Sharing Community Histories Members

Erin Battat

Associate Teaching Professor in Writing; Wellesley College

Erin Royston Battat explores the role of art, literature, and memory in social movements. She received her Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University in 2008. Her book, ‘Ain’t Got No Home’: America’s Great Migrations and the Making of an Interracial Left (UNC 2014), examines how Depression-era migration narratives imagined an interracial movement for economic and racial justice. As a public historian, Battat works with Nipmuc tribal members to deepen public understanding of the histories and present-day experiences of local Indigenous communities. She teaches in the Writing Program at Wellesley College, where she serves as President of the Wellesley Organized Academic Workers-UAW union. She lives in Natick, Massachusetts with her spouse and three children.

Jessica Bozek

Master Lecturer, Boston University

Jessica Bozek (she/her) is a Master Lecturer at Boston University, where she teaches in the Arts and Sciences Writing Program and the Kilachand Honors College. She is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, The Tales and The Bodyfeel Lexicon, as well as several chapbooks, including How to See the Wind and Squint into the Sun. Poems and non-fiction pieces have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, Everyday Genius, Guernica, Tarpaulin Sky, and The Volta. Beyond the classroom, Jessica enjoys running, cycling, baking, sewing, knitting, and reading novels. She lives in Cambridge with her family and rescue dog.

Laura Grattan

Associate Professor of Political Science, Wellesley College

Laura Grattan is a scholar and educator whose work focuses on community organizing, grassroots politics, and social movements fighting for racial and economic justice in the United States. Her recent publications have focused on police and prison abolition, and she is co-director of the ACC. Grattan’s research and teaching in political theory are shaped by nearly a decade of community organizing toward living wages and working conditions with Durham C.A.N. in Durham, North Carolina. Her commitment to community-based research and pedagogy is also indebted to two decades of work with organizations such as the Kettering Foundation and the URBAN Research Network, a network of scholars and practitioners committed to strengthening the methods and impact of community-based research.

Heather Hanson

Lecturer, American Sign Language and Interpreting Education Program, Northeastern University

Heather Hanson recently joined Northeastern University’s American Sign Language & Interpreting Education Program, bringing extensive experience centered on Deaf community partnership and equitable communication. Her interpreter education philosophy stems from intentional engagement and trust-building with Deaf communities, working in genuine solidarity rather than service alone. This commitment to equity and her deep community connections inspired her transition to educator, supporting emerging interpreters’ development. As an active member of Novin, a grassroots organization dismantling barriers for new interpreters, Heather addresses systemic challenges facing the profession. In her Northeastern role, she extends this advocacy to students, fostering their skills while cultivating meaningful, respectful connections with Deaf communities that will sustain their careers.

Emily Howe

Associate Professor Visual and Performing Arts, Curry College

Emily Howe, Ph.D. is an ethnomusicologist, conductor, and music educator currently serving as Associate Professor of Music at Curry College. Emily’s ethnomusicological research examines the politics of development in contemporary Cambodia through analysis of music and dance practices. As a conductor with the Boston Children’s Chorus since 2010, Emily creates culturally responsive curricula empowering young people to learn about the past in order to dream about – and sing about – the world in which they wish to live. Deeply committed to engaged scholarship, Emily has led projects in schools and prisons around the world, and produced a collaborative audio/visual exhibition about the lives of Cambodian women artists called សូរស្ត្រី / Her Sounds. Emily earned her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology at Boston University.

Francesca Inglese

Assistant Professor, Northeastern University

Francesca Inglese is an ethnomusicologist who explores how sound and embodied practice shape knowledge, identity, and social change. Her forthcoming monograph, Remixing Race after Apartheid, examines how Cape Town’s Carnival participants negotiate race, urban space, and value through music. Her current project, Dark Angels, traces a long genealogy of genre-bending violinists and the violin’s social life in American popular music and culture. Her work appears in Ethnomusicology, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Journal of the Society for American Music, amongst others. She has received NEH and Mellon Foundation grants and since 2020 has collaborated with the Transformative Culture Project addressing music education inequity in Boston.

Jovonna Jones

Assistant Professor, English and African & African Diaspora Studies, Boston College

Jovonna Jones is a writer and cultural historian from Greater Boston. She is an Assistant Professor of English and African & African Diaspora Studies at Boston College, specializing in visual culture, Black feminisms, and the built environment. Her articles have appeared in Aperture, Boston Art Review, Callaloo, Souls, and Southern Cultures, along with essays in Fragments of a Crucifixion (MCA Chicago), Picturing Black History (Abrams Books), and LaToya M. Hobbs: Carving Out Time (Harvard Art Museums). Her current work blends family history and visual archives to re-examine Black space-making and spatial activism in Boston’s South End. Jovonna is a 2024-2025 ACLS Fellow. She has previously held fellowships at the Newhouse Center for Humanities, Dartmouth College, the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She holds her PhD and MA from Harvard University and BA from Emory University, each in African American Studies.

Nick Juravich

Associate Professor, UMass Boston

Nick Juravich is an Associate Professor of History and Labor Studies and the Associate Director of the Labor Resource Center at UMass Boston. He is the author of Para Power: How Paraprofessional Labor Changed Education (Illinois Press, 2024) and co-editor, with Steve Striffler, of The Pandemic and the Working Class: How U.S. Labor Navigated COVID-19. Nick teaches undergraduate courses in history and labor studies and MA courses in public history. With Betsy Drinan, he co-directs the Boston Teachers Union Collections Project. He serves on the Labor and Working-Class History Association’s Teaching Resources Committee, the Scholarly Advisory Board of the Center for Women’s History at New-York Historical, and the Point committee of the Faculty Staff Union.

Sarah Kanouse

Associate Professor of Media Arts, Northeastern University

Sarah Kanouse (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer examining the political ecology of landscape and space. Migrating between video, sound, and performance, her expanded nonfiction media projects shift the visual dimension of landscape to allow hidden stories of environmental and social transformation to emerge. Her solo and collaborative creative work has been presented by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Documenta 13, the Museum of Contemporary Art-Chicago, The Cooper Union, Smart Museum, and other academic, artist-run and public venues. Her essays on contemporary art have appeared in Acme, Cultural Geographies, Leonardo, Parallax, and Art Journal and numerous edited volumes. A 2019-2020 fellow at the Rachel Carson Center at Ludwig Maximilians Universität, she is Associate Professor of Media Arts in the Department of Art + Design at Northeastern University.

Irina Kogel

Full-time Lecturer in Russian Language Russian Language Coordinator, Boston University

Irina Kogel is the Russian Language Coordinator in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Boston University. A heritage speaker of Russian from Belarus, Irina is passionate about helping students discover the diverse range of Russophone experiences and perspectives. Irina has been teaching Russian language at all levels since 2012 as well as Russian literature in translation and in the original. She pursued graduate study at the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to BU, Irina taught at Mount Holyoke College, UMass Amherst, and Davidson College. A member of the Board of Directors for the American Council of Teachers of Russian, Irina is a dedicated mentor whose teaching focuses on differentiated instruction, heritage speaker identity, and experiential learning.

Tanya Maggi

Dean of Community Engagement and Professional Studies, New England Conservatory of Music

Tanya Maggi is the Dean and Chair of Community Engagement and Professional Studies at New England Conservatory and an internationally recognized leader in re-imagining the role musicians can play within their communities. Ms. Maggi founded New England Conservatory’s flagship Community Performances and Partnerships Program in 2003, and has since worked with thousands of conservatory students, professional musicians, and community partners to create impactful programming in community settings. Ms. Maggi also spearheads NEC’s Institute for Teaching Artistry, globally leading the Teaching Artistry field. Extensively involved with arts and social advocacy initiatives across the country and abroad, Ms. Maggi plays a leadership role in numerous non-profit and arts education advocacy coalitions that strive to use music as a means for social change.

Carly Martino

Assistant Professor of English and ESOL Faculty Coordinator, Roxbury Community College

Carly Martino is an Assistant Professor of English and ESOL Faculty Coordinator at Roxbury Community College. She specializes in multilingual learning and curriculum design. At RCC, she collaborates with Boston Public Schools to help facilitate the Early College Consortium for multilingual high school students. Additionally, she develops ESOL coursework that affirms students’ linguistic and cultural identities and supports faculty and staff through professional development workshops in helping multilingual students achieve academic success. Her teaching experience spans developmental and college-level composition courses and Academic English courses for English Language Learners. She holds an M.A. in English Literature and a graduate certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Northeastern University.

Christina Michaud

Master Lecturer Associate Director of English Language Learning, Boston University

My academic background spans English literature; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; linguistics; and teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). Broadly speaking, my scholarly interests center on justice-oriented pedagogies. Having taught in the Writing Program at Boston University for twenty-two years, I can say that nearly all my classes are “political” in topic and approach, and all involve community-engaged learning in different ways. I have previously held an interdisciplinary fellowship focused on antiracist pedagogies through the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, under Professor Ibram X. Kendi, and participated in a faculty learning community through the BU Initiative on Cities to collaborate with faculty from across the university to create a resource guide for experiential or community-focused teaching.

Cara Michell

Assistant Professor of Race and Social Justice in the Built Environment, Northeastern University

Cara Michell is an artist and Assistant Professor of Race & Social Justice in the Built Environment at Northeastern University’s School of Architecture and School of Public Policy & Urban Affairs. Her art and research projects focus on community-led cartography and decolonial approaches to participatory map-making. Before returning to the academy, Cara worked as an Associate & Senior Urban Planner at WXY Studio in NYC and BrookMcIlroy in Toronto. Her artwork and participatory workshops have been featured at MoMA PS1, La Mama Galleria, the New Museum, Creative Time (CTHQ), the Cité International des Arts in Paris. In 2015, She co-founded and co-chaired the inaugural Black in Design conference with Courtney Sharpe and the Harvard GSD AASU. Materials from the conference are now archived in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).

Jenny Musto

Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Wellesley College

An interdisciplinary scholar and engaged leader, Jennifer Musto’s research examines the sociolegal dimensions and harms of carceral anti-violence interventions, particularly carceral protectionist strategies to address human trafficking, sex work, and labor exploitation in the United States. Her work also explores carceral control beyond the criminal punishment system, tracking the known and lesser-known effects of anti-violence reforms billed as therapeutic, trauma-informed alternatives to punishment. She has lectured and published widely on these topics. In her leadership roles at the ACC and Knapp Social Science Center, she has also developed programming to support community-engaged research and teaching.

Violetta Ravagnoli

Associate Professor of History, Emmanuel College

Violetta Ravagnoli is an Associate Professor of History at Emmanuel College. She oversees the Colleges of the Fenway Minor in Migration Studies. Her research interests focus on the history of Chinese migration, especially the development of transnational ties and identities. She authored The Building of Chinese Ethnicity in Rome: Networks Without Borders (Palgrave, 2022) and has published on Asian and Asian American history, including a chapter in Gender and Food in Transnational East Asia titled “Grace Chu: Chinese Cooking at the Crossroad of Ethnicization and Emplacement” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). Her current project focuses on culinary innovators, particularly immigrant women who published cookbooks in the 20th century and used foodways as resilient tools for education and resistance.

Erika Schneider

Professor of Art History, Art, Design & Art History Department, Framingham State University

Professor Erika Schneider teaches art history at Framingham State University, where she is also the coordinator of the Museum Studies minor. Her specialty is nineteenth and early twentieth-century U.S. art and transnational intersectionality on which she has presented professionally both in the United States and abroad, as well as publishing a monograph and several articles in art history, literary, and history journals. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, Getty Foundation, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NEH, and Terra Foundation. She is currently investigating the international origins of the Harlem Renaissance and the role of race and gender, specifically for African American sculptor, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877-1968), while maintaining the artist’s online catalogue raisonné.

Qianqian Zhang-Wu

Assistant Professor of English; Coordinator of Multilingual Writing, Northeastern University

Qianqian Zhang-Wu is Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern University. Zhang-Wu is a leading scholar whose research interrogates multilingual writing, translingualism, and raciolinguistic ideologies through a critical, justice-oriented lens. Her scholarship—featured in top-tier journals including Research in the Teaching of English and Journal of Second Language Writing—foregrounds multilingual communicators’ lived experiences and challenges deficit-oriented discourses in multilingual writing. Zhang-Wu has published three books, over three dozen journal articles and book chapters, and guest-edited two special issues in prominent international journals. Zhang-Wu’s award-winning monograph, Languaging Myths and Realities: Journeys of Chinese International Students, integrates digital ethnography and lived multilingual communication experiences in groundbreaking ways. It has been recognized with four prestigious international/national awards, including the 2023 CCCC Research Impact Award.