Tracy Clayton was appointed the 2016-17 Ida B. Welles Media Expert-in-Residence at the Anna Julia Cooper Center at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Clayton is a writer, humorist, and co-host of the podcast Another Round.
Clayton is a native of Louisville, Kentucky, and is a graduate of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.
Mindy T. Fullilove is a new professor of urban policy and health at The New School in New York City. She was a professor of clinical sociomedical sciences and psychiatry at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. She is the author of Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It (OneWorld/Ballantine, 2004).
Dr. Fullilove is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She holds a master’s degree and a medical doctorate from Columbia University.
Fred Higgs III was named faculty director of the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He was a full professor and director of the Particle Flow and Tribology Lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Professor Higgs is a graduate of Tennessee State University in Nashville, where he majored in mechanical engineering. He holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.
Iyelli Ichile was named an instructor in Africana studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and a postdoctoral fellow at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore. She will conduct research on African American history in Maryland.
Dr. Ichile holds a master’s degree in African American studies from Columbia University in New York City and a Ph.D. in African diaspora studies from Howard University in Washington, D.C.
Lena Hill, an associate professor of English at the University of Iowa, has been given the added duties of senior associate to the president of the university. Dr. Hill has been on the faculty of the university since 2006 and was awarded tenure in 2013.
Dr. Hill is a summa cum laude graduate of Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she majored in English. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Yale University.
Omari Weeks is a new assistant professor of English at Willamette University in Salem Oregon. He is teaching courses on African American literature and American ethnic studies.
Dr. Weeks recently earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation was entitled, “On a Path of Decent Pleasures: Sex, Spirit, and Affect in Late 20th-Century African American Literature.”
