Author Bios (alphabetical)

Lucha Arévalo, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Chicanx and Latinx Studies at Río Hondo College in Whittier, California. Lucha is an award-winning faculty member whose work was recognized in 2024 by California’s Community Colleges Association for championing equal access and fair treatment of minoritized groups within the state’s community college communities. In the classroom, she works with her students to write and illustrate children’s storybooks. Since the launch of this project in 2019, it has grown into a digital archive and the re-launch of a children’s library on her campus. As a 2022 Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellow, Lucha published on the power of storytelling as a healing modality for the open-access Ethnic Studies Pedagogies Journal. The ACLS continues to uplift her community-engaged scholarship. Lucha is an author of the open-access textbook and workbook, New Directions in Chicanx and Latinx Studies (2023; 2024), which were projects awarded by the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges Open Educational Resources (OER) Initiative, a competitive state-wide grant that funds OER projects demonstrating significant need, are collaborative across multiple community college districts, incorporate culturally responsive pedagogy, address principles of DEIA, and are openly licensed. She will build upon this work during her 2025-26 academic year sabbatical. Meanwhile, she will work on her book manuscript, Insurgent Learning: Confronting Neoliberal Assaults on Public Education in Los Angeles County, 2000-2015, which captures efforts to privatize public schools while highlighting the ongoing resistance of teachers, parents, and students as they work to transform their public institutions.

Cinder Cooper Barnes has over 20 years of higher education teaching experience. She is presently a full-time faculty member in the English department at Montgomery College and serves the director of the Global Humanities Institute. She currently co-leads overseas faculty development seminars to Senegal with the Council of American Overseas Research Centers and the West African Research Center. Her most recent accomplishment was co-authoring a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to host a Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty entitled “Concepts of Black Diaspora in the United States: Identity and Connections among African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American Communities,” which Montgomery College received, and which she co-directed. Cinder is an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) community college fellow, serves as vice-chair of the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County and the West African Research Association. She is doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign in Education Policy, Organization and Leadership with a Global Studies concentration.

Beth Baunoch has been teaching Media Studies at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) for over 13 years and currently serves as the Mark McCulloch Endowed Teaching Chair. She teaches a range of courses including Podcast Journalism, Film History, Fundamentals of Media Production, Digital & Social Media Marketing, and Introduction to Mass Media. She is also the President of CCBC’s chapter of the American Association for Women in Community Colleges (AAWCC), where she advocates for leadership development and community-building among women in higher education. Beth has played a key role in fostering student media at CCBC, co-founding the Film Society and the New Media Collective to support student-led storytelling and creative collaboration. With support from a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation, she founded ForReal Media, a podcast production house based in Baltimore. Through this platform, she executive produced Good School, a journalistic podcast created with CCBC students exploring the complexities of higher education from the perspective of community college learners. Most recently, she launched Know-It-All, a student-driven podcast series that is now distributed on Baltimore’s NPR affiliate, WYPR.

Santiago Andrés Garcia is a Professor of Anthropology at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, overseeing the newly established anthropology program and laboratory. He is an ACLS/NEH Public Engagement Scholar (2022) and an ACLS/MELLON Community College Fellow (2019). In 2015, he was honored with the ASA Gloria E. Anzaldúa Contingent Faculty Award for critically engaging community college students while teaching at Río Hondo College. His growing published research focuses on the connections between teaching and learning, Mesoamerica, and promoting positive human health and well-being. His greatest passion is to teach and inspire students from all backgrounds to help them achieve their personal and educational goals.

Prithi Kanakamedala, PhD, is a Professor of History at Bronx Community College CUNY, and teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is also the inaugural faculty coordinator at PS2 (The Public Scholarship Practice Space) housed at the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center. An active public historian, she continues to work with a range of cultural organizations across New York City. Brooklynites: the Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough (NYU Press, 2024) is her first full-length book.

Megan Rigsby Klein, PhD, is a Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Oakton College where she has taught for nineteen years. She has been actively involved in teaching and supporting college students who are incarcerated and recently released from prison through Oakton's partnership with the Northwestern Prison Education Program (NPEP) since 2021. Her research and pedagogy focus on student access and mental well-being; with her ACLS fellowship she worked on developing curriculum which embeds skills related to community building, academic resilience and mental wellness by centering the stories and needs of her incarcerated students. As a PhD student, Megan was awarded the President's Medallion for social justice from Loyola University in 2016. As a faculty member at Oakton, she was awarded the Full-Time Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award in 2021 and the High Impact Practices Team Teaching Award in 2024. She has a MA in Spanish Literature, a MA in Anthropology and a PhD in Sociology. Megan is an avid knitter and a gardener-in-training. She lives with her husband and three children and despite what two of them will tell you, she does not have a favorite.

Charlotte Lee is an instructor in the Social Sciences Department at Berkeley City College. Lee has been a community college educator since 2015. She teaches courses in Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Global Studies. An advocate of open access education, she has been a contributing author of peer-reviewed, Creative Commons-licensed textbooks in global studies, comparative politics, and political science research methods (supported by the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges). She has published on a range of topics, including the politics of China, bureaucratic transition in Eastern Europe, and the democratic peace. Her original research has appeared in edited volumes and academic journals such as Studies in Comparative International Development and Foreign Policy Analysis. Her book, Training the Party: Adaptation and Elite Training in Reform-era China (Cambridge University Press, 2015), explores the foundations of the Chinese Communist Party's institutional resilience. In 2022-23, she was named a Mellon/ACLS Community College Fellow to conduct research on ideology in contemporary China, which has resulted in scholarly publications and CC-licensed teaching resources (available on OER Commons). She holds a B.A. in Asian Studies and Political Economy from the University of California, Berkeley, and received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University. Her public service record includes completion of a U.S. Peace Corps assignment (in Romania) and postdoctoral Minerva Fellowship at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Sophie Maríñez, PhD, is a professor of modern languages and literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. She is recently affiliated with various Ph.D. and MA programs at the Graduate Center (CUNY) and a winner of the 2025 Frantz Fanon Award for an Outstanding Book in Caribbean Thought for Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Penn Press, 2024). This monograph intervenes in recent debates on human rights, birthright citizenship, statelessness, and anti-Black racism, contributing cultural productions that bear witness to historical, islandwide alliances and interconnections. This fall, Maríñez will be a Visiting Professor at the Sorbonne Nouvelle's Institute of Latin American Studies/Center for Research and Documentation on the Americas (IHEAL-CREDA). During her stay in Paris, Maríñez will continue her project "Exiled in France," which she began in the summer of 2024 with the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Humanities Initiative Research Grant. 

William A. Morgan, PhD, is Professor of History at Lone Star College. His research on race, slavery, and emancipation in Latin America and the Atlantic World has been awarded a Lydia Cabrera Fellowship from the Conference on Latin American History, a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, two Mellon/ACLS Faculty Fellowships, and a Folger Research Fellowship. His work appears in the following volumes Tabaco y Esclavos en los Imperios Ibéricos, American Empire in Global History, and Social Struggle and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Cuba, and in the journals, Slavery & Abolition, Colonial Latin American Review, Agricultural History, and Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History. His manuscript, Cuban Tobacco in the Age of Second Slavery, will be published by the University of Georgia Press, Spring 2026. 

Katherine R. Rowell, PhD, has taught sociology at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, since 1996. Dr. Rowell has won numerous awards for teaching excellence: the American Sociological Association Teaching Excellence Award (2012), the United States Outstanding Community College Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement of Scholarship and Education and the Carnegie Foundation in 2005, and the 2005 North Central Sociological Professor of the Year Professor. She has traveled extensively, including a Fulbright trip in 2003 to South Africa, Botswana, and Swaziland, a peace conference in Mongolia, and recently presented at a Child in City conference in Dublin, Ireland. Her research interests focus on housing issues, including homelessness and eviction. She also researches teacher empathy and speaks regularly on this topic. She served as the founding director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Sinclair Community College from 2008-2015. She is a former chair of the board of the Dayton International Peace Museum. She currently serves as the Honors program advisor at Sinclair Community College. Dr. Rowell earned a bachelor's degree in political science and master's degrees from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and a Ph.D. from Ohio State University in Sociology. In 2021, she was awarded a Mellon American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship that resulted in the publication of a book and documentary focused on children, eviction, and housing insecurity in the United States.

Jamie A. Thomas, PhD, is Dean of Social Sciences at Cypress College and Adjunct Lecturer in Linguistics at California State University, Dominguez Hills. As a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellow (2021-2022), Jamie led the linguistics program at Santa Monica College, where she was awarded the Distance Education Excellence Teaching Award in 2022, and recognized by Intuit as one of LA County’s “Top 100 Educators”. Her research on “Closing Racial Equity Gaps in Online Teaching” is available in publications advocating "Community College Linguistics for Educational Justice”, and “Centering Indigenous Voices in Online Teaching and Open Pedagogy.” Prior to becoming a community college faculty member, Jamie held fellowships and a professorship at Middlebury College and Swarthmore College, respectively, and was also a Visiting Scholar in Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Presently, Jamie facilitates professional development for the California Community Colleges and its statewide Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) Program, and serves as an advisory coach for the Open for Antiracism (OFAR) Program, which provides guidance on inclusive pedagogies and use of Open Educational Resources (OER). She is co-designing “AI 4 Learning”, a professional development course on educational applications of generative artificial intelligence, with contributors from Carnegie Mellon University, the California Community Colleges, State University of New York, and the United Negro College Fund. Jamie holds a PhD in Second Language Studies (Applied Linguistics) from Michigan State University. Her books include Embodied Difference: Divergent Bodies in Public Discourse, and Zombies Speak Swahili: Race, Horror, and Sci-fi from Mexico to Tanzania and Hollywood.

Jewon Woo, PhD, is a professor of English at Lorain County Community College, Ohio. She teaches African American, American, and Women’s literatures, as well as Black Digital Humanities. Her research includes topics such as Black Print Culture, Black periodicals, performance, 19th-century American culture and literature, community-based pedagogy, pedagogy for under-represented students, and digital humanities. Recently, she published a digital humanities project titled Ohio’s Black Newspapers in the 19th Century, with support from the ACLS, NEH, and Mellon Foundation. For her book project on Black newspaper-reading culture, she also received an American Antiquarian Society’s fellowship to dedicate summer 2025 to research. She currently serves as a NHRPC Satellite Partner at the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State University, contributing her expertise in reading old Black newspapers to the Colored Conventions Project.

Editors:

Brian Stipelman, PhD, is the Dean of Arts and Humanities at Frederick Community College, and on the executive board of the Community College Humanities Association.  He is the author of “The Broader Definition of Liberty”: The Theory and Practice of the New Deal (Lexington, 2012) and “I Am No Guide”: Pearl Jam Song by Song  (Fonthill Press, 2024). He served as a final reviewer for the Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship Program, and is committed to amplifying both the work of community college faculty and community college practice within the broader academic humanities community.

Carmen Carrasquillo, PhD, is the first in her family to attend college. She credits her Puerto Rican mother for teaching her the most important lesson — "¡Sí Se Puede!” At San Diego Miramar College, she is a professor of English whose teaching practice centers on equity and social justice. She is the founder of Community Voices literary magazine, an Honors Program Coordinator, and the Vice President of the Academic Senate. She also coordinates the Mellon-funded Preparing Accomplished Transfers to the Humanities Program. Students named her a “Champion for Student Success.” Her children are her greatest pride and joy.