLA departments of English and history, and in the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, and she is the founder and co-director of the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab. Prior to her arrival at UCLA in 2022, Stern was associate dean for the humanities at the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. She has received numerous grants for her research, including funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Dana A. Williams is professor of African American literature and dean of the Graduate School at Howard University. Prior to her appointment as the first female dean of the Graduate School at Howard, she served as chair of English there for nine years. She is former president of the Modern Languages Association and the College Language Association. In 2016, President Barack Obama nominated her to serve as a member of the National Humanities Council. In addition to her work at Howard, she held a faculty position at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge; a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL; and a John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute faculty fellowship at Duke University. She currently serves on the board of the American Council of Learned Societies. Her latest book is Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship (Harper/Amistad, 2025).
