Expanding the Canon: A ProArts Faculty Development Series
The ProArts Consortium (comprised of Berklee College of Music, Boston Architectural College, Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Emerson College, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, New England Conservatory, and School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University) has assembled a series of events on the theme of Expanding the Canon. This three part series is designed to directly impact the way in which faculty engage in the classroom, with creative disciplines and the liberal arts in mind. The goal of this series is to encourage faculty members to reflect upon the reality of how we engage in the classroom while diversifying and drawing on (but not reproducing) the canons of our own education.
Series Structure
Friday 2/11, 12:30-2:00 PM EST | Domonic A. Rollins, Ph.D., will speak on challenging the belief of The Canon vs. a canon, normalizing social construction of knowledge, and teaching inclusively within the space of one's own discipline.
Friday 2/25, 12:30-2:00 PM EST | Join a panel of faculty to hear the experiences of others in the ProArts community, and to discuss how to translate the expansion of The Canon across various identities. Panelists include Dorothy Clark (Boston Architectural College), Rebecca Marchand (Berklee College of Music), Claudia Mattos (School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University), and Monique Van Willingh (New England Conservatory). This panel will be moderated by Marika Preziuso (Massachusetts College of Art and Design).
Friday 4/8, 12:30-2:00 PM EST | Deion Hawkins (Emerson College) will host a workshop with a focus on conducting relevant conversations in the classroom, humanizing faculty, and shaping culture to support this endeavor.
Faculty can register to attend using the password protected embedded links above; please reach out using your faculty email address. For issues accessing our events calendar, please email info@proarts.org.
Boston Architectural College adjunct faculty member Dorothy Clark has had a long relationship with the institution. Since 2019 she has been teaching “History & Modernity: The Idea of Empire,” a world history survey course, using a variety of lenses through which to view the past, including Critical Race Theory tenets and human geography. Dorothy also co-teaches the master’s level “Thesis Research and Development” and is a writing tutor at the BAC’s Learning Resource Center.
Dorothy works full time as editorial services manager at Historic New England and is editor of Historic New England magazine. A longtime journalist, she holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s in American history from the University of Massachusetts Amherst as well as a master’s in historic preservation from the BAC, which she received in 2016.
She has given presentations and served as a panelist at the annual Black New England Conference organized by Black Heritage Trail NH and held at Southern New Hampshire University.
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Originally from Indianapolis, Indiana, Deion S. Hawkins, PhD currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Argumentation & Advocacy and the Director of Debate at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. As a first generation student and licensed high school English teacher, Deion has always been passionate about the power of education and equipping all with the tools of advocacy, empathy, and dialogue. As a critical scholar, Deion remains committed to advancing equity and fighting racism and other systems of oppression, especially in public health spaces. His recent research can be found in Frontiers in Health Communication and Health Communication. Outside of the classroom, with over 10+ years of experience, Deion has coached multiple national finalists and champions in various debate events. Lastly, Dr. Hawkins is proud to humbly serve the community. He currently serves as a pro-bono mediator throughout the larger Boston court system and is the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) chair for Boston Health Care For the Homeless Program.
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Rebecca Marchand is Professor of Core Studies (Music History) at Boston Conservatory at Berklee. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Musicology from University of California, Santa Barbara, and holds a Certificate in College and University Teaching from UCSB as well as a Professional Studies Certificate in Arts Administration from Emerson College. At the Conservatory she teaches part of the undergraduate music history survey, Writing About Music for graduate students, as well as a variety of graduate seminars—most recently on Concert Music and the Harlem Renaissance, as well as American composition and the Cold War.
Marchand’s musicological research has focused on twentieth-century American concertized sacred music, Cold War contexts, and more recently, performance lexicons for interpreting graphic scores. She served as the president of the New England chapter of the American Musicological Society from 2012 to 2016, and has held previous teaching and lecturing positions at Boston University, Longy School of Music of Bard College, Clark University, and Providence College.
At Berklee she has served as an ETUDE (Enhancing Teaching through an Understanding of Diversity and Equity) Scholar since 2017, becoming Faculty Director in 2020. In this capacity she manages and oversees several faculty initiatives that include a reading and film group, a “working definitions glossary”, social media communications, as well as the Equity Partners program, which is a voluntary advocacy program for faculty and staff. In 2021 she was awarded the first Exemplary Faculty Award for Inclusive Teaching at Berklee. Marchand has been a lead participant in revising the music history curriculum at the Conservatory, focusing on challenging the supremacy of the western classical music canon as a model of exemplars, rather than a problematized narrative.
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A native of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Claudia Mattos Avolese obtained her PhD in art history from the Free University in Berlin, Germany, and was an associate fellow at the Courtauld Institute in London for a year. In 2003 she became a professor for the history of art at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), in Brazil, where she taught visual arts and art history until moving to the United States in 2019. At the University of Campinas, her courses focused on various topics, including image theory, 19th century landscape traditions, ecology, German Avantgarde and Brazilian Modernism, among others. In 2017, she was a visiting professor at Harvard University, teaching the course “Academies in the non-Western World”, together with Prof. Yukio Lippit. At Tufts she has offered a course on the concept of Antropofagia in Brazil, examining it as decolonial strategy. Dr. Mattos Avolese continues to collaborate with the Graduate Program in Art History and Visual Studies at UNICAMP, especially in support of the Getty’s Connecting Art Histories Program. Her principal areas of interest are visual culture in Brazil, indigenous art, material culture, global art history and theory. Her recent research focuses on indigenous arts in Brazil, the imaginary of the forest and ecology. She has published widely on global exchanges in the 19th century, including scientific expeditions by explorers to Brazil, and the creation and development of art academies in South America. Additionally, she has published on connections between German art theory and 19th century visual culture in Brazil, and on the history of art history with special focus on Winckelmann and Aby Warburg. Her scholarly work has appeared in many peer review journals including, The Art Bulletin, Perspective, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, and Journal of Art Historiography.
Dr. Mattos Avolese is seriously committed to decolonizing the field of art history, visual culture, and helping to produce a more inclusive and diverse approach to the art and material culture created across the planet. With the support of The Getty Foundation in Los Angeles, she created a new Graduate Program in non-Western art history at UNICAMP. She was president of the Brazilian Art Historical Committee (CBHA) for three years and is presently a member of the board of CIHA, the International Art Historical Committee. In 2020/21 during the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Mattos Avolese coordinated the online lectures series “Art Worlds of Brazil” at The Clark Art Institute, which offers an overview of Brazilian art and patrimony to a wide international public—much of this research work was completed before the present museum representation crisis that continues today. At Tufts, Dr. Mattos Avolese will be running an international online teaching program devoted to Brazilian non-Western art traditions, with the support of The Getty Foundation, in collaboration with UNICAMP and three other universities in Brazil.
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Marika Preziuso is Professor of World Literature at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the Caribbean Diaspora and an M.A. in Gender, Society and Culture, both from the University of London, UK.
Marika’s academic research explores Western imaginaries of ‘otherness’ and the literary and aesthetic strategies employed by writers, artists, and theorists from the African and Caribbean diasporas to critique and expand such imaginaries and create “opaque” and hybrid spaces for themselves and their art.
At MassArt, Marika teaches 20th century and contemporary postcolonial literature, particularly by migrant and diasporic writers, and speculative fiction of the uncanny, and Afrofuturism. The transnational scope of Marika’s classes actively invites the skill of intercultural understanding. In 2018 Marika designed intercultural understanding as a pedagogic framework, and has since offered its core tools and practices through interactive faculty development workshops and faculty consulting at MassArt and beyond. Details on Intercultural Understanding© are on her website.
At MassArt, Marika is the founder and organizer of Creative Counterpoints, the annual lecture devoted to the intersections of narratives of creativity and difference as investigated by visual artists, writers, public intellectuals, and other culture makers.
As a published poet and meditation instructor, Marika also leads “Found in Translation” writing workshops for creatives who straddle various languages and cultures, to rekindle their creative flow through generative and reparative writing and code-switching.
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Centering deep engagement and a strategic focus, Domonic Rollins successfully coaches organizations through diversity and inclusion change efforts. As the President of Rollins Consulting, Domonic works will clients to start, continue, and refine their efforts to make their organizations as inclusive as possible. Previously, he served as the Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at The Dalton School and as the Senior Diversity & Inclusion Officer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Both inaugural chief diversity officer posts affirm and catalyze a necessary condition for diversity, equity, and inclusion work in organizations: engagement.
A hallmark of Domonic's work is translating big ideas regarding diversity and inclusion, into practical solutions and considerations for organizations and interpersonal relationships. Previously, he served as the Senior Education and Training Specialist in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on issues of professional socialization, structural barriers to inclusive environments, social justice training in universities, and pathways to senior leadership for minoritized university administrators. His dissertation research investigated how Black male administrators navigate racism in higher education.
Domonic serves and keeps connection with Academic Impressions, Leadershape Inc., the Social Justice Training Institute, Washington Consulting Group, and other professional organizations dedicated to inclusion. Passion areas for Domonic include diversity, social justice, organizational dynamics, and supervision. Domonic earned his Ph.D. in Higher Education, Student Affairs, and International Education Policy from the University of Maryland-College Park.
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Originally from South Africa, Monique Van Willingh is an educator, musician and advocate for social and racial justice with cultural humility and brave dialogue as her central approach. As the Director of Cultural Equity and Belonging at the New England Conservatory of Music, Monique is committed to creating and sustaining spaces of belonging that incorporate Culturally Responsive Teaching, Andragogy (how adults learn), and Asset-based strategies that drive collaboration.
In her past position as Director of Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Program at Longy School of Music of Bard College, Monique supported the Longy mission of preparing musicians to make a difference in the world. She oversaw Longy’s one-year music education credential program in Los Angeles, that focused on music pedagogy, performance, and social justice. Monique has taught graduate level courses such as Historical and Social Foundations of Education, Social Justice Music Research Project, and Culturally Responsive Teaching.
Monique serves as the Vice Chair of the El Sistema USA national board. In this capacity, she co-leads the ESUSA Equity-centered Pedagogy Working Group, recently co-led ESUSA’s 5-year strategic planning process and serves on the Racial Diversity and Cultural Understanding Committee. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the Inter-generational Orchestra at Heart of LA (HOLA), an after-school youth program that partners with the LA Philharmonic to serve under-resourced youth with high quality music programs. Monique has been a panelist, presenter or facilitator at conferences and organizations such as El Sistema USA, Sphinx, YOLA National, iTAC, Global Leaders Program, Global Arts, and From the Top.