Dr. Cassie Smith has been selected for the SEC Academic Leadership Development Program.
According to its website , “The SEC Academic Leadership Development Program seeks to identify, prepare and advance academic leaders for roles within SEC institutions and beyond. It has three components, a university-level development program designed by each institution for its own participants (i.e., fellows); two SEC-wide three-day workshops held on specified campuses for all program participants; and a competitive fellowship designed to provide administrative growth opportunities for former fellows.”
Cassander (Cassie) Smith joined the Honors College in May 2021 as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. She also is an associate professor of English, specializing in critical race studies and early Black American culture. She earned an MFA in fiction (2005) and a Ph.D. in early American literature (2010) from Purdue University. She has published a number of books and scholarly articles that address the cultural contributions of people of African descent in the early Americas. Those publications include “Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World” and “Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic.” Her current work in progress, tentatively titled “Wasteful Bodies: Conservation, Preservation and the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” examines a discourse of sustainability that shaped the transatlantic slave trade in the 16th-18th centuries. Smith is affiliated with the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies in the English Department, the Department of Gender and Race Studies, and the Summersell Center for the Study of the South.
Congratulations Dr. Smith!
