Ian Barron
Ian Barron is a Professor in the department of Student Development and Director of the Center for International Education (CIE); the International Center for Child Trauma Prevention and Recovery (ICCTPR), and the Trauma Response Network (TRN). Dr Barron’s trauma development and research projects are captured in a Research Excellence Framework Impact Case Study that has been recognized as outstanding and world leading. Dr Barron is widely published. Dr Barron has developed numerous curriculum and materials for trauma-informed professionals and paraprofessionals in face to face, blended and on-line formats, in the field, and in higher education institutions. Keynotes, international training, seminars, and workshops have been delivered for local and global interdisciplinary audiences.
Madelaine Bartlett
Madelaine Bartlett is an associate professor in the Biology Department. Originally from South Africa, she earned a BSc in Genetics and Developmental Biology from the University of the Witwatersrand before leaving for the US, where she completed a PhD in Plant Biology at the University of California Berkeley and a postdoc in maize genetics at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. At UMass Amherst, she runs a lab focused on plant development and evolution. Fertilized eggs harbor self-organizing systems that reliably develop into complex organisms, all directed by molecular machines. The Bartlett lab studies this process of organismal development, and on how changes to development impact the evolution of diversity. Work in the lab is driven by two main questions: (1) what are the genes that control plant development? (2) How have these genes evolved? The Bartlett lab is committed to outreach and education, and is involved in initiatives that involve high school students, local farmers, artists, and summer camp students in scientific research.
Laura Ciolkowski
Laura Ciolkowski is Senior Lecturer in the Department of WGSS. She earned her BA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and her PhD in Literature from Brown University. Her research and teaching lie at the intersection of social justice feminism, literature, and critical prison studies. Her work in the area of prison education has been facilitated by multiple grants, including a Civic Engagement and Service-Learning Faculty Fellowship and a Public Service Endowment Grant. She was also awarded the Provost’s Distinguished Community Engagement Award for Teaching. At UMass, she regularly teaches courses that inspire students to think about literature, social justice and prison education, including “Critical Prison Studies”; “Gender, Race, and Mass Incarceration in the US”; and “Imagining Justice,” a course enrolling an equal number of UMass students and students incarcerated in the women’s jail in Chicopee. Her most recent article on teaching in prison is forthcoming in the Modern Language Association volume, Teaching Literature in Prisons.
Paul Collins
Paul M. Collins, Jr. is a Professor of Legal Studies and Political Science. His research focuses on understanding the democratic nature of the judiciary, interdisciplinary approaches to legal decision making, and social movement litigation. Collins is the author of Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making (Oxford University Press), and coauthor of Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings and Constitutional Change (Cambridge University Press) and The President and the Supreme Court: Going Public on Judicial Decisions from Washington to Trump (Cambridge University Press). The recipient of numerous research awards, Collins has published dozens of journal articles and his research has been funded by grants from the Dirksen Congressional Center and the National Science Foundation. His research and commentary have appeared in a host of popular media outlets, including the New York Times, National Public Radio, and the Washington Post. Collins has previously lectured at the Hampshire County Jail and House of Corrections.
Rosie Cowell
Rosie Cowell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Originally from the UK, she earned a bachelors’ degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford, before leaving her home turf for postdoctoral training in Dijon, France and San Diego, California. At UMass Amherst, she runs a cognitive neuroscience lab, where she and her students study the brain mechanisms of memory and visual perception, supported by the NSF and the NIH. They ask questions about why memory declines with age and brain damage, and whether our conscious awareness of the visual world depends on recognizing what we see as something meaningful. Rosie and her students are invested in public outreach and education, disseminating their research to pre-schoolers, senior citizens, high-school girls aspiring to STEM careers, and incarcerated students at Hampshire County Jail.
Liz Fox
Liz Fox is the Arts and Academic Programs Coordinator at the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies. She teaches courses on early modern drama and culture, gender and sexuality studies, and material culture that feature transhistorical approaches to Renaissance studies. She teaches in a diverse range of academic settings, including Wesleyan University’s Center for Prison Education, Bard College’s Clemente Course in the Humanities (Springfield), and Bard Prison Initiative’s Microcollege (Holyoke). Liz is currently co-editing a collection of essays titled “Carceral Shakespeare” that examines encounters with Shakespeare’s work in carceral spaces from literature teachers, theater practitioners, justice-impacted people, and audience members. The collection explores disjunctures as well as connections, identifies disappointments as well as successes, and investigates prison classrooms and performance spaces as important sites of critique.
Toussaint Losier
Dr. Toussaint Losier is an Assistant Professor in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and a Woodrow Wilson National Foundation Career Enhancement Fellow. He is co-author of Rethinking the American Prison Movement (Routledge, 2017) with Dan Berger and is preparing a book manuscript tentatively titled, War for the City: Black Liberation and the Consolidation of the Carceral State. He previously co-taught a Black Studies class for two years at the South Bay House of Corrections and taught for six years in the St. Leonard’s Adult High School providing a fully accredited secondary education for formerly incarcerated women and men in Chicago.
Annie Raymond
Annie Raymond is an Assistant Professor in the department of Mathematics and Statistics. Originally from Montreal, she studied math and music at MIT as an undergrad before pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics at the Technische Universitaet in Berlin and a postdoc at the University of Washington. At any given moment, you will most likely find her thinking about extremal graph theory and sums of squares or reflecting on how to increase diversity in STEM and on education in prisons. She has previously taught math to incarcerated people at the Monroe Correctional Complex near Seattle and at the San Quentin State Prison near San Francisco. Since arriving at UMass, she has taught two courses at the Hampshire County Jail, and also ran a Math Circle as well as a lecture series featuring different speakers from UMass.
Razvan Sibii
Razvan Sibii is a Senior Lecturer in the Journalism Department. Originally from Romania, he holds a BA in Journalism from the American University in Bulgaria and a Master’s and Ph.D.in Communication from UMass Amherst. He has been teaching UMass Journalism and Honors courses, some of which are centered on the critical examination of incarceration, since 2003. He has taught Intro to Journalism workshops in Hampshire County Jail, as well as a fully credited, mixed-student Social Justice Journalism class. He publishes a monthly column in the Daily Hampshire Gazette about immigration and incarceration.
Jonathan Wynn
Jonathan Wynn is an Associate Professor and Department Chair of Sociology. His two major publications are The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York (2011, University of Chicago Press, Fieldwork Encounters and Discoveries Series) and Music/City: American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Newport (2015, University of Chicago Press). In addition to articles published in City & Community, Qualitative Sociology, Media, Culture and Society, Sociological Forum, Cultural Sociology, and Contexts Magazine, two of his articles are “Hobo to Doormen: The Characters of Qualitative Analysis, Past and Present” (in Ethnography), and “On the Sociology of Occasions” (in Sociological Theory). Pieces of public sociology have been placed in The Guardian, Salon, and The Washington Post.
Youngmin (Min) Yi
Youngmin (Min) Yi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. Her current research examines the role of institutions of social control—such as the criminal legal, child welfare, and immigration systems—in shaping racial inequality and social stratification in family life. Her most recent work has been focused on quantitative analysis of the breadth and depth of family member incarceration and its consequences for health inequality in the United States. In her teaching, she aims to equip students with quantitative analytic tools and conceptual frameworks for critical engagement with numerical information and the social world. After completing her undergraduate studies in Economics and French at Wellesley College, Yi worked in non-profit policy research on gender and racial inequality in economic security and employment conditions and then completed her PhD in Sociology in the Departments of Sociology and Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University.