Navigating Tenure and Promotion as BIPOC Scholars

Session Submission Type: Professional Development Workshop

Abstract

The Race, Indigeneity and Scholar Support (RISS) Committee is excited to sponsor this professional development session to provide mentoring and resources on the tenure and promotion process for Junior faculty. The session will bring together senior faculty across the field to provide mentoring and guidance based on their experience. Additionally we will offer a series of resources and skill sharing that address topics such as: how to select the names of suggested external evaluators, writing your personal statement for your tenure dossier, best practices for constructing teaching portfolios, and managing the stress of the tenure process. Participants will leave the panel with a set of curated resources and mentoring contacts put together by RISS committee members as well as a set of peer connections that they can turn to for support as they continue to navigate the tenure and promotion process. Participants are encouraged to bring their tenure and promotion documents to share and get feedback during the session.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Bayley Marquez, University of Maryland-College Park

Panelists

• Richard Yarborough, University of California-Los Angeles

• Mishuana Goeman, University at Buffalo

• Neda Atanasoski, University of Maryland-College Park

• Lauren Klein, Emory University

Biographical Information

Richard Yarborough is Professor of English at UCLA, where he teaches African American literature and 19th- and 20-century American fiction. He is also a Faculty Research Associate with UCLA's Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, which he directed for six years. The recipient of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award in 1987, he has been recognized as an Outstanding Faculty Member by the African Student Union in 1997 and received commendations from the City of Los Angeles in 1990 and the County of Los Angeles in 1991. In 2012, the Richard A. Yarborough Mentoring Award was set up by the American Studies Association's Minority Scholars' Committee to "honor a scholar who, like Richard Yarborough, demonstrates dedication to and excellence in mentoring."

Mishuana Goeman PhD, daughter of enrolled Tonawanda Band of Seneca, Hawk Clan, is currently a professor and Chair of Indigenous studies at University of Buffalo. Her monographs include Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Settler Aesthetics: The Spectacle of Originary Moments in the New World (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). Most recently she is a co-pi on Haudenosaunee Archival Research and Knowledge (Hark), a Mellon funded project at University at Buffalo (2023). In 2023, she began her role as the president-elect of the American Studies Association and served as the President of the association in 2024.


Lauren Klein Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the departments of Quantitative Theory & Methods and English at Emory University. She also serves as director of the Emory Digital Humanities Lab and PI of the Mellon-funded Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI Network. he is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, the award-winning Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in leading humanities journals including PMLA, American Literature, and American Quarterly; and at technical conferences including ACL, EMNLP, and IEEE VIS. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the ACLS, the NEH, and the Mellon Foundation.

Neda Atanasoski is Professor and Chair of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park and Associate Director of Education for the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM). Atanasoski’s interdisciplinary research has focused on feminism and AI, feminist and critical race approaches to science and technology studies, AI and the future of work, militarism, and human rights and humanitarianism. She is the author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (2013), co-author of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (2019), and co-editor of Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution (2022) and Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen (2025). She serves on the editorial collective of the journal Critical Ethnic Studies, the flagship journal of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association.

Bayley J. Marquez is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of American Studies, an affiliate faculty with the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and The Consortium for Race, Gender, and Ethnicity at the University of Maryland, College Park and an Indigenous scholar from the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians. As an Indigenous scholar, she centers how her work and scholarship takes place on Piscataway land, former plantation land, and within a land grant university funded by the seizure and sale of Indigenous lands. Her book, Plantation Pedagogy: The Violence of Schooling Across Black and Indigenous Space, was published by UC Press in 2024.