Faculty & Staff

• David Anderson, Associate Professor of English
• Pamela Beattie, Chair and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary and Public Humanities
• Lisa Bjorkman, Associate Professor of Urban and Public Affairs
• Aishia Brown, Associate Professor of Health Promotion and Behavioral Sciences
• Anna Browne Ribeiro, Associate Professor of Anthropology
• Nefertiti Burton, Emeritus Professor of Theatre Arte
• Ying Kit Chan, Professor of Fine Arts
• Karen M. Chandler, Chair and Professor of English
• Dewey M. Clayton, Professor of Political Science
• Amy Clukey, Associate Professor of English
• Fannie Mae Cox, Associate Professor, Outreach and Reference Librarian, University of Louisville Libraries
• Hilaria Cruz, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary and Public Humanities
• Cherie Dawson-Edwards, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Professor of Criminal Justice
• Natasha DeJarnett, Assistant Professor of Environmental Medicine
• Rebecca Devlin, Assistant Professor Term of History
• Tyler Fleming, Associate Professor of Pan African Studies and History
• Catherine Fosl, Emeritus Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and ABI Founding Director
• Lauren Freeman, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the MA in Applied Philosophy
• Melanie Jones Gast, Associate Professor of Sociology, 2021-22 ABI Faculty Fellow
• Joy L. Hart, Professor of Communication, Latin American and Latino Studies Steering Committee
• Lauren Heberle, Professor and Chair of Sociology, Director of the Center for Environmental Policy and Management
• Siddhant Issar, Assistant Professor of Political Science
• Felicia Jamison, Assistant Professor of History and Interdisciplinary and Public Humanities
• Frank Kelderman, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Individualized Major Program and Liberal Studies
• Tracy K'Meyer, Professor of History
• Kathryn Marklein, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
• Lisa Markowitz, Professor of Anthropology
• Michael Brandon McCormack, Professor of Pan-African Studies and Comparative Humanities and Chair of Pan-African Studies, Former ABI Director
• Yara Mekawi, Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Director of the Challenging Ongoing Legacies of Racism (COLOR) Lab
• Carrie Mott, Associate Professor of Geographical and Environmental Sciences
• Laura Moyer, Professor of Political Science
• Andrea Olinger, Associate Professor of English and Director of Composition
• Rodger Payne, Professor of Political Science
• Eve Carlisle Polley, Assistant Professor Term, Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
• Aaron Rollins Jr., Professor and Chair of Urban and Public Affairs, Director of Peace, Justice and Conflict Transformation and Master of Public Administration Programs
• Mary P Sheridan, Professor of English, Director of the Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society
• Rachel Singel, Associate Professor of Fine Arts
• Siobhan Smith Jones, Professor of Communications and Executive Director of the University Honors Program
• Cara Snyder, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Affiliated Faculty of the Latin American and Latino Studies program
• Angela Storey, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Anne Braden Institute
• Kaila Story, Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Pan-African Studies, Audre Lorde Chair in Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality Studies
• Shelley Thomas, Associate Professor and Assistant Department Chair of Social Studies Education
• Sherri Wallace, Professor of Political Science
• Jasmine Whiteside, Assistant Professor in Sociology
• Bronwyn Williams, Professor of English and Endowed Chair in Rhetoric and Composition

2024-2025 Community Advisory Council

Council Co-Chairs

Carla Wallace has been part of organizing for change for over 40 years.  She is a co-founder of Showing Up for Racial Justice (known as SURJ) which moves white people—in particular, those who are poor, working-class and rural—to be part of the multiracial struggle for collective liberation. Mentored by southern civil rights activists including Anne Braden, Carla also co-founded Louisville’s Fairness Campaign, which has been nationally honored for its work winning LGBTQ equity by centering racial justice and connecting community organizing and electoral work. Carla has been inducted into the Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame.

Shameka Parrish Wright is Metro Council’s District 3 representative including Shively and surrounding West End neighborhoods. She also serves as the executive director of VOCAL-KY, an advocacy group focused on ending mass incarceration, homelessness and the War on Drugs. She has dedicated over 25 years of her life to organizing the community to address the issues around the criminalization of poverty.

Council Members

Eboni Neal-Cochran is Co-Director of REACT (Rubbertown Emergency ACTion), a grassroots organization of residents living near or at the fence lines of a cluster of chemical facilities commonly referred to as Rubbertown. She has been working with the organization since 2003 educating and working with community members, educating decision makers and pushing for reduced exposure to toxic chemicals.

Amber Duke is Executive Director of the ACLU of Kentucky. Amber was program director for the ABI at UofL. She earned an MA from UofL’s Pan African Studies Department. She also earned a Graduate Certificate in Public History from UofL’s History Department. She has a BS in Communication Studies from NYU.

Sherry Durham is the Associate Director of the Muhammad Ali Institute at the University of Louisville. A native of West Louisville and a graduate of Central High School, Sherry is currently a PhD Candidate in the College Student Personnel Program at the UofL. Sherry is a dedicated member of the Cardinal family having worked at UofL nearly 9 years.

Heather Fox is a native Louisvillian who comes from a line of Southern Baptist preachers and radio announcers. She is a faculty member in the University of Louisville Archives & Special collections where she manages the Oral History Center and is a manuscript archivist. She loves working with people.

Lauren Freeman is a Professor of Philosophy at University of Louisville and Director of the M.A. in Applied Philosophy. She’s also an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and faculty affiliate of the Anne Braden Institute. She conducts impact driven, interdisciplinary research that aims to understand how members of marginalized groups are oppressed in both obvious and subtle ways within the context of science, medicine, health and healthcare.

Alexandra Howard is a faculty member in the University of Louisville Libraries and a doctoral student in the College of Education. She helps lead the Cardinal Access to Restorative Education (CARE) Initiative at the University of Louisville which is a program dedicated to expanding educational opportunities for individuals in correctional facilities, those under community supervision, and those with a history of incarceration. She is also a co-founder of the Bluegrass Coalition for Higher Education in Prison (BCHEP) which is a state-wide stakeholder network working to collaboratively support and expand higher education in prison programs across Kentucky. Alex has a background working in the criminal legal system as a public defense investigator in her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. 

Chad Kamen was raised in Louisville where he first learned about community-building through joining food justice organizing across the city. He currently works in the University of Louisville Archives & Special Collections and focuses on outreach and instruction with the library's rare book collections.

Rev. Canon Dr. Jason D. Lewis serves as Canon for Congregational Vitality and Bishop's Liaison to the Racial Healing Commission and Economic Disparities Task Force of the Diocese of Kentucky. Known for his expertise in Appreciative Inquiry and Asset Based Community Development, he supports communities to leverage assets toward just action and building Beloved Community.

K.A. Owens is a veteran community and political organizer. He writes and speaks on a variety of issues and is a longtime radio host. He is a Co-Chair of the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, a former Chair of Kentuckians For The Commonwealth and a member of the Leadership Council of the Fairness Campaign. Mr. Owens earned BA and MA degrees from the University of Louisville. He earned an honorable discharge from the Kentucky Air National Guard. Mr. Owens is a resident of Louisville, KY. 

Romith Paily is currently a first-year student at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. He graduated in 2025 from the University of Louisville with a B.S. in Public Health. He is passionate about environmental justice and health equity.

Emma Posey is an undergraduate student at UofL double-majoring in Journalism and English Public and Professional Writing and minoring in Pan African Studies. She is an Honors Scholar, Martin Luther King Scholar, and Woodford R. Porter Scholar. On campus, she writes for the university newspaper, The Louisville Cardinal, serves as Social Media Chair for Black and Brown Honors Society, is an after-school mentor for the non-profit She Became, and is a member of the ABI's Community Council. She conducted research alongside ABI faculty in the summer of 2024 on histories of anti-apartheid activism in Louisville in the 1980s, supported through the Summer Research Opportunity Program by the Office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity.

Dr. Catherine Fosl

Dr. Fosl is an Emeritus Professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at UofL and was the founding director of the Anne Braden Institute, serving in that role from 2006 to 2021. Fosl was Anne Braden’s biographer and is the author of Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002; University Press of Kentucky, 2006), as well as the books Freedom on the Border: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky (co-authored with Tracy E. K’Meyer, University Press of Kentucky, 2009) and Women for All Seasons: The Story of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (University of Georgia Press, 1989). Subversive Southerner won the 2003 Oral History Association Book Award and was named an Outstanding Book in 2003 by the Gustavus Myers Center for Human Rights.

Through the institute, Fosl widened the public understanding of the significance in U.S. social movement history of Anne Braden and other understudied figures and currents at the grassroots level. She has advanced engaged scholarship that is grounded in collaboration between researchers and their subjects, producing knowledge that can be acted upon. By providing activists with broader historical and intellectual tools to enhance their efforts, such knowledge can advance racial and social justice aims. At the same time, she shaped the institute to expose scholars to a greater range of community-based knowledges.

Dr. J. Blaine Hudson (1949 - 2013)

The late Dr. Hudson was the former dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and a professor of Pan-African Studies.

As a creator of the institute, Hudson was a visionary educator and longtime university and community leader who was also a renowned scholar of African American history. He was the author of Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in the Kentucky Borderland (McFarland, 2002) and of the Encyclopedia of the Underground Railroad (McFarland, 2006), as well as many articles. He co-authored the book Two Centuries of Black Louisville: A Photographic History. As a young student activist in the 1960s, Hudson was mentored by Anne Braden and they remained friends for nearly forty years.

The Anne Braden Institute is one of many vehicles through which Hudson enacted his life-long commitment to connecting history to urban problems and to social change. Another was the Saturday Academy program, a non-credit “open classroom” learning series in African and African American history held in western Louisville.

Dr. Angela Storey

Dr. Storey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and has served as Director of the Anne Braden Institute since January 2024. As an applied cultural anthropologist, her research examines the everyday politics of the natural and built environment, with a focus on urban inequality, community engagement, and participatory processes of governance. 

Storey’s research has been funded externally by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and through internal grants from the Gheens Foundation, the Cooperative Consortium for Transdisciplinary Social Justice Research, the EVPRI’s office, and the Health Equity Hub. Storey received her PhD from the University of Arizona and is co-editor of the collection The Everyday Life of Urban Inequality: Ethnographic Case Studies of Global Cities (Lexington/Bloomsbury 2020, 2022).

At the ABI, Storey’s work has focused on revitalizing the Community Advisory Council, expanding faculty affiliates, connecting with community-based and engaged scholars, and emphasizing work with the ABI’s collections, in addition to organizing the ABI’s core programs including the Annual Anne Braden Memorial Lecture and the annual student paper and multimedia prizes. 

Dr. Brandon McCormack

Dr. Michael Brandon McCormack (Associate Professor of Pan-African Studies and Comparative Humanities) was director of the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research from 2021 - 2023. McCormack earned his PhD in 2013 from the Vanderbilt University Department of Religion, where he was also a fellow. He is also a proud undergraduate alum of UofL.

His research explores the intersections between Black religion, popular culture, the arts and activism. He teaches courses in African American religion, religions of the African diaspora and religion and hip-hop culture. He is one of the university’s inaugural Ascending Stars Fellows and an Academic Research Fellow at the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis. He is also a member of the Black Interfaith Project, a national network of academics, artists and activists engaged in research and action around the role of Black religious and spiritual practices in movements for social justice.

McCormack is a frequent speaker and lecturer, having been invited to speak at a range of institutions from HBCUs to Ivies. He finds his deepest joy in speaking outside of academia — at churches, public schools, community centers and other places where everyday folks are gathered and engaged in collective meaning-making and ongoing struggles for freedom.

Dr. Catherine Fosl

Dr. Fosl is an Emeritus Professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at UofL and was the founding director of the Anne Braden Institute, serving in that role from 2006 to 2021. Fosl was Anne Braden’s biographer and is the author of Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002; University Press of Kentucky, 2006), as well as the books Freedom on the Border: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky (co-authored with Tracy E. K’Meyer, University Press of Kentucky, 2009) and Women for All Seasons: The Story of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (University of Georgia Press, 1989). Subversive Southerner won the 2003 Oral History Association Book Award and was named an Outstanding Book in 2003 by the Gustavus Myers Center for Human Rights.

Through the institute, Fosl widened the public understanding of the significance in U.S. social movement history of Anne Braden and other understudied figures and currents at the grassroots level. She has advanced engaged scholarship that is grounded in collaboration between researchers and their subjects, producing knowledge that can be acted upon. By providing activists with broader historical and intellectual tools to enhance their efforts, such knowledge can advance racial and social justice aims. At the same time, she shaped the institute to expose scholars to a greater range of community-based knowledges.