Charles DeSassure was promoted to associate professor of computer science at the Southeast Campus of Tarrant County College in Arlington, Texas. He has been on the college’s faculty since 2001. His area of specialization is information assurance.
DeSassure is a graduate of Orangeburg-Calhoun Technical College and Claflin University in South Carolina, and holds a master’s degree in computer resources and information management from Webster University.
Debbie Owens was appointed interim chair of the department of journalism and mass communications at Murray State University in Kentucky. She is the first African American and second woman to the lead the department in its nearly 90-year history. Owens had served as graduate program director for the department.
Dr. Owens is a graduate of Brooklyn College of the City University of New York System. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and a Ph.D. in mass communication from the University of Florida.
Kalenda Eaton, an associate professor of English at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania, has been awarded a J. William Fulbright Research Chair in Society and Culture at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Dr. Eaton will research Black/African Canadian literature and identity politics and serve as a mentor to graduate students, among other activities.
Dr. Eaton is a graduate of Dillard University in New Orleans and holds a Ph.D. in English from Ohio State University. She is the author of Womanism, Literature, and the Transformation of the Black Community 1965-1980 (Routledge, 2008).
Tameka Winston was named interim chair of the department of communications at Tennessee State University in Nashville. She is a professor of communication and is host of a Sirius XM radio show.
Dr. Winston is a graduate of Alcorn State University. She holds a master’s degree from Austin Peay State University in Tennessee and an educational doctorate from Tennessee State University.
Jason Mott was named writer-in-residence in the department of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He will teach a class each fall for the next three years.
Mott is the author of the book The Returned (MIRA, 2013), which became a bestseller and was turned into the ABC television series Resurrection. He holds a bachelor’s degree and a master of fine arts degree in poetry from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
Shennette Garrett-Scott, an assistant professor of history and African American studies at the University of Mississippi, has been selected for a Shelby Cullon Davis Center for Historical Studies Fellowship. Professor Garrett-Scott will spend the next two academic years at Princeton University working on a book about African American women in banking and finance.
Dr. Garrett-Scott joined the faculty at the University of Mississippi in 2013. She holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin.
