2021-22 Chancellor's Leadership Fellows Launch Projects to Enhance Faculty Life at UMass Amherst

This year’s Chancellor’s Leadership Fellows are immersed in their fellowship projects to develop and implement enhancements to faculty life at UMass Amherst. Laura Doyle, professor of English, Sarah Poissant, associate professor of communication disorders, and Laura Valdiviezo, professor of teacher education and school improvement, were awarded the fellowships for the 2021-22 academic year. Additionally, Jenny Adams, associate professor of English, and Christiane Healey, senior lecturer in biology, have been awarded 2021-22 Faculty Fellowships in order to continue their work as 2020-21 Chancellor’s Leadership Fellows.

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The Chancellor’s Leadership Fellowship program cultivates future campus leaders by offering half-time, one-year temporary appointments to an administrative area on campus and providing shadowing and mentoring from the leaders of the host units. Fellows are expected to launch a significant program during the fellowship year that will demonstrate capacity for leadership. The Office of Faculty Development coordinates the annual application process for the Chancellor’s Leadership Fellowship. A full list of all past Chancellor’s Leadership Fellows by year can be found here.

2021-22 Chancellor’s Leadership Fellows:

Laura Doyle, professor of English, is working with Barbara Krauthamer, dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, on a project to enhance campus structures for interdisciplinary co-teaching across departments and colleges. The project was prompted by the findings of the 2020 COACHE Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey in which UMass faculty expressed a desire for more such opportunities. “Many UMass faculty produce rich interdisciplinary and collaborative research, yet they have few opportunities to channel that learning and those dialogical relationships into their classrooms,” says Doyle. “In this era when students seek interdisciplinary learning and the world needs holistic interdisciplinary solutions to pressing problems, UMass Amherst has an opportunity to model innovative forms of collaborative thinking and teaching for both students and other institutions.”

Doyle’s research is itself interdisciplinary, forging models that integrate literary-cultural studies with history, existential philosophy, and political economy from a decolonial and intersectional perspective. Together with Professor Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji (economics) she co-directs the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project, which has recently been awarded a Mellon Foundation grant to build an interdisciplinary graduate certificate in Decolonial Global Studies. Doyle’s new book, Inter-imperiality, “Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance” was awarded the Immanuel Wallerstein Prize; and her earlier books include “Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture;” “Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940.” Awards include a Leverhulme Research Professorship at Exeter University-UK; a Rockefeller Fellowship in Intercultural Scholarship in Afro-American Studies at Princeton University; and two Fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Sarah Poissant, associate professor and associate chair of communication disorders, is working in the Office of Faculty Development with Michelle Budig, senior vice provost for faculty affairs, on a project to institutionalize and expand programming and services for mid-career faculty to support their progress towards promotion. “I am thoroughly enjoying my experience as a Chancellor’s Leadership Fellow and am grateful for the mentoring I am receiving from Michelle Budig,” says Poissant. “In just a few short months I have learned a great deal about the needs of our faculty and it has been rewarding to develop and offer programming responsive to those needs. As my fellowship progresses, I look forward to creating additional programming to support mid-career faculty and to the opportunities I will have to continue to expand my own leadership capacity.”

Poissant’s current research centers on the development of novel hearing assessment procedures aimed to improve diagnostic accuracy of behavioral threshold testing of young children or otherwise difficult-to-test populations. The long-term goals of this work are to decrease the time and expense involved in determining hearing status and more rapidly offer habilitative treatments to maximize auditory access and development. This work is funded by the American Speech, Language, and Hearing Foundation. Poissant currently serves as Associate Chair of the Communication Disorders Department and as Chair of the Graduate Council.

Laura Valdiviezo is working in the Office of Faculty Development with Michelle Budig, senior vice provost for faculty affairs, to expand definitions of successful research in engaged and creative work among scholars of color at UMass Amherst. She has designed dialogue meetings with faculty of color in order to generate detailed and contextualized knowledge of what constitutes excellent research.  “It is important that we build on the existing knowledge of our community,” says Valdiviezo. “I have been pleased to find like-minded colleagues who want to expand understanding and recognition of excellence in the work we do.  For me, this is exciting as it signals our preparedness to be revolutionary and embark in cultural transformation towards more knowledgeable and just ways of embracing diversity at our institution.”

Valdiviezo is an educational ethnographer interested in the re-conceptualization of educational institutions as loci of change for social justice. In her research, Valdiviezo examines diversity, pluralism, and knowledge production in institutional policy as a way to understand how inequality is reproduced but also how it can be contested within institutions. Her work across the Americas with Indigenous and Afro-Latin American populations and with minoritized communities in the United States, has been published in international academic outlets for readership in English and Spanish. For two terms, 2014-19, with Sally Campbell Galman, Valdiviezo served as editor-in-chief of “Anthropology and Education Quarterly.” Recently she became editor of the award-winning educational book series “Language, Culture and Teaching,” founded by Sonia Nieto.

2021-22 Faculty Fellows:

Jenny Adams, associate professor of English, has been awarded a 2021-22 Faculty Fellowship with the Office of Student Success in order to continue her work as a 2020-21 Chancellor’s Leadership Fellow on a campus-wide strategic vision of first year seminars as an important retention effort. First-Year Seminars provide first-year students with important academic approaches and awareness of student support resources to help them in their transition to college and achieving success in the college environment.

Adams’ current research focuses on academic debt and university life in late medieval England. To this end she is working on a monograph provisionally titled “Degrees of Collateral: Debt and University Life in Medieval Oxford.” With Nancy Bradbury (Smith College) she has recently edited an essay collection titled “Medieval Women and Their Objects.” Her past research has been on chess and political organization in the late Middle Ages.  For her research she has won fellowships from the ACLS, NEH, Newberry Library, and Mellon Foundation.  She has taught a wide variety of courses including: Chaucer; Arthurian Legends; Major British Authors; Medieval Dream Poetry; Medieval Travel Narratives; Utopian/Dystopias; Old English; and Society and Literature.

Christiane Healey, senior lecturer in Biology, has been awarded a 2021-22 Faculty Fellowship with the Office of Faculty Development in order to continue her work as a 2020-21 Chancellor’s Leadership Fellow. Healey continues her work assessing faculty development programming needs for non-tenure-track faculty, drawing on data from the 2020 COACHE Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey and NTT faculty focus groups. This fall semester, she offered programming in a series on Faculty Supporting Students, and in the spring will offer a series on supporting NTT faculty with a particular focus on mentoring and leadership.  

Healey’s research expertise is in evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology. Healey has taught writing classes as a Quin-Morton Fellow in the Princeton Writing Program at Princeton University, and was a faculty member at UCLA before joining the UMass faculty in 2010. She has taught topics ranging from HIV/AIDS and writing to introductory biology, ecology and evolution. She has employed numerous pedagogical approaches depending on class size and learning objectives, including community engagement, team-based learning and flipped classroom approaches. Healey chairs the Undergraduate Education Council and has served as Chair of the Biology Curriculum Committee. Healey was awarded the CNS Outstanding Teaching Award in 2017. More recently, she was the first recipient of the Mahoney Teaching Award to join the team of faculty in the iCons program and has been invited to join the UMass leadership team in the Bay View Alliance, a network of leading research universities studying culture change and leadership for teaching and learning.