Keynote Speaker:
Timothy K. Eatman, Ph.D., is the inaugural dean of the HLLC. Most recently, he held an appointment as Associate Professor of Higher Education in the School of Education at Syracuse University. From 2012 to 2017, Tim served as Faculty Co-Director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA). He is co-author of Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University, a seminal IA research report on faculty rewards and publicly engaged scholarship.
Tim’s research explores institutional policy and equity issues in higher education. He has published in such venues as the Journal of Educational Finance, Readings on Equal Education, Diversity and Democracy, and The Huffington Post, and has written several other book chapters and reports. He is co-editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Service Learning and Civic Engagement, released in 2017.
He serves in national roles including as a faculty member for Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Summer Institutes on High Impact Practices and the Advisory Panel for the Carnegie Engagement Classification for Community Engagement.
Tim sits on the editorial board of University of Michigan Press - The New Public Scholarship book series, Urban Education, Diversity, and Democracy and reviews for several scholarly journals and publications. The recipient of the 2010 Early Career Research Award for the International Association for Research on Service Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE) and now a member of the board, Tim often consults with Higher Education associations and institutions for collaborative research, keynotes, workshops and consultancies.
Panel Moderator:
Margaret Post is an assistant research professor at Clark University in the Department of International Development, Community and the Environment. Her scholarship focuses on the role of grassroots community organizations in social policy change.
Dr. Post is author of Grassroots Coalitions and State Policy Change: Organizing for Immigrant Health Care (2011) and co-editor of Publicly Engaged Scholars: Next Generation Engagement and the Future of Higher Education with Elaine Ward, Nicholas Longo, and John Saltmarsh (2016). She also publishes in both scholarly and practitioner journals. In addition to teaching courses on public policy, community organizing, and qualitative research methods, Dr. Post conducts research and trainings with a range of non-profit and political organizations. Since 2013, Dr. Post also has served as a senior researcher with the Innovation Network Inc. Her current research focuses on the prevalence and efficacy of 501(c)(4) nonprofit advocacy organizations.
From 2013-2018, Dr. Post was a visiting scholar at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth College. She was post-doctoral fellow and co-manager of the Policy Research Shop at the Rockefeller Center from 2011-2013. Prior to her work at Dartmouth College, Dr. Post was Director of the Donelan Office of Community Based Learning at College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, MA) from 2007-2011.
In 2007, Dr. Post was awarded the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the Bailis Family Social Justice Award from the Heller School at Brandeis University. She has served on the Executive Committee of Massachusetts Campus Compact, the Advisory Board of the publication Diversity and Democracy, and is an active member of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA).
Dr. Post holds a doctorate in social policy from Brandeis University, and a master of public policy from the University of Minnesota.
Panelists:
Eric D. Batista is the appointed Director of the newly created Office of Urban Innovation under the City of Worcester Executive Office of the City Manager. Before this new role under Eric’s leadership he oversaw the creation and development of the Worcester Youth Violence Prevention Initiative, which has helped reduce violence by bringing more than 70 organizations and 150 people together to raise more than $3 million to improve the life and safety of Worcester students. He is an active member of the Latino community serving as the President of Adelante Worcester, a nonprofit focused on developing Latino leaders in the Greater Worcester area. He serves as a board member for Worcester Community Action Council, Youth Opportunities Upheld, Inc., Latino Education Institute at Worcester State University, and Corporator for the Greater Worcester Community Foundation. Eric holds an MBA from Assumption College, a Bachelor’s in Economics from University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and an Associate of Science in Building Architectural Engineering from New England Institute of Technology. Of note, he also served on the operations board that began the Campus Compact's Community Engagement Professionals (CEP) credential program.
Stephanie Yuhl is Professor of History at the College of the Holy Cross and specializes in the social and cultural history of the twentieth-century United States, with emphases in Southern history, public history, memory, gender/sexuality, and social movements. Her book-length treatment of Charleston’s cultural and touristic renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston, won two national awards, in historic preservation and southern history, respectively. The author of multiple essays and articles, Yuhl’s “Hidden in Plain Sight: Centering the Domestic Slave Trade in American Public History” (2013) earned the Fletcher M. Green and Charles W. Ramsdell Award for the best article published in the Journal of Southern History. A practicing public historian and consultant, Yuhl has curated museum exhibits, conducted community oral history projects, and served as lead scholar on projects in the Digital Humanities. She is currently co-curating a museum exhibit, archive-building, and oral history project (funded in part by the Scholarship in Action grant through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Holy Cross) on LGBTQ+ history in Worcester, which will be on exhibit at the Worcester Historical Museum until November 19. She is also at work on a book tentatively entitled, Cultural Redlining: The Cityscape & Neo-liberal Abuses of the Public Good, with colleagues at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
As the Executive Director of Worcester Historical Museum (WHM), Bill has over 40 years of experience in providing support and leadership to the Museum’s governing authority, managing and directing Museum operations, ensuring its finances are secured and managed and communicating the Museum’s goals to the public and stakeholders. He believes that the most exciting part of his job lies within the partnerships built with individuals, groups and other organizations throughout the community. Mass Humanities awarded Bill Wallace with its highest honor this year the "Mass History Commendation" for his impressive stewardship of Worcester's history at the Worcester Historical Museum which has included such current public history projects at the museum like the Latino History Project and the impressive exhibit For the Record: LGBTQ+ Worcester.
Department of Sociology, Worcester State University
