Affiliated Faculty

Alyse Bertenthal is an Assistant Professor of Law. Broadly trained as a lawyer and critical social scientist, Bertenthal relies on empirical methods to inform understandings of the micro-foundations of socio-environmental inequalities and contribute to efforts to develop effective interventions to overcome them. Her scholarship broadly focuses on environmental justice, and more specifically on how state institutions contribute to disparities in environmental protection and how and why groups might be differentially impacted by laws, policies, and government (in)actions. Another strand of research explores the interrelationship of scientific and legal practices in creating an ethics of care for non-human nature and broadening conceptions of justice to encompass the more-than-human world. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Bertenthal has published in law reviews and peer-reviewed journals, including the Annual Review of Law & Social Science, Law & Literature, Law & Policy, Law & Social Inquiry, Theoretical Criminology, Wisconsin Law Review, and Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Council of Learned Societies, and the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. She earned a B.A. from Yale University, a J.D. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine.

Dr. Shannon Brady is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Wake Forest University. Broadly, her research examines how people make meaning of themselves and the environments they find themselves in and how this affects their well-being, achievement, relationships, and health. She is particularly interested in how the messages and practices of institutions that structure our lives—particularly schools—can foster or thwart individual well-being and success and help or hinder efforts toward equity and inclusion. By developing and testing social-psychological interventions, she seeks to advance theory, elucidate psychological dimensions of major social issues, and develop new ways to improve individual and community life. One of her favorite classes to teach at Wake Forest is her first year seminar, the Psychology of Inequality. Before graduate school, she was an elementary and middle school teacher at Taopi Cikala Owayawa (Little Wound School) on the Oglala Lakota Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She has a M.S. in Education from Black Hills State University and a Ph.D. in Developmental and Psychological Sciences from Stanford University. When not teaching or researching, she enjoys making and eating delicious food, spending time in nature, playing pinochle, and hanging out with her family.

Alex Brewer is a medical sociologist and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wake Forest University. Her research interrogates the reproduction of social inequalities in the US healthcare system. Dr. Brewer is currently working on a book manuscript that examines how frontline healthcare workers manage the problem of urban hospital overcrowding, which it links to broader historical processes of deindustrialization, racial segregation, and fiscal austerity. In other projects, Dr. Brewer studies gender inequality in medical education, the structure of expertise in the medical profession, and clinical decision-making about pain management in the context of the opioid crisis. Her work has been published in the American Sociological Review and Social Science & Medicine and has won awards from the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Dr. Brewer earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2020.

Hana Brown is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Wake Forest University. Her research examines the political origins and political consequences of racial inequalities.  She uses an array of qualitative and historical methods to understand the effects of political actors and institutions on racial inequality, the effects of immigration and racial divisions on policy outcomes, and the micro-level effects of state actions on the lives of racial minorities and immigrants. Professor Brown’s scholarship has been published in such journals as the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, and Ethnic and Racial Studies.  Her research has been funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Science Foundation and has received awards from four different sections of the American Sociological Association. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and her BA from Bryn Mawr College.

Dr. Alan Brown is an Associate Professor of English Education, Bryant/Groves Faculty Fellow, and Chair of the Department of Education at Wake Forest University. A former high school English teacher, he earned a B.S. in English and Secondary Education from Appalachian State University, an M.A.Ed. in English Education from Wake Forest University, and a Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction with a concentration in secondary English education from The University of Alabama. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on topics including academics and athletics in K-12 schools, adolescent literacy, arts and movement, educational leadership, English methods, and young adult literature. His scholarly interests include working with secondary and college students as well as middle and high school teachers and athletic coaches to critically examine the culture of sports in schools and society while connecting contemporary literacies to students’ extra-curricular interests. Since 2016, he has led an after-school sports literacy program for eighth-grade boys at Paisley IB Magnet School. He also coordinates the Skip Prosser Literacy Program, including the program’s READ Challenge, a collaboration between Wake Forest Athletics, Wake Forest Department of Education, Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, and the Winston-Salem based literary nonprofit Bookmarks. Nationally, Alan was the recipient of the Conference on English Leadership’s Innovative Leadership Award in 2015. At Wake Forest University, he has been awarded an Academic and Community Engagement Fellowship (2016-2018), Faculty Service Excellence Award (2018), Champion of Change for Service and Social Action (2018), Innovative Teaching Award (2019), and Donald O. Schoonmaker Faculty Award for Community Service (2020).

Brian Calhoun is an educator and counselor based in North Carolina. He has taught in the College to Career program at Wake Forest University since July 2012 (WFU Department of Counseling and Education – respectively).

As a counselor he has worked with Dr. Mark Scholl (Wake Forest University – Department of Counseling) to create a local Career Support Workshop series – Promoting the Resilience of Community Ex-Offenders. In addition, he has provided group counseling support for families/caregivers of those living with Alzheimer’s at the Sticht Center (Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist – Winston-Salem, NC). Mr. Calhoun has helped author / work on the Care Train project with Dr. Philip Clarke (WFU Department of CNS) – peer-led Dementia Support for African American caregivers.

Dr. Francis Flanagan is an Associate Professor of Economics at Wake Forest University. His two main research areas are criminal law, particularly how the rules for jury selection affect the composition of juries and outcomes of criminal trials, and matching markets, which study how to allocate objects without using prices, such as allocating public school seats to students. Using data from North Carolina and elsewhere, Dr. Flanagan’s jury research highlights that prosecutors are much more likely to “strike” Black potential jurors relative to white potential jurors, and that these disparities can have significant effects on verdicts.  Dr. Flanagan earned a B.A. in economics from Washington University in St. Louis, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.

Dean Franco is Profesor of English and Director of the Humanities Institute. Since joining Wake Forest in 2001, he has introduced new courses into the curriculum, including Studies in Chicana/o Literature and Multiethnic American Writers, and he has taught courses on comparative race studies, human rights and literature, literature and theory, and first-year seminars on secularity and religion, and uncertainty. Dean served two terms as the English department co-chair, and he was the founding director of the Jewish Studies minor. In 2010, Dean was among three faculty who co-founded the Humanities Institute. Dean’s books include Ethnic American Literature:  Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing (Virginia UP, 2006), Race, Rights, and Recognition:  Jewish American Literature Since 1969 (Cornell UP, 2012), and The Border and the Line: Race, Literature, and Los Angeles (Stanford UP, 2019).  Dean’s essays appear in PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, and NOVEL, as well as books published by Cambridge UP and Oxford UP.

Karin Friederic is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wake Forest University. Broadly, her research examines how transnational human rights and global health campaigns reconfigure gendered subjectivities, relationships, and ideas of citizenship in rural communities in Latin America.  Currently, she is completing a book manuscript entitled The Prism of Women’s Rights: Re-gendering Citizenship and Subjectivities in Rural Ecuador, which focuses on the effects of human rights discourses on local responses to intimate partner violence on Ecuador’s coast over the last twenty years.  Karin’s research has been published in diverse venues and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Feminist Review Trust, among others. Karin was also awarded the 2015 Campbell Fellowship for Transformative Research on Women in the Developing World by the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Since coming to Wake Forest University in 2012, she has introduced a number of new courses, including Human Rights and Global Justice in Latin America, the Anthropology of Global Health, and Save the World in One Click!, a first-year seminar on the ethics of charity and humanitarianism. She also regularly teaches about cross-cultural understandings of race and racism, inequality, and health in Introduction to Cultural Anthropology.

Since the year 2000, Karin has also worked with Ecuadorian communities in their efforts to obtain health care services and mobilize against gender violence.  In 2003, she co-founded a nonprofit organization, The Minga Foundation, which is dedicated to improving global health through community-led development. Karin joined the Department of Anthropology at Wake Forest University after completing her MA and Ph.D. at the University of Arizona and teaching at Colby College. She received her BA in Anthropology from The Colorado College.

Andrius Galisanka’s research focuses on the history of 20th-century political thought and topics in contemporary political theory, particularly global justice, freedom of movement, and animal rights.

Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo is Earley Assistant Professor of Catholic and Latin American Studies in the School of Divinity at WFU.  She is an expert in Christian theological studies and Latin American Christian traditions, holding an M.T.S. from the University of Notre Dame and a Ph.D. from the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. She teaches courses both in the Divinity School and the Department for the Study of Religions, including Latin American Liberation Theologies, Whiteness and Christian Theology, and Christian Responses to Immigration. Her first book, The Power and Vulnerability of Love: A Theological Anthropology (Fortress, 2015) draws on women’s diverse experiences of maternity and natality to uncover the deep anthropological roots of human systems of violence and privilege. Her current co-authored book project, Re-membering the Reign of God: The Decolonial Witness of El Salvador’s Church of the Poor (under contract, Lexington Books), both offers an analysis of Salvadoran ecclesial base communities as agents of decoloniality and challenges white Christians in the Global North to enter into decolonial solidarity with grassroots liberation movements like the base communities both at home and abroad. Dr. Gandolfo has also begun research for a third book, Eco-Martyrdom in the Americas: Dying for Our Common Home (under contract, Orbis Books), which highlights the violence of environmental racism particularly through the stories of environmental defenders in Latin America who have been assassinated for their leadership in grassroots movements for social justice and ecological well-being.

Annalise Glauz-Todrank’s scholarship focuses on the intersections of religion, race, and law in the configuration of Jewish identification, particularly in the modern period. She investigates how these socially constructed categories become normalized, instantiate institutional inequalities, and shape conceptions of the self and the other. Currently, she is completing a manuscript entitled Judging Jewish Identity in the United States, in which she examines the 1987 U.S. Supreme Court case that provided race-based civil rights protection to Jewish Americans for the first time. Recent publications include articles in Religion Compass, Critical Research on Religion, and Who Is a Jew?: Reflections on History, Religion, and Culture, edited by Leonard Greenspoon. She has a forthcoming chapter in Race with Jewish Ethics entitled “Jewish Critical Race Theory and Jewish ‘Religionization in Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb.” She serves on the American Ethnic Studies and Jewish Studies Program councils at Wake Forest University, and she is a member of the Law, Religion, and Culture committee at the American Academy of Religion. Her classes include Introduction to Jewish Traditions, Approaches to the Study of Religion, Jewish Identities: Religion, Race, and Rights, Jews in the United States, and Modern Jewish Movements. Previously, she taught at Wesleyan University as a postdoctoral scholar, from 2010-2012, and at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she earned her Ph.D. in Religious Studies. Her B.A. is from Hampshire College.

Andrea Gómez Cervantes is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Wake Forest University. Dr. Gómez Cervantes’ research interests include immigration, immigration policies, race/ethnicity, gender, Latina/x/os, health, and families. In her current project, Illegality in the Heartland, she investigates the effects of immigration policies on Latin American immigrants’ everyday lives and ethnoracial relations among Latin American immigrants. Dr. Gómez Cervantes is a University of California President’s Fellow, a Ford Fellow, and an American Sociological Association Minority Fellow. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 2019.  Her work appears in Social Problems, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Migration Letters, Sociology Compass, and Feminist Criminology.

Derek Hicks is Associate Professor of Religion and Culture at Wake Forest University’s School of Divinity. He teaches and researches broadly in the areas of African American religion, religion in North America, religion and foodways, and cultural studies. Currently, he serves as the co-chair of the Religion and Food Group steering committee with the American Academy of Religion. He also serves on the steering committee of Wake Forest University’s Slavery, Race, and Memory Project, a Wake Forest University initiative seeking to account for the institution’s role with slavery. Dr. Hicks is the author of the book Reclaiming Spirit in the Black Faith Tradition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). He is currently completing a second book entitled Feeding Flesh and Spirit: Religion, Food, and the Saga of Race in Black America (under review with UNC Press). In addition, he served as assistant editor of the volume entitled African American Religious Cultures (ABC-CLIO Press). He also contributed chapters for the books Blacks and Whites in Christian America: How Racial Discrimination Shapes Religious Convictions (New York University Press, 2012) and to the edited volume Religion, Food, and Eating in North America (Columbia University Press, 2014). He is also the co-author of an article entitled “How Much a Dollar Cost?”: Political Ideology, Religion, and Poverty Policy Through the Lens of Kendrick Lamar’s Music (Southern California Review of Law and Social Justice, Vol 28:2, 2019).  Dr. Hicks is the founding director of the Center for Research, Engagement, and Collaboration in African American Life, which serves Wake Forest University’s intellectual community as an interdisciplinary research hub that promotes innovative programming and community engagement.   In support of his scholarship, Dr. Hicks has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Ford Foundation, the Fund for Theological Education, the Louisville Institute, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Wabash Center, and the Louisville Institute.  In 2017 he was awarded the “Martin Luther King Jr. Building the Dream Award” for his justice work at Wake Forest University and in the Winston-Salem community.

Julia S. Jordan-Zachery is professor and chair of the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Wake Forest University. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on African-American women and public policy. She is also the author of the award-winning book “Black women, cultural images and social policy” (2009 Routledge) and “Shadow Bodies: Black Women, Ideology, Representation, and Politics” (Rutgers University Press, 2017)and a number of articles and edited volumes including “Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag” (Arizona University Press, 2019). Jordan-Zachery was awarded the Accinno Teaching Award, Providence College (2015-2016). Jordan-Zachery serves as the President of the Association for Ethnic Studies.

Judith Madera is an Associate Professor of English and teaches courses about the intersection of race and environment. She is the author of Black Atlas (Duke UP) and her essays have appeared in Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Transatlantic American Studies, and Radical History Review. Recent work has been supported by the Mellon-National Endowment for the Humanities.

Madera has introduced courses such as Caribbean Studies; the Black Atlantic; Environmental Literature; and Radical Ecologies to the English Department and Interdisciplinary Honors. She has facilitated student learning projects with a number of community organizations, including the Boys & Girls Club; The Farm at the Children’s Home; El Buen Pastor Latino Community Services; Forsyth Humane Society; the Piedmont Environmental Alliance; SECU House and the Yadkin Riverkeeper.

Dr. Stan Meiburg is the Director of Graduate Studies in Sustainability at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He began this role in 2017, following a 39-year career with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  Dr. Meiburg concluded his career by serving as EPA’s Acting Deputy Administrator, the agency’s second highest position, from 2014 to 2017.

Prior to his time as Deputy Administrator, Dr. Meiburg served in senior career positions as EPA’s Deputy Regional Administrator in the Southeast and South Central regions of the United States, as well as serving in EPA offices in Research Triangle Park and in Washington, DC. He received EPA’s Distinguished Career Service Award, EPA’s Gold Medal for his work on the Clean Air Act Amendments, the Commander’s Award for Public Service from the Department of the Army, and the Distinguished Federal Executive award in 2012, the highest civilian award for a Federal senior executive.  He currently serves as chair of the North Carolina Environmental Management Commission, is a member of the Roundtable on Science and Technology for Sustainability of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.

Dr. Meiburg holds a bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude with Honors in Politics, from Wake Forest University, and master’s and doctoral degrees in political science from The Johns Hopkins University.

Roberta Morosini is a Professor of Italian. Her research is centered around Medieval and Early Modern Italy in and of the Mediterranean and mainly inquires on questions related to space, gender, and ethics with a geo-critical approach. Her studies of the Mediterranean as a space focus on mobility and crossings of women and slaves from East to West through medieval text and images, as a way to raise awareness about the “now” and questions of alterity, inclusivity, violence, identity, and displacement related to the contemporary mass migration from North-Africa to the Italian shores.

She works on maps and literary geography and has written numerous articles on mobility and crossings in the Medieval Mediterranean (What a Difference a Sea Makes in the Decameron, 2019; “The widest expanse of water”. Space and Itineraries of Mediterranean Dante. With a note on the voyages of Medusa and Ysiphile, 2019), and more recently she devoted an entire book to women of the the Salty Sea (Il mare salato, Viella 2020).

Her pan-mediterranean research interests include the study of Christian-Muslim Relations (Brill 2010). Morosini’s recent book on mis/representation of Muhammad and Islam in Dante’s Comedy and the Renaissance painter Filippino Lippi’s Adoration of the Golden Calf is in Dante, il Profeta e il Libro 2018 (forthcoming in English). Her current research and teaching dwell on ways to incorporate the historical understanding of disease outbreaks into the teaching curriculum with the goal to contribute to a culture of pro-humanitate. The aim is to encourage a new humanism by ways of exploring how literature can inspire models of justice and social equality in our classrooms, to rebuild our Cities after the pandemic. Studying how people reacted to the plague that struck Florence in 1348 through Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1370 ca.), she shares models of order and civilization in opposition to the chaos, irrationality, and violence generated by fear, from a socio-economic and political point of view. She cannot wait to teach her FYS in Spring 2021 on Gardens of Joy, Cities of Hope. Bodies in movement and the Pandemic, and lecture in Jerusalem in December on Dante and Islam.

Michele Myers is an Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University. As a holistic, social justice educator, Myers’ personal commitment is ensuring that ALL children receive a humanizing education that honors their histories, heritages, literacies, languages, cultures, family structures, and communities as assets for learning. Her passion for affecting change pushes her work beyond the walls of her university into the schools and communities in which children work, live, and learn.

Dr. Samanta Ordóñez, Assistant Professor of Spanish, investigates the construction of racialized gender categories and how they are being resisted and challenged by politically transformative cultural practices in diverse contemporary social settings. Her current teaching and research deal with Mexican and diasporic contexts where gender- and race-based hierarchies re-articulate the global logic of coloniality in neoliberal, populist, and other guises; and where trans-local communities engage in complex forms of intercultural relationality to generate and share in alterable social identities, unrecognized forms of political and social activism, adaptive coalitions, and ways of living in resistance. Her courses introduce intersectional and decolonial perspectives on cultural configurations of race and gender to enhance student’s ability to recognize patterns of domination and practices of opposition unfolding within the structural dimensions of neoliberal globalization as lived and experienced from the heterogeneous positionalities constituting Mexican, Latin American, Latinx, Black, Asian, indigenous, and other overlapping social collectivities. She is the author of Mexico Unmanned: The Cultural Politics of Masculinity in Mexican Cinema(SUNY Press, 2021), a study of current filmmaking that critically illustrates how Mexico’s deeply embedded mythologies of mestizo masculinity continue to manifest in categorially dehumanizing cultural representations of racialized men. Her scholarship appears in Chasqui and Studies in Hispanic and Latin American Cinemas. Dr. Ordóñez holds degrees from the Universidad Veracruzana (B.A.), the University of Western Ontario (M.A.), and Cornell University (M.A. & Ph.D.).

Dr. Dani Parker Moore worked as a middle school and high school teacher before pursuing her Ph.D. at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While working on her Ph.D., Dr. Parker Moore worked with the TRiO programs Upward Bound and Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program. Her previous work in schools and with TRiO programs has shaped the ways in which she approaches her research, which focuses on parent engagement and family-school-community collaborations, with a specific interest in Freedom School programs.

Megan Regan is a visiting associate professor at Wake Forest University. Her work examines the challenges facing the working poor and the difficulties people at the poverty level face regarding self-sustainability and risk. She is particularly interested in local policies related to food and housing that disproportionately affect low-income residents and residents in racially and ethnically segregated areas of Winston-Salem. In her current work with the City of Winston-Salem, Megan works to increase access to local and home-produced food by working with local government policy-makers. She also works to increase market access for small-scale farmers in the urban core. For more on this work, check out the Liberty Street Vendors Market or the City of Winston-Salem’s “chicken permit.” Megan has taught courses in Economic Development in Latin America and Gender and Globalization, in addition to teaching in the International Studies program at Wake Forest University. Megan earned a BSBA in marketing, M Ed in educational leadership, and a PhD in food and resource economics at the University of Florida.

Professor Simmons’ research interests include corporate governance and higher education policy. His articles have appeared in top journals and law reviews. He is the author of the new book Potential on the Periphery: College Access from the Ground Up (Rutgers Univ. Press) . Prior to joining the Wake Forest Law School faculty, Professor Simmons worked as corporate counsel for two multinational corporations and as an associate at the law firm of Wilmer Hale in Washington, D.C. Immediately after law school, he clerked for the Honorable E. Norman Veasey, Chief Justice of the Delaware Supreme Court.

Professor Simmons is a member of the American Law Institute. He is also the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Simmons Memorial Foundation (SMF), a nonprofit organization that provides college consulting services and mentoring to vulnerable students.

Professor Simmons received his undergraduate education at Wake Forest University; his Juris Doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania Law School; and a Master of Laws from the University of Cambridge. At the University of Pennsylvania, he received the Thouron Award and the Fontaine Fellowship. Professor Simmons has received multiple honors in recognition of his efforts in promoting higher education opportunities.

Associate Professor of English

Associate Dean for Faculty Recruitment, Diversity, and Inclusion

Margaret H. Taylor is a Professor of Law at Wake Forest University School of Law, where she teaches courses in Immigration Law, Administrative Law, and Torts.  Professor Taylor’s research focuses on the immigration court system, immigration detention, and the deportation of criminal offenders.

Professor Taylor was invited to testify on detention policy before Congress and the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.  She was appointed to the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration, served on the Advisory Board of the Appearance Assistance Program of the Vera Institute of Justice, and served as a consultant on immigration for the Committee on Federal-State Jurisdiction of the Judicial Conference of the United States.  Professor Taylor is a recipient of the Joseph Branch Excellence in Teaching Award from Wake Forest University School of Law and the Elmer Fried Excellence in Teaching Award from the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Risa Toha is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wake Forest University.

Her research examines questions related to ethnic politics, political violence, and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. Her book, Rioting for Representation: Local Ethnic Mobilization in Democratizing Countries, examines the micro-dynamics of ethnic riots in Indonesia during its transition to democracy and argues that local political actors resort to violence to protest against exclusion in local politics. This book was published by Cambridge University Press.    Her other works have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Electoral Studies, among others.

She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her AB from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.  Prior to joining Wake, she was an Assistant Professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, an Indonesia Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wheaton College.  Her research has been supported by grants from the Singapore Social Science Research Council, Singapore’s Ministry of Education, the Mustard Seed Foundation, the Pacific Rim Research Organization, and the U.S. Department of Education.

I completed my undergraduate degree at Creighton University and subsequently completed an M.A. and Ph.D. at Indiana University.  I then spent several years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I joined the Department of Sociology at Wake Forest in 2002.

My research focuses on several dimensions of social stratification and the politics of inequality. This work includes research on labor relations and race relations. In the area of labor relations, I have studied the politics of health and safety legislation with a recent emphasis on the conditions facing Latino workers in the meat packing industry. In the area of race relations, I have examined the dimensions and dynamics of residential segregation in micropolitan areas, focusing on new Latino destinations.  More recently, my research on Latinos has broadened to include an analysis of alcohol use and abuse among first-generation, second-generation, and third-generation plus adolescents. My work has been published in Social Problems, Sociological Compass, Social Science Research and Sociological Spectrum.

I have taught a wide range of courses that reflect my research interests as well as my efforts to integrate both community outreach and research with the substantive work covered in these classes.  These courses include: Principles of Sociology, Race and Ethnic Relations, Sociology of Work, Social Problems, Special Topics:  Immigration, and a Freshmen Year Seminar.  In all of these courses, students are introduced to the principles of social research and the opportunities for community outreach that coursework in sociology prepares us to pursue. In a similar vein, I recently served with Dr. Steven Gunkel as a faculty advisor on an international service trip to Kayamandi, South Africa. In the post-apartheid era, this black township is a place where the work of tearing down the legacy of racism and colonialism remains pressing.  As part of the Wake Forest contingent, I had an opportunity to provide a computer literacy course to adults living in this township.

A distinguished scholar and public intellectual, Corey D. B. Walker is the Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities and is jointly appointed in the Department of English and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Wake Forest University. His research and teaching specialties include African-American social and political thought; critical theory and cultural studies; and religion, ethics, and public life. He has held faculty appointments and academic leadership positions at Brown University, University of Virginia, Winston-Salem State University, and Virginia Union University. He has held visiting faculty appointments at Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena, Union Presbyterian Seminary, and the University of Richmond.

He is the author of A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (University of Illinois Press), editor of Community Wealth Building and the Reconstruction of American Democracy: Can We Make American Democracy Work? (Edward Elgar Publishing), editor of To Stand With and For Humanity: Essays from the Wake Forest University Slavery, Race and Memory Project (Wake Forest University), editor of the special issue of the journal Political Theology on “Theology and Democratic Futures,” associate editor of the award-winning SAGE Encyclopedia of Identity and has published over sixty articles, essays, book chapters and reviews appearing in a wide range of scholarly journals and publications. He also co-directed and co-produced the documentary film fifeville with acclaimed artist and filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson. His scholarship and public speaking attracts a broad audience and he provides informed commentary to a number of media outlets.

Ivan Weiss is an educator and documentary filmmaker based in North Carolina. He has taught in the Journalism Program at Wake Forest University since January 2017. As a filmmaker, his work has explored a variety of subjects, including experimental music, baseball, desegregation, the plight of wounded military veterans, and more.

Tess Wise is an Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs. She studies American political economy, paying particular attention to the way White supremacy is constructed through debt and institutions such as personal bankruptcy. Professor Wise is working on a book manuscript that combines lived experiences of Americans going through Chapter 13 personal bankruptcy with an analysis of personal bankruptcy’s racialized position in the American welfare state. She likes to consider what are sometimes thought of as primarily economic topics, such as consumer finance, through the lens of family, racial inequality, and politics. Professor Wise also does research in American politics more broadly, working on topics such as how newspapers covered the crack-cocaine versus opioid epidemics, racial priming in experimental research, the gender politics of political methodology, and how America is positioned to participate in the debate over the future of global public health in the context of COVID-19. Before coming to Wake Forest in 2021, Professor Wise completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2019 and was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Amherst College. Her work has been published in the Journal of Health Policy, Politics, and Law and PS: Political Science and Politics.

Ron Wright is one of the nation’s best known criminal justice scholars. He is the co-author of two casebooks in criminal procedure and sentencing; his empirical research concentrates on the work of criminal prosecutors. He is a board member of the Prosecution and Racial Justice Project of the Vera Institute of Justice, and has been an advisor or board member for Families Against Mandatory Minimum Sentences (FAMM), North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services, Inc., and the Winston-Salem Citizens’ Police Review Board. Prior to joining the faculty, he was a trial attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice, prosecuting antitrust and other white-collar criminal cases. Ron and his wife, Amy, have two children.

Phoebe Zerwick, director of journalism and associate professor of the practice, is an investigative journalist, narrative writer, and web-based documentary maker who teaches in the Journalism and Writing programs. She came to teaching after 20 years at the Winston-Salem Journal, where she was a reporter, columnist, and editor. In 2003, Zerwick wrote a series about the wrongful murder conviction of Darryl Hunt, which led to his exoneration. She is currently working on a book about Hunt’s case for Grove Atlantic, which explores the trauma of wrongful incarceration and the racism Hunt endured. Much of Zerwick’s teaching explores the intersection of race, criminal justice, and journalism. She has written for a wide range of publications, including Glamour, Parents, National Geographic,  O, The Oprah Magazine, Our State, the Duke Law Magazine, and The Nation, and her work has been recognized by The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists, Columbia University, and the North Carolina Press Association. Zerwick has a BA from the University of Chicago in General Studies (1982) and an MS from Columbia University in Journalism (1987).