A Quartet of Black Scholars Who Are Taking on New Positions or Duties

Barnard A. Jones was promoted to associate professor in the division of criminal justice and homeland security of the Lesley H. and Williams L. Collins College of Professional Studies at St. John’s University in Staten Island, New York. He was also granted tenure.

Dr. Jones earned a master’s degree in emergency management from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and a second master’s degree in management information systems from Kean University in Union, New Jersey. He holds a doctorate in civil security leadership, management, and policy from New Jersey City University.

Artha Gillis, a psychiatrist who studies the long-term effects of early-life adversity on children, will be the inaugural holder of the RNPH Board Advisors Term Chair in Psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Gillis has been a member of the UCLA faculty since 2021, after serving as a staff psychiatrist at UCLA Health. She specializes in evaluating and treating children who have experienced sexual trauma.

Dr. Gillis holds a Ph.D. from Texas A&M University and a medical doctorate from the University of California, Davis.

Terry-Ann Jones, professor of political science and director of the Africana studies program at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has been appointed the deputy provost for undergraduate education at the university. She was on the faculty at Fairfield University in Connecticut for 15 years before joining the faculty at Lehigh in 2020.

Dr. Jones holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and Latin American and Caribbean studies from York University in Toronto. She earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in international studies from the University of Miami.

David Staten,  a professor of rehabilitation counseling, has been named associate provost for academic affairs at South Carolina State University. He has served in the role on an interim basis since December 2021. He has been on the faculty for 22 years. Dr. Staten was the first African American man to serve as the president of the American Rehabilitation Counseling Association.

Dr. Staten received a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and a master’s degree in rehabilitation both from South Carolina State University. He received a Ph.D. in rehabilitation counselor education from the University of Iowa.

UCLA’s Kelly Lytle Hernández Wins the Bancroft Prize

The Bancroft Prize is one of the nation’s top honors in the field of American history. The prizes are awarded annually by Columbia University for books published in the previous year, and judged by a panel of distinguished historians “in terms of scope, significance, depth of research, and richness of interpretation that they present in the areas of American history and diplomacy.” The prize includes a $10,000 award.

This year, one of the three winners is Black.

Kelly Lytle Hernández holds the Thomas E. Lifka Chair of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was honored for her book Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (W.W. Norton, 2022). The book is an “ambitious and exciting study of the Mexican Revolution as both Mexican and American history focused on the liberal-turned-anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón and the radical men and women that surrounded him,” according to the prize committee.

Dr. Lytle Hernández is also the director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. Currently, Professor Lytle Hernández is the director and principal investigator for Million Dollar Hoods, a university-based, community-driven research project that maps the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles.

Professor Lytle Hernández is s graduate of the University of California, San Diego and earned a Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles

Who am I Here?

It’s been a while since I emerged from the bavacrypt. No work travel for me since May of 2022, and I won’t lie, I was getting into a groove at home with the nest full again and my blood levels finally normalized. Life has been small and good, but there is a world out there, and to finally cross paths in the flesh with folks I work with daily and other friends I have not seen for many years is a special opportunity that I’m ready to partake. I have a crazy Canadian comrade meeting me in Los Angeles tomorrow—which is its own special gift—but there are also commies from grad school, and a dear friend from my days at UCLA that I had not seen for 23 years.

Old Gold AVS Reunion with Thom Arredondo

That was my first evening in San Diego, catching up with Thom Arredendo who I now know is one of those rare human beings that you can simply walk back into their life after more than two decades and pick up from where you left off. California was my home during the early and mid-1990s, filled with post-punk bands, Long Beach Community College, Parker’s Lighthouse, UCLA, AVS, movies, music, literature and poetry. It was the beginning of my love affair with the world wide web, and the moment I realized gaming—thanks to PCs—was going to be an entirely new phenomena after playing Doom and Duke Nuke’Em, not to mention MAME, Warez sites, and CD-ROM games like The Residents’ Bad Day at the Midway. Thom is a part of me, and seeing him again was a welcome reminder of a time that was special. Hell, a focal point of the next leg of this trip is seeing Unwound live on their reunion tour at the Wiltern Theater—a band that defined my time in LA and underscored a strain of manic, disaffection that framed a sensibility of the time.

Thom is a huge film, music, and literature lover, and stands as an early influence for AV Geekery. He started me off on my love for laserdiscs, turning me on to the above clip of Michael McClure talking about Jack Kerouac describing what the ocean is saying in his novel Big Sur. I believe the clip is from the 1986 documentary What Happened to Kerouac (1986) featuring an inspired clip with a description and reading that borders on the magical. In preparation for this adventure I finished Ham on Rye (1982) on the flight over, and just cracked On the Road for the next piece of my journey. I wanted to be more regularly reminded of a moment when words and ideas created a vital and radical lens on the experience of living. I tend to smooth the poetic edge of things with age, and wonder if that’s what makes me the who I am looking back on the who I was. Who am I here? Ah Jerry, Jerry Blake.