Sean McCarthy

Dr. Seán McCarthy is an assistant professor in the School of Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication at James Madison University. His teaching and research are situated at the intersection of community engagement and digital literacy studies, and he is particularly interested in how writing and digital media production inform and transform transdisciplinary university-community partnerships in local, national, and international contexts. He has served as a faculty associate with JMU’s Center for Instructional Technology (now Innovation Services) and is currently a university Entrepreneurship Faculty Fellow. Seán co-designed and co-teaches an annual institute for faculty in digital humanities pedagogy at JMU and is involved in several university-wide initiatives that promote community and civic engagement

Mollie Godfrey

Dr. Mollie Godfrey is Assistant Professor of English at James Madison University with a background in the preservation of African American archives. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, she helped preserve the archives of the Chicago Defender, the South Side Community Arts Center, and two Black Arts Movement publishers. More recently, she worked with undergraduates at Bates College to preserve the papers of the Maine NAACP. In addition to her work in archival preservation and community engagement, she is currently working on a book project tentatively titled “Black Humanisms: Race, Gender, and the Fictions of Segregation.” Articles related to this topic have appeared in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, MELUS, and CLA Journal. Her co-edited volume, Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow, is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.

Tessa McKenzie

Tessa McKenzie, MPH co-instructed the course during her time as the Community-Engaged Research Coordinator in the Division of Community Engagement at VCU. Tessa continues to use connected-learning strategies in her new role as Manager of Evidence-Based Decision-Making with Bridging Richmond, an educational equity partnership in Richmond, VA. She has a unique background in social epidemiology and her area of expertise focuses on bringing harmony across data silos to ask the right questions that reveal and heal social inequities.  Tessa believes data is what brings us together. Through Tessa’s collaborative approach, she is working with public school districts to create a data-sharing culture with trust-building as a central tenet and major driver of change.

Laura Gogia

Laura Gogia, MD, PhD assisted in the design of Collaborative Curiosity and served as the first connected learning coach for the course. She is the Associate Director of the Grace E. Harris Leadership Institute (GEHLI) at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and an independent educational consultant specializing in mixed methods research, innovative digital learning designs, and alternative evaluation strategies. Recent scholarship has focused on community engaged scholarship, participant success, and systems-level evaluation in higher education. Laura earned her doctorate in Educational Research and Evaluation and medical degree from VCU. In a prior professional life, she was a women’s health provider in rural Virginia and continues to be a fierce advocate for clinical translational research, knowledge accessibility, and health and wellness.

Valerie Holton

Valerie Holton, PhD, LCSW, was one of the instructors for Collaborative Curiosity. She is recognized for her work on the role of urban universities in their communities and the infrastructure needed to enhance their impact within their institutions and across their communities. In her current role as the director of community-engaged research in the Division of Community Engagement at Virginia Commonwealth University, she leads the division’s involvement in building universitywide infrastructure to advance community-engaged research (CEnR). Additionally, she supports the development of the division’s and university’s capacity to track and measure the impact of VCU’s engagement. She also serves as the executive editor of Metropolitan Universities journal (MUJ).