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Members of the Africana Board:
The Board consists of members from across UTC’s Academic community, contributing a wide variety of experiences and backgrounds to the growth and development of the Minor. The Africana Committee is responsible for all matters concerning the Minor including the curriculum, events, sponsorship etc. The Committee holds two positions for student representatives. If you wish to represent Africana, please contact the Coordinator.
Dr. Vic Bumphus joined the UTC faculty in 2002. He received his M.A from the University of Nebraska focusing on criminology and urban studies. His Ph.D. in criminal justice and criminology was obtained from Michigan State University, College of Social Science. Dr. Bumphus is also coordinator of the Graduate Program in Criminal Justice and Faculty Director of the Southeastern Leadership and Command Academy (SECLA), which offers both graduate and undergraduate leadership coursework to law enforcement across the southeastern United States. He teaches courses on policing and society, minorities and crime, cross-cultural diversity and crime, and integrative criminal justice seminar among others. His research interests include police accountability, race, ethnicity, family, and crime, criminal justice privatization, sentencing disparity and demography, and the social construction of the police in contemporary societies.
Dr Bumphus is the coordinator of the Africana Minor and an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at UTC.
Dr. Tom Buchanan joined the faculty of UTC in 2002 after receiving his Ph. D. in sociology from the University of Cincinnati. His research interests include race, class, and gender inequalities in the areas of health, homelessness, work, and organizations. His teaching interests include introductory sociology, social inequality, work, and social statistics.
Dr. Lisa Cothran is a Social and Personality Psychologist who teaches Social Psychology and Personality Psychology. She is preparing to teach Multicultural Psychology, Psychology of the African/African-American Experience and Psychology of Women. A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Dr. Cothran attended Tennessee State University (B.S.) and Washington University in St. Louis (A.M. and Ph.D.).
Lauren Curry is a student board member. She is a senior in Graphic Design with a minor in Public Relations. Lauren will graduate May 2007 and will pursue a Master of Business Administration. She has been a member of the Africana Board since Spring 2005.
Dr. Elizabeth Gailey is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Communication at UTC, where she teaches upper-division media theory, research, and writing courses. Adopting a cultural studies approach to media research, she is interested in media construction of gender, social movements, and issues. Her book, Write To Death: News Framing Of The Right-To-Die Conflict From Quinlan’s Coma To Kevorkian’s Conviction, was published by Praeger Press in 2003. Recent work has focused on advertising images of women and religious symbology, and she is currently preparing a book chapter tentatively titled, “Hot Bodies and Cool Spectatorship: Televisual Cues and Audience Involvement in Reality Cosmetic Surgery Shows."
Dr. Gale Iles is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. She earned her doctorate degree in 2006 at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. Her research area lies in sentencing practices, particularly the identification and examination of unwarranted sentencing disparities. She has also done work in the area of comparative criminal justice systems and has traveled to over 28 different countries throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, North America and the Middle East. Dr. Iles is currently working on a project that compares sentencing decisions and outcomes in American Territories to that of the U.S. Mainland.
Dr. Victoria Steinberg Contemporary Francophone African Cinema explores the uses of cinema in post-colonial Africa both as a means to convey local culture, both past and present, in an effort to reach both Africans themselves and the West as well as a tool to express current conflicts. Thus African cinema looks both inward and outward, both forward and back. It at once seems to seek to define culture as it expresses it. By bracketing the course to cover only Francophone Africa, we need learn only limited history of the colonial presence and therefore can spend more time on African culture itself.
Dr. Steinberg enjoys studying African cinema. In 1997, she had the opportunity to meet several African filmmakers at a conference at Michigan State University. Among them, Jean Marie Teno and Bassek va Kobhio from Cameroon, Djibril Diop Mambéty (the grand fatherand sage of francophone African cinema) and Ousman Sembène from Senegal and Cheick Oumar Sissoko of Mali, whom she got to hear talking among themselves about filmmaking, filmmaking and distribution in Africa, storytelling and funding of films, in addition to discussing the films that they had made and brought with them. While the highlight of her study of francophone African cinema, Dr. Steinberg continues to present papers and articles on these films, even applying for a National Endowment of the Humanities workshop in June, 2005 in Senegal.
