Jedan Phillips, an associate professor of family, population, and preventive medicine at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University in New York, has been given the additional duties of associate dean for minority student affairs. Dr. Phillips joined the School of Medicine faculty in 2005.
Dr. Phillips is a graduate Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He received his medical degree from the University of Maryland.
Florastina Payton-Stewart, an associate professor of chemistry at Xavier University of Louisiana, has been named associate vice provost of academic affairs. She previously served as the faculty administrative fellow for diversity and inclusion.
Dr. Payton-Stewart is a graduate of Xavier University of Louisiana where she majored in chemistry. She holds a Ph.D. in bioorganic chemistry from Tulane University in New Orleans.
Eric Darnell Pritchard was named to the Brown Chair in English Literacy and associate professor of English at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He has been serving as an associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo of the State University of New York System. Dr. Pritchard is the author of the award-winning book Fashioning Lives: Black Queer and the Politics of Literacy (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016).
Dr. Pritchard earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Lincoln University of Pennsylvania. He holds a master’s degree in Afro-American studies and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Wallace D. Best was named the Hughes-Rogers Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University in New Jersey. Professor Best is the author of Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952 (Princeton University Press, 2007) and Langston’s Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem (New York University Press, 2017).
Dr. Best holds a master’s degree in church history and theological studies from Wheaton College in Illinois. He earned a Ph.D. in American history from Northwestern Univerity in Evanston, Illinois.
