Academy Award-winning filmmaker Spike Lee has been schooling moviegoers since he entered the industry in 1983. The time has come for the tenured NYU professor's work to be more widely considered in education, specifically at the collegiate level, starting with Do the Right Thing.

This month I shared my thoughts with Visible Magazine about the necessity of casting a wider net in the classroom to raise awareness and introduce pivotal lessons about race and racial injustices. Check out the article here: visiblemagazine.com/spike-lees-do-the-right-thing-should-be-mandatory-in-higher-ed/
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​In 2010, I interviewed the late Bill Nunn, a Morehouse College grad like Lee, who portrayed the unforgettable character Radio Raheem in the film. 

The Public Voices Fellowship (PVF) at the University of Illinois System is part of a prestigious national initiative to change who writes history. The 2022-2023 cohort for the system-wide PVF were announced on September 15 by Avijit Ghosh, executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs for the University of Illinois System.

The PVF is a unique opportunity led by The OpEd Project and designed for tenure-system faculty. The program is part of a national initiative to help faculty amplify their expertise in ways that can contribute to public conversations about pressing issues. The internationally acclaimed curriculum and method explore leadership, power, and action in an unfair world. Using time tested methods of transformational learning, fellows will explore how credibility works, how ideas spread, when and why minds change, and how ideas play out over time and space. 

Now in its fourth year, the program traditionally hosted 20 slots to tenured faculty. For the first time ever, this year two of those slots were reserved for non-tenured faculty at the three universities, which include the University of Chicago (UIC), University of Illinois Springfield (UIS), and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I/UIUC).  

The faculty chosen for the 2022-2023 cohort includes the following:

Chicago

• Xóchitl Bada, Associate Professor in Latin American and Latino Studies, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
• Cynthia Blair, Associate Professor of Black Studies and History, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Director of the African American Cultural Center
• Margena Christian, Media Scholar, Journalist, Author and Senior Lecturer, Department of English, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
• Michael Jin, Associate Professor of Global Asian Studies and History,
  Global Asian Studies Program, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
• Julie Maslowsky, Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences, School of Public Health
• Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez, Bridge to Faculty Postdoctoral Research
  Associate, Department of History, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
• Christine Park, Professor of Anesthesiology and Medical Education,
  College of Medicine
• Laurie Jo Reynolds, Associate Professor, Department of Art, School of Art and Art History
• Jessica Shaw, Assistant Professor and Community Psychologist, Department of Psychology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Springfield

• Jennifer Martin, Associate Professor, School of Education
• Sean McCandless, Assistant Professor, School of Public Management and Policy
• Amy McEuen, Associate Professor, School of Integrated Sciences, Sustainability, and Public Health

 Urbana-Champaign

• Catherine Corr, Associate Professor, Department of Special Education, College of Education
• Marc Doussard, Associate Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, College of Fine and Applied Arts
• Leonard McKinnis, Assistant Professor of Religion and Black Studies, Department of Religion and Department of African American Studies, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
• Rachel McMillian, Assistant Professor, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education
• Lissette Piedra, Associate Professor, School of Social Work
• Imanni Sheppard, Teaching Assistant Professor, Co-Director of Bioethics and Medical Humanities Thread, Medical Education Facilitator, Biomedical and Translational Sciences, Carle Illinois College of Medicine
• Helga Varden, Professor, Department of Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
• Lesley Wexler, John D. Colombo Professor of Law, College of Law

 

Margena A. Christian, a senior lecturer in English at the University of Illinois Chicago, is one of seven educators selected to receive a 2022-2023 Faculty Innovations in Pedagogy and Teaching Fellowship from The HistoryMakers, a nonprofit research and educational institution committed to the preservation and accessibility of untold personal stories of both well-known and unsung African Americans.

The fellowship is designed to foster classroom innovation and teaching and diversify curricula while broadening student learning and research skills. Award recipients receive a $7,500 award and the opportunity to demonstrate how faculty can creatively incorporate The HistoryMakers Digital Archive into a semester course and syllabus.

Christian’s UIC course, “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud! Writing About African Americans in the Media,” will use The HistoryMakers Digital Archive to explore the role of the Black media in political, social and cultural coverage with regards to representation, dissemination, innovation and education. She is the author of Empire: The House That John H. Johnson Built. 

Students will evaluate misconceptions and misrepresentations about African Americans, engage in scholarly research to uncover strategies utilized in contributing to more inclusivity, and identify the diverse narratives employed within The HistoryMakers Digital Archive to understand why who controls the narrative matters in the media.

“The fellowship’s first two years proved The HistoryMakers Digital Archive is a unique electronic resource that works well in-person or over video-sharing platforms like Zoom. This year, I am so pleased by the caliber of applications received and look forward to what engaging discussion and research spring from use of the archive,” said Julieanna L. Richardson, founder and president of The HistoryMakers.

Other recipients include the following:

• Anastasia Bailey, Assistant Professor, Rutgers Business School
• Liseli Fitzpatrick, Lecturer, Department of Africana Studies, Wellesley College
• Danielle Gray-Singh, Professor, Biological Sciences, Clark Atlanta University
• Steven Keener, Assistant Professor, Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology, Christopher Newport University
• Ngozi Ndule, Adjunct Instructor, Howard University School of Law
• Chatee Richardson, Assistant Professor, Education, Spelman College 

Listen to broadcast on WBEZ.org

 Read the full story by Richard Prince at Journal-isms.com

Read the full story at New York Daily News. 

The author of Empire visited Windy City LIVE on June 24 where she discussed the biography with the TV show's co-hosts, Val Warner and  Ryan Chiaverini. A story about the appearance was also featured on the University of Illinois at Chicago's English  news website. 

To read the full newspaper article, visit the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. 

For more information about this upcoming event, visit the Chicago Public Library's official site. 

Chicago Defender June 26, 2019 issue

Bionce Foxx, a radio personality on V103 and iHeart Radio in Chicago, interviewed Dr. Margena A. Christian and Darryl Dennard, host of the radio show Chicago Speaks, about their time working with pioneering publisher John H. Johnson at the empire known as Johnson Publishing Company (JPC). Dennard is a former co-host of the EBONY/JET Showcase, a talk show centering around guests who graced the cover and pages of both magazines,  that was produced at JPC. He worked on the show from 1987-1991.

Register for free event at DuSable  http://bit.ly/JPCEmpire

Chicago Defender story November 6, 2018

Chicago Defender story May 1, 2019 or full issue of newspaper