These speakers are involved with “Building the Engaged University: Inspiration and Challenge,” a series of events at the University of Michigan in the fall 2002:

Ismael Ahmed

Ismael Ahmed is co-founder of ACCESS (Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services), which he established 30 years ago. Recognizing that there was a need in the growing Arab community to provide services to new immigrants, he was one of the first volunteers to open a storefront to address these needs. Ahmed served as a volunteer until he was named executive director of ACCESS in 1983. Under his leadership, ACCESS has grown from the storefront to a major organization in the Detroit area. There are currently 44 programs being offered which serve over 50,000 people in one year. Ahmed has received a number of awards and has been appointed to many committees in recognition of his work in the community. These include the American Association of Community Colleges Alumni of the Year award (2002) the Outstanding Alumnus of Henry Ford Community College Award (2000), the New Detroit Bridging the Gap Individual Award (1999); the Michiganian of the Year Award (1995); University of Michigan Alumni of the Year Award (1994); Points of Light Award presented by the White House (1992); Outstanding Leadership Award from the U.S. Census Bureau (1992); Congressional Record Tribute to ACCESS; and numerous State of Michigan House and Senate resolutions honoring ACCESS.

Harry C. Boyte

Harry C. Boyte is founder and co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota; a senior fellow at the Humphrey Institute; and a graduate faculty member of the College of Liberal Arts. He served as national coordinator of The New Citizenship from 1993-95, a broad, nonpartisan coalition of civic and educational groups that worked, in association with the White House Domestic Policy Council, to analyze the gap between government and citizens. He presented its findings at a Camp David seminar on the Future of Democracy to President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and other leaders of the administration on January 14, 1995. Boyte also has served as a senior advisor to the National Commission on Civic Renewal and to the State of the Union Public Television series. For the last 10 years, Boyte has directed action research projects at the Humphrey Institute aimed at developing practical theory to re-engage citizens with public life and revitalize the civic mission of public institutions, including higher education. Boyte’s doctorate is in political and social thought from The Union Institute. In the 1960s, Boyte worked for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., serving as a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the southern civil rights movement.

Lonnie G. Bunch

Lonnie G. Bunch is the president of the Chicago Historical Society — one of the nation’s oldest history museums — a position that he assumed in January 2001. For more than a dozen years, Bunch worked in various capacities at the Smithsonian Institution. He was the associate director for curatorial affairs at the National Museum of American History from 1992-2000 and served as the senior curator of political history from 1989-1991. Before coming to the Smithsonian, Bunch was the founding curator of the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. Bunch, who holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in American and African American History from the American University, is an adjunct professor of museum studies at George Washington University and a documentary filmmaker. Bunch was recently appointed by President George W. Bush to the Commission for the Preservation of the White House.

Mary Schmidt Campbell

Mary Schmidt Campbell, scholar, author and former New York City Cultural Affairs Commissioner, is dean of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. The Tisch School houses two institutes: The Kanbar Institute of Film and Television and The Institute of Performing Arts. Both count among their alumni many of the country’s leading film directors, Broadway producers, and writers, as well as theatre historians and critics. Alumni include Oliver Stone, Tony Kushner, George C. Wolfe, Martin Scorese, Marcia Gay Haden, Spike Lee, Billy Crystal, Alec Baldwin, Susan Seidelman, Jim Jarmusch, Ang Lee, Amy Heckerling, Barry Sonnenfeld, Martin Brest, Todd Solondz and Bill Duke. Campbell begin her career in New York as the executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, widely regarded as the principal center for the study of African and African-American Art. In 1987, Mayor Edward I. Koch invited Dean Campbell to serve as Commissioner of Cultural Affairs of the City of New York. Campbell has a B.A. in English literature from Swarthmore College, and M.A. in art history from Syracuse University. Campbell co-authored the book “Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America.”

Jan Cohen-Cruz

Jan Cohen-Cruz is associate professor and the director of Theatre Studies at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Drama Department, and also teaches and serves on the faculty advisory board for the School’s Center for Art and Public Policy. From 1995-97, Cohen-Cruz co-directed Tisch’s AmeriCorps project (President Bill Clinton’s domestic Peace Corps) focusing on violence reduction through the arts. Since, Cohen-Cruz has co-directed Urban Ensemble, through which Tisch students do community-based art internships, and has coordinated the Drama Department’s minor in applied theatre. She co-edited “Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism” and edited “Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology.” Her essays have appeared in TDR, High Performance, American Theatre, New Theatre Quarterly, Black Masques, African Theatre, Theatre Topics, and various anthologies. Cohen-Cruz has been a freelance practitioner of the techniques of Augusto Boal since bringing him to the U.S. in 1989. Her long-term project is writing a book about U.S. community-based performance.

Dudley Cocke

Dudley Cocke, director of Roadside Theater, is a stage director, media producer, teacher and writer. He recently directed New Ground Revival, a bluegrass musical with the Mullins Family Singers, and Why the Cowboy Sings for the 2002 Winter Olympics. International work includes directing the company’s innovative performances in the Czech Republic (1992), directing Junebug/Jack for England’s Festival of the American South at London’s South Bank Center (1994), and conducting dance/story workshops for the 1996 Baltic Dance Festival in Poland. Under Cocke’s direction, Roadside has toured its original plays in 43 states and performed in big cities from London to Los Angeles. He has taught theater at Cornell University and the College of William and Mary, and often speaks and writes as an advocate for democratic cultural values. Cocke received his B.A. from Washington & Lee University; his graduate work was conducted at Harvard University. He is the recipient of the 2002 Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities.

Spencer R. Crew

Spencer R. Crew, Ph.D., serves as the executive director and chief executive officer of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. Its mission is to use the examples of courage, cooperation and perseverance characteristic of participants in the Underground Railroad to inspire a generation of modern-day freedom conductors. Prior to coming to the Freedom Center, Crew was appointed director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in 1994. He joined the NMAH staff in 1981 as a historian and became curator in the museum’s Division of Community Life in 1987. Crew was named chair of the Department of Social and Cultural History in 1991 and served as the museum’s acting deputy director from 1991-1992. During his tenure at the Smithsonian he curated numerous exhibitions, including “Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration 1915-1940.” He also has published extensively in the fields of African-American and public history. Before his tenure at the Smithsonian, Crew was assistant professor of African American History and American History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Julie Ellison

Julie Ellison is the director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. Ellison recently completed three years as associate vice president for research at the University of Michigan. In this position, she led the University-wide Year of Humanities and Arts (YoHA). Ellison is professor of English language and literature at U-M, where she has taught since 1980. Her undergraduate studies were at Harvard, and she received her Ph.D. in English from Yale. Currently Ellison is collaboratively teaching a graduate course on public cultural work, as well as working with undergraduates on a project for third- and fourth-graders, “The Poetry of Everyday Life.” Ellison is a member of the Board of the Michigan Humanities Council and serves on the Michigan Arts and Humanities Steering Committee.

Kenneth C. Fischer

Kenneth C. Fischer is president of the University Musical Society (UMS) of the University of Michigan. Since its founding in 1879, UMS, which has an operating budget of $9.7 million for the 2002-03 season, has presented top-ranking international artists including symphony orchestras; chamber music; solo recitals; jazz; world music; ballet, modern and culturally-specific dance; opera, theater and choral groups; and special attractions. UMS sponsors an extensive education and audience development program involving up to 200 events each season and hosts many artists’ residencies. UMS also supports the work of creative artists, having commissioned more than 36 new works, reconstructions, and productions in the past decade. Fischer has contributed to the performing arts presenting field as a speaker, workshop leader, writer, consultant and conference chair as well as a site visitor and panelist for many public and private grant programs. He currently serves on the boards of directors of Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Interlochen Center for the Arts, Chamber Music America, American Arts Alliance, Arts Midwest and ArtServe Michigan.

Kristin A. Hass

Kristin Ann Hass is the associate director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life and she teaches in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. Her book “Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” explores the legacy of the war as it is expressed in the public work of making memory at the Wall. Hass lectures, teaches and writes about material culture, memory, notions of the public and constructions of the nation. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies, is partner in West-Side Museum Works, and has worked in a number of historical museums (including the National Museum of American History, the Henry Ford Museum, and the Michigan Historical Museum).

Richard Howorth

As a teenager growing up in Oxford, Miss., Richard Howorth sometimes discussed with his family why their town, the home of William Faulkner and the University of Mississippi, did not have a bookstore. After he and his wife, Lisa, completed college, they worked in a two-year self-apprenticeship period at the Savile Bookshop in Washington, D.C., before returning to Oxford to open Square Books in 1979. Since then, the store has moved and expanded a few times, and continues to operate on the town square, with an active schedule of readings and events, including a weekly radio show featuring writers and musicians that airs on Mississippi Public Radio. Howorth served 11 years on the board of directors of the American Booksellers Association and was elected to two terms as president and chairman of the board, an experience that, coupled with community activism (he was one of a group of plaintiffs that sued the city in 2000), directed him toward filing to run for public office in 2001. During a summer in which he spent late afternoons going door to door asking citizens their ideas and concerns, Howorth was elected mayor on a campaign of effective management, smart growth and open government. He is still owner of Square Books, but now works full time in City Hall.

Julia Reinhard Lupton

Julia Reinhard Lupton received her Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies from Yale University in 1989. Since then, she has taught English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She has authored or co-authored two books on Shakespeare and numerous articles on Renaissance literature. In 1997, she founded Humanities Out There, an educational partnership between UCI’s School of Humanities and schools in the nearby city of Santa Ana. HOT is the winner of a Golden Bell Award from the California School Boards Association and has been featured in various local and national magazines and newspapers, including TIME Magazine. HOT is the recipient of several grants, including an NEH Exemplary Education Grant. Lupton is currently completing a book entitled, “Citizen Saints: Paul to Shakespeare.”

Hadass Sheffer Hadass Sheffer is director of program development and humanities-related programming at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in Princeton, N.J. Her charge is to design and direct foundation programs that focus on the humanities both in higher education and the community more broadly. Joining excellent research and creative activity to the practice of civic engagement, the Woodrow Wilson Public Scholarship Grants support campus-community projects that focus on an issue of cultural or social significance at the local, regional or national level. The program was originally developed as the granting arm of the Imagining America partnership. Her other programs include the Humanities at Work, services for humanities doctoral students and their faculty to increase awareness of the value of humanities training and education to society at large; the Visiting Fellows program which brings business, government and non-profit leaders to the campuses of small liberal arts colleges around the country for week-long residencies, providing a window to the outside world to students and faculty, and a glimpse into current campus life for the visitors; and fellowship programs for doctoral students and faculty in the humanities. Sheffer was a translator in her native Israel before moving to the United States to study Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught linguistics and cross-cultural communication at Temple University and Swarthmore College, and has been e-content manager at an electronic publishing company.

Kathleen WoodwardKathleen Woodward, professor of English, is director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington and chair of the National Advisory Board of Imagining America. Key to the Simpson Center is public scholarship, and many ongoing programs with the humanities at their core have been put in place over the last three years, including a rich array of short seminars for K-12 teachers. The author of “Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions” and “At Last, the Real Distinguished Thing: The Late Poems of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams,” Woodward is completing a book on the cultural politics of the emotions entitled Statistical Panic and Other New Feelings. She has published essays in the broad cross-disciplinary topics of technology and culture, aging and the emotions in many journals, including New Literary History, Discourse, differences, and Cultural Critique, and is the editor of Figuring Age: Women—Bodies—Generations (1999) and The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture (1980). She has received grants from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts and is a member of the Advisory Boards of the Brookdale Foundation and the International Longevity Center—U.S.A. From 1995-2001 she was chair of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, an international organization of over 140 members. Woodward holds a B.A. in economics from Smith College and a Ph.D. in literature from the University of California at San Diego.