People You Should Know: Experts on Campus

Name: Karen Wilson * Notable Alumni
Category: Culture: African-American Culture
Title: Lecturer in the Department of History
Degree: MA and Ph.D. in history from UC Riverside, as well as from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Areas of Expertise: Karen Wilson is a singer-storyteller, scholar and teaching artist who was born in Harlem, New York. Karen sings music across the spectrum of the African Diaspora in the United States including spirituals, calls, hollers, jazz, blues and rhythm and blues. She collected and premiered "A Tribute To Blueswomen: Beauty and the Blues" with her group, Blue Wave — New York. With Blue Wave — West, she created and premiered, "The Cool Intellectuality of Wise Women's Blues: Ida Cox and Friends."
__________________________________________________________________
Name: Vorris Nunley

Category: Culture: African-American Culture
Title: Assistant Professor of English
Degree: Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University

Areas of Expertise: Coretta Scott King was and is important for women in general and specifically to African American women to understanding movements for civil and human rights. Dr. King described her as more than a
"supportive spouse," she was a partner. She even demanded the "obey"
element of the wedding vows be removed in a time when such things were very difficult. While valuing the struggle against racial oppression, she clearly understood how the gender oppression and the marginalization of women was central to any notion of African American or human uplift. A notion too often, in practice, overlooked by the men of the American Civil Rights and other emancipatory movements.

The very fact we know so little of her contribution to the rights of African Americans and to women in general is a tribute to her sacrifice to something larger than herself and a cautionary tale about how the contributions of women continues to be repressed in "official" histories around a variety of socially significant events.

___________________________________________________________________

Name: Yolanda T. Moses * Notable Alumni

Category: Culture: African-American Culture
Title: Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Excellence and Diversity/Vice Provost, Conflict Resolution; Professor of Anthropology
Degree: Ph.D. University of California, Riverside Areas of Expertise: Professor Moses' research focuses on the broad question of the origins of social inequality in complex societies through comparative ethnographic and survey methods. She has explored gender and class disparities in the Caribbean and East Africa. More recently her research has focused on issues of diversity and change in universities and colleges in the United States, India and South Africa.

As president of the American Anthropological Association in the mid-1990s she led the effort to develop a traveling exhibit and web site about race. The project - "RACE: Are We So Different?" - launched in January. Moses is the chair of the advisory board and one of eight curators of the project