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Scholars and Projects

MSU Scholar Profiles

Julie Avery

Curator of Rural Life and Culture and Director, Information and Museum Services Division, MSU Museum

Julie Avery coordinates the Rural Arts and Culture Program, a grants and assistance activity of the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. She is actively engaged in contemporary community arts practice and development work focused in Michigan and the greater Midwest, especially in rural, small and remote communities.

Howard Bossen

Professor, School of Journalism
Adjunct Curator,  Art Museum at MSU

Howard Bossen curated “Luke Swank—Modernist Photographer,” an exhibition of 130 photographs that established Swank (1890-1944) as a pioneer photographer who fashioned social documentary into a compelling visual poetry. Outreach programming related to the exhibit included public gallery walks led by Bossen, radio theater performances, co-public-programming by the School of Labor and Industrial Relations, the Department of Art, and the American Studies Program, and a public writing workshop where writers of all ages explored connections between literary forms and the visual arts.

Karen McKnight Casey

Director, Center for Service-Learning and Civic Engagement

As the director of the Center for Service-Learning and Civic Engagement (CSLCE) at the MSU Museum, Karen Casey acts as a vital link between the students, cultural centers, and community groups she works with every day. Her title denotes her leadership, but her speech -- peppered with verbs like “collaborate,” “coalesce,” and “engage” -- illustrates a working philosophy centered on community empowerment, partnership, and democratic practice.

David Cooper

Director, Public Humanities Collaborative
Professor, Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures and Residential College in the Arts and Humanities

In 1995, Cooper co-founded the Service-Learning Writing Project and designed a community-based writing course—“Writing in the Public Interest”—that continues to enroll nearly 300 undergraduates a year in 12 stand-alone sections. He currently teaches in conjunction with Photo Voice, an international initiative for citizen empowerment and self-exploration through photography. Student projects have been recently exhibited in the Residential College in Arts an Humanities. Cooper was also instrumental in the archiving at the MSU Library of Robert Coles’ (Pulitzer Prize for Children of Crisis) manuscripts, essays, correspondence and the files of  DoubleTake, a magazine of documentary photography, nonfiction and literature.

Ellen Cushman

Associate Professor, Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures

A member of the Cherokee tribe and associate professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University, Ellen Cushman is currently working on a DVD and Web site for high school English teachers that model a civic research for social justice curriculum. The curriculum utilizes a critically transformative pedagogy that involves teaching students to research and learn about cultural and social issues relevant to a community with the goal of using new technologies to produce multimodal communications that contribute to that community. Building on her interests in new media work, Cushman is also developing a long-term study of Cherokee language and cultural preservation efforts and the identity politics involved in these.

  • Dr. Cushman's full bio coming soon

Jim Detjen

Knight Director and Professor, Knight Center for Environmental Journalism

Formerly an award-winning science and environment reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Jim Detjen directs MSU’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism. The Knight Center trains student and professional journalists to cover the Great Lakes basin environment. Detjen also uses the center to recruit and train local writers and organizations as ‘citizen journalists’ who report on the environment and develop multi-media stories for the GreatLakesWiki.

Kurt Dewhurst

Director, MSU Museum
Professor, English Department

Oral histories, fly fishing, post-Apartheid South Africa, folklore . . . these are just a few of the interests that command Kurt Dewhurst’s time and energy as director of the Michigan State University Museum and curator of the museum’s Folk Arts exhibits. As the head of the largest public museum of natural history and culture in the state, Dewhurst works to forge connections and bridge boundaries. In addition to bringing both new audiences and new exhibits to the MSU Museum, Dewhurst also devotes time to collaborating with artists and communities throughout the state, across the nation, and overseas to preserve their rich regional cultural histories. “Public humanities is an investment,” Dewhurst declares, “one that, although time-consuming, can provide important results.”

Nell K. Duke

Associate Professor, Department of Teacher Education and Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Special Education
Co-Director, MSU Literacy Achievement Research Center

Nell Duke led a project to educate child care workers about the learning processes of children from infancy through five years of age. In a DVD and booklet produced for the Michigan Department of Human Services for distribution to 20,000 licensed child care providers across Michigan, Duke developed a range of daily literacy activities aimed at age appropriate levels.

Leonard Fleck

Professor, Department of Philosophy, College of Arts and Letters
Professor, Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences, College of Human Medicine

As a moral philosopher and medical ethicist deeply involved with issues of health care and public policy, Leonard Fleck and his “Just Caring” project use a deliberative model of public discussion to guide community forums across the country on critical policy issues such as health care rationing, resource allocation, right to life, priority setting, genetics, ethics, and reproductive decision making.

Jeff Grabill

Professor, Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures
Co-Director, Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center

Jeff Grabill’s public scholarship addresses how people write together to do the knowledge work of their everyday lives. His research is located at the intersection of professional and technical writing, rhetorical theory, and literacy theory. Grabill’s latest book is Writing Community Change: Designing Technologies for Citizen Action (Hampton). In many ways, the book’s focus on technology and democracy is an extension of the work represented in his first book, Community Literacy Programs and the Politics of Change (SUNY, 2001). 

James Lawton

Professor, Department of Art and Art History

James Lawton organizes and directs Art on the Edge and Beyond: MSU’s Fringe Events, a series of live performances and lectures that showcase the diversity of the arts in an era of globalization and cultural border crossings. Through performance events and related programs, Lawton invites the public to explore the changing role of art in the new millennium. Recent “Fringe” artists include multi-media performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and photographer Carrie Mae Weems, whose work probes issues encircling African-American culture and the ways images shape perceptions of color, gender and class.

Marsha MacDowell

Curator of Folk Arts, MSU Museum
Professor, Department of Art and Art History.

The work of Marsha MacDowell, a publicly-engaged scholar, is grounded in an interdisciplinary approach to material culture and informed primarily by art historical, folkloristic, and ethnographic theories and methodologies. For many years her work has largely focused on the documentation and analysis of the production, meaning, and use of traditional material culture (especially that of Hmong-Americans, Native Americans, South Africans, and women); the analysis of the role of museums in contemporary society; the development of educational resources and public arts policies related to traditional arts; the development of curriculum materials related to community-based knowledge; and the creation of innovative ways, including digital repositories, to increase access to and use of traditional arts materials.

Anita Skeen

Professor of English and Program Director, Residential College in the Arts and Humanities

Before coming to Michigan State, Skeen was on the faculty at Wichita State University and served on the Board of Directors for the Kansas Humanities Council, where she helped to found “Talking about Literature in Kansas Libraries,” a reading and discussion program. In 1995 after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Skeen designed a poetry workshop where citizens wrote about thoughts and feelings evoked by works of art damaged by the bombing.  She is the author of four volumes of poetry and her poems, short fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. For 29 years Skeen has been Director of the Creative Arts Festival at Ghost Ranch Conference Center in Abiquiu, New Mexico. 

Mark Sullivan

Associate Professor and Chair, Music Composition Program

Mark Sullivan secured several federal grants to support Hispanic and African-American artists in five artistic disciplines (theatre, painting, writing, music, video). Sullivan’s artists-in-the-schools programs model effective ways to integrate the arts into the curriculum at schools with high proportions of at-risk students.

Paul B. Thompson

Professor and W. K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics

Paul Thompson’s research has centered on ethical and philosophical questions associated with agriculture and food, and especially concerning the guidance and development of agricultural technoscience. He has undertaken a series of projects on the application of recombinant DNA techniques to agricultural crops and food animals. Thompson works closely with undergraduate and graduate students to develop new research and teaching methods that combine the values of scientific discovery, learning and engagement with local communities.  He formerly held appointments in philosophy and agricultural economics at Purdue University and Texas A&M University.

Frederick Tims

Professor and Chair, Music Therapy Program

Frederick Tims is professor and area chair of music therapy and a board-certified music therapist at the MSU College of Music. He has worked with a wide range of people including seniors, survivors of cancer, at-risk youth and many others using music as a healing force.

Cynthia Vagnetti

Doctoral Candidate, Rhetoric and Writing

Cynthia Vagnetti is an artist and researcher who has developed film, print, videotape, and audiotape materials on sustainable agriculture and produced the traveling exhibition Voices of American Farm Women. 


Contact Information

  • Public Humanities Collaborative
  • 119 Morrill Hall • Michigan State University • East Lansing, MI 48824
  • Phone: 517.432.3910 • Fax: 517.355.0159 • E-mail: phc at msu.edu