Alisha Knight, an associate professor of English and American Studies at Washington College who draws her inspiration from social historian Earl Lewis’s assertion, “Intellectual work is the foundation of social change,” was chosen to receive the Alumni Association’s 2020 Distinguished Teaching Award.

Provost and Dean of the College Patrice DiQuinzio made the announcement during the First-Year Convocation, held virtually on Aug. 21. Professor Knight will offer the keynote remarks during Washington’s Birthday Convocation on Feb. 25, 2021.

Knight, who specializes in African American literature and print culture at the turn of the twentieth century, says she aspires to empower students to become change agents. To that end, she developed a course, “Black Men & Women: Images of Race and Gender in American Literature and Culture,” to help students read racialized images much like literary texts. Her students learned to do this by identifying and analyzing contemporary versions of historical racial stereotypes in popular culture. Their work is represented in a digital exhibition available here.

Her own research focuses on the African American book publishing trade at the turn of the twentieth century. Specifically, she is researching the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company, a black-owned publisher based in Boston in the early 1900s.  Her work examines the peculiar nature of disseminating literature to African Americans at a time when many publishers either took this reading audience for granted or simply assumed it did not exist. “Putting them on the Map” is a digital humanities component of her larger project.

Her service to Washington College includes serving as the founding program director for the Black Studies minor, chairing the Service & Scholarship Committee, advising Cleopatra’s Sisters, and serving on the Tenure & Promotion Committee, the Honor Board, Phi Beta Kappa’s Members in Course committee, as Faculty Secretary, and as Faculty Moderator.

Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu. 

Michael Harvey

Michael Harvey, the John S Toll Associate Professor of Business Management, has been announced as the Interim Provost and Dean of Washington College.  Harvey succeeds Patrice DiQuinzio and is expected to serve a three-year term in this important role.

As the Interim Provost and Dean of the College, he will be working in close partnership with incoming Interim President Wayne Powell in setting the overall academic priorities for Washington College.

“I am well acquainted with the high praise that Michael’s teaching earns from students, alumni, and colleagues,” said President Kurt Landgraf. “He has routinely demonstrated in key service positions — such as department chair and Faculty Council chair — that he is deeply committed to the support of faculty and students required for great teaching and learning in the liberal arts and the need for strategic growth in our academic programs. “

Harvey holds a bachelor’s degree in English from University of Maryland, master’s and doctoral degrees in government from Cornell University, and a master’s degree in international business from University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. He joined the Washington College faculty in the Department of Business Management in 1998. In recent years he has spearheaded the department’s Summer Seminar in International Business.

An accomplished scholar, Harvey’s work centers on leadership and organizational studies. In addition to authoring The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing, a must-read for his students, he is co-editor with Prof. Ronald Riggio of Claremont College of Leadership Studies: The Dialogue of Disciplines (Elgar, 2011), which the International Leadership Association recognized as one of the year’s best books in leadership studies.

In assuming this critical post, he will be building upon the excellent leadership and strong foundation that Patrice DiQuinzio has provided as Provost and Dean since 2017.

“I have worked with Michael Harvey for more than 12 years and I’ve always been impressed by his great ideas, his energy, and his thoughtfulness,” DiQuinzio says. “Michael will make an excellent provost, and I will do everything I can to help him in taking up this office and to smooth his transition as much as possible.”

Harvey is very active within the local community, having served as a member of the Kent County Public Schools Board of Education from 2009 to 2014 and most recently, advocating for the Black Lives Matter street murals that are to be installed in the heart of Chestertown.

On the lighter side, he has a self-professed love of chess and a fascination with the history of the game – so much so that he even published a chess primer.  He enjoys sharing this passion with others by serving as a volunteer chess coach in the local schools, churches and the library.

Harvey and his wife, Sabine, have two children.

Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.

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Washington College President Kurt Landgraf announced today another series of measures aimed at allowing the College’s undergraduates to successfully complete their studies online by May 2020 while simultaneously attempting to maintain and preserve the overall fiscal health of the 237-year-old college.

In a letter to faculty and staff earlier today, President Landgraf outlined a short-term plan that includes:

– all staff using a portion of accrued vacation and leave between now and June 30 to offset budget set-asides for those costs;
– temporary staff furloughs; and
– cuts in salary for some positions, including voluntary pay reductions for faculty and staff.
– Healthcare benefits for furloughed employees will remain in effect throughout the furlough period, which we anticipate will end by August 15.

In March, in response to the growing COVID-19 pandemic, Washington College implemented an emergency response plan that initially closed the Chestertown campus to students, employees, and the public. In addition, the plan reallocated budgets to address the immediate needs created for students, faculty, and staff. Today’s actions are an incremental expansion of the March 2020 emergency response plan that will help offset lost revenues.

In addition to the cost savings generated by these measures, Landgraf acknowledged the College’s receipt of a $1.1 million aid package from the Higher Education Relief Fund. While this federal grant provides much-welcomed assistance for the institution and for students, Landgraf and the Board of Visitors and Governors are exploring additional measures to lessen the financial impact of this crisis.

“We are doing everything we can to treat our furloughed employees fairly, and I know that health insurance is a major concern,” notes Landgraf. “In addition to continuing health insurance coverage and their unemployment benefits, which cover about half of an employee’s weekly wages, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act will provide an additional $600 per week to those who are collecting unemployment benefits due to the pandemic, through July 31. I hope that we will be well on the other side of this crisis by then.”

Meanwhile, faculty and students are getting through their coursework online and some end-of-year events—including the Senior Reading, the Sophie Kerr Prize Announcement, and the Senior Awards ceremony—will move to a digital format. Graduating seniors and their families are invited to return to campus this fall for Commencement ceremonies, which have been rescheduled for October 17.

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The 2019-2020 George Washington Prize winner, author and historian Colin Calloway, will join Washington College to talk about his latest book, “The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation.” As Calloway will discuss, Indian people and Indian lands played a crucial role in shaping our nation, as well as the life of the man who founded the nation.

Colin Calloway

The Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience is the host of this free public event to be held on March 17^th at 6 pm in John S. Toll Science Center’s Litrenta Hall. A book signing will follow immediately after the talk.

Colin G. Calloway is the John Kimball, Jr. 1943 Professor of History and Professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. His previous books include “Pen and Ink Witchcraft: Treaties and Treaty Making in American Indian History” and “The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army.”

In “The Indian World of George Washington,” Calloway tells the fascinating story of Washington’s lifelong engagement with Native America. The book paints a new and, at times, disturbing portrait of the nation’s first president—as an untested militia officer on the banks of the Ohio, as a diplomat who gradually learned to work with Indians on their own terms, and, during his final years, as a disappointed Indian land speculator.

“Calloway has written one of those rare works that combines pathbreaking scholarship with lively, engaging, and accessible writing,” said Adam Goodheart, the Hodson Trust-Griswold director of Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.

Calloway’s talk is well-timed, coming on the heels of Washington College’s 2020 Convocation, a celebration honoring the birthday of our First President alongside the achievements of Henry Red Cloud, a Lakota Sioux elder who has worked to make Pine Ridge environmentally, culturally, and economically sustainable.

The George Washington Prize honors the year’s best new works on early American history, especially those that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history. Created in 2005, the George Washington Prize was presented that year to Ron Chernow for “Alexander Hamilton.”

The prize is one of the nation’s largest and most prestigious literary awards. Washington College sponsors the prize with its partners the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and George Washington’s Mount Vernon.

About the Starr Center

Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience explores the American experience in all its diversity and complexity, seeks creative approaches to illuminating the past, and inspires thoughtful conversation informed by history. Through educational programs, scholarship and public outreach, and a special focus on written history, the Starr Center seeks to bridge the divide between the academic world and the public at large.

About Washington College

Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 39 states and territories and 25 nations. With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.

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Nina Lakhani

While calls to protect the environment are growing, attacks against activists are reaching alarming rates. Guardian reporter Nina Lakhani will be at Washington College on Thursday, March 19, to discuss why Latin America is the most dangerous region in the world for land and environmental rights activists. While more than half of the world’s assassinations of activists occurring in the region, few of these crimes are ever investigated or prosecuted as governments and businesses have worked to silence these activists.

Sponsored by the Goldstein Program in Public Affairs, the event begins at 5:00 p.m. in the Hynson Lounge and is free and open to the public.

Nina Lakhani is the Environmental Justice correspondent for the Guardian U.S., based in New York. Her first book, “Who Killed Berta Cáceres: Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet,” will be published this summer on Verso Books. Lakhani has reported from over a dozen countries, spending six and a half years as a freelancer in Central America and Mexico where she focused on forced migration, the consequences of the war on drugs, state-sponsored violence, corruption, and impunity, gender violence, environmental defenders, and the battle for natural resources. Before that she held staff posts with the Independent and the Independent on Sunday in London.

About Washington College

Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 39 states and territories and 25 nations. With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.

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As of 2016, 6.1 million Americans were prohibited from voting due to laws that disenfranchise citizens convicted of felony offenses. And of that number, as the female incarcerated population has increased by more than 750% over the past 40 years, a growing number of those who face post-conviction barriers to reentry into society are women. Nicole D. Porter, The Sentencing Project’s Director of Advocacy, will speak on this topic at Washington College on March 19.

Co-sponsored by the William James Forum, the Department of Sociology, the program in Justice, Law, & Society, and the Women’s Centennial Celebration Committee, “Expanding the Franchise: Challenging Mass Incarceration through Enfranchisement,” gets underway at 6:30 p.m. in the Toll Science Center’s Litrenta Lecture Hall. Porter’s talk will address voting rights and women with felony convictions.

Through research and advocacy efforts, The Sentencing Project works to reform sentencing policies and practices that contribute to racial disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system, while promoting alternatives to incarceration. As Director of Advocacy for the organization, Porter manages state and local advocacy efforts on sentencing reform, voting rights, and eliminating racial disparities.

Porter’s work has been cited in several media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio. Essence Magazine recently named her a new Civil Rights Leader based on her work to eliminate mass incarceration.

About Washington College

Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 39 states and territories and 25 nations. With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.

Don’t miss the latest! You can subscribe to The Talbot Spy‘s free Daily Intelligence Report here