Women’s & Gender Studies M.A. student Anisha Bhattarai published an article in The Informal: South Asian Journal of Human Rights and Social Justice entitled, “Negotiating Feminism and Stigma in Nepal: Woman’s Rights Perspective.” This article draws partially on Anisha’s participation at the United Nations’s Commission on the Status of Women conference, which she attended in March 2025 with Sociology and Women’s & Gender Studies Professor Solange Simões, who is also Anisha’s advisor.  

The publication of this article speaks to the high-quality and mentorship of our graduate program in Women’s & Gender Studies. Anisha will be the Graduate Assistant in Women’s & Gender Studies in the academic year. Anisha has also spent the summer researching the history of the Women’s & Gender Studies Department in the EMU Archives and our timeline will debut shortly on the website. 

Psychology student Treasure Affia has won a $1500 Portz Interdisciplinary Fellowship through the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) for her project, "Investigating Attachment Styles, Social Anxiety, and Emotion Regulation through The Sims 4." Treasure will be completing the project (which will also serve as her Honors thesis) with Dr. Ryan Wessell of the Department of Psychology. 

Each NCHC member institution can submit one proposal per year for consideration in the competition. The NCHC then awards six Portz Fellowships, ranging from $1500 to $5000, in a competition for creative and innovative research endeavors  that cross interdisciplinary boundaries. 

Treasure was selected as a 2025 Portz Fellow from a pool of highly competitive honors students from across the country. The selection committee said that Treasure's project reflects a thoughtful and relevant purpose and clear research methods. They also commented that they were impressed with Treasure's preparation, engagement in honors, and evident enthusiasm for the project.

The Association for Writing Across the Curriculum (AWAC) has named Dr. Ann Blakeslee, Professor of English Language & Literature and Director of the Office of Campus & Community Writing, as a Distinguished Fellow. This award recognizes distinguished scholars who have made significant contributions to the field of WAC through scholarship, service, and achievement. 

AWAC praises Professor Blakeslee’s impressive record of program building at EMU: 

At Eastern Michigan University, she founded and led a WAC program that has been in operation for more than two decades and includes intensive annual institutes, a WAC speaker series, a book group, discussion groups for WAC faculty, and K-12 WAC outreach to local school districts. She also transformed the university’s writing center into a WAC-based center and developed strong connections between the WAC program and the larger Ypsilanti community through the Eastern Michigan Writing Project and YpsiWrites, a community writing resource she co-founded that offers workshops and writing support to members of the Ypsilanti community.

Dr. Joseph Csicsila, Head of the Department of English, adds that Professor Blakeslee’s AWAC honor is much deserved. “Ann is one of the most innovative academics I’ve ever worked with,” says Professor Csicsila, “and what she’s brought to–and done for–EMU’s campus the last twenty years through her work with WAC is immeasurable. She’s a true point of pride for this institution.”  AWAC also recognized Dr. Blakeslee’s important scholarly contributions and service to her profession. She has published articles in journals such as Language and Learning Across the Disciplines, Journal of Nursing Education and Practice, and Technical Communication Quarterly, as well as chapters in edited collections such as Writing Beyond the University: Preparing Lifelong Learners for Lifewide Writing and her monograph Interacting with Audiences: Social Influences on the Production of Scientific Writing. Additionally, Dr. Blakeslee served for three years as the incoming chair, chair, and past chair of the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum (AWAC). She currently serves as Associate Publisher for Books with the WAC Clearinghouse where she has played a key role in an ongoing effort to create sustainable, ethical practices. Dr. Blakeslee is also a Fellow of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing and a recipient of the Society for Technical Communication Ken Rainey Award for Excellence in Research.

This summer, on Saturday, June 21st, Preservation Studies director Nancy Bryk and Matt Jones, Director of the Center for Oral History Research (and a Preservation Studies graduate), attended the joyous dedication of an historical marker for a modest frame home on 99 Pine Street in Manistee, Michigan. That marker honors the Smith family, including Raymond and Annie Smith, and their ten children. The Smiths moved into the home in 1935 (and still owns it); they were the only African American family in Manistee for nearly five decades. They shrugged off limitations and supported other African American contract workers passing through who could not find room and board elsewhere in the resort town. Particularly, the Smiths accommodated entertainers heading to Idlewild, Michigan as performers. They housed local actors, too, including James Earl Jones, who remained a friend of the family until his passing. The Smiths saw discrimination and hardship but persisted; Raymond and Annie found ways to earn enough to send eight children to college. 

EMU is an important part of 99 Pine Street’s recent history. In 2021, Fatou Dieye, granddaughter of Raymond and Annie and daughter of Ann Smith, was searching for a way to honor her mother—an EMU alumna—on her 80th birthday. She connected with Nancy Bryk, mentioning this house. Might our program be interested in researching it? Yes, we would!  Bryk wrote a successful Brickley grant requesting funding for student trips to document and research the house. Preservation Studies faculty, including Bryk, Dr. Matt Cook and Dr. Dan Bonenberger, brought students to Manistee to do this work. Brickley funding also supported Matt Jones to conduct eight oral histories with surviving children of Raymond and Annie. Those interviews are a treasured product of that funding. 

The house deserved an historical marker. It just so happens that Michigan’s historical markers are researched and written by an EMU Preservation Studies graduate assistant. Troy Masserant began research on the marker and his successor, Andrew Oswald, oversaw text approval with the Michigan Historical Commission. 

The marker dedication was a heartwarming celebration, including 200 people who were thrilled that Raymond and Annie’s accomplishments were formally acknowledged. EMU’s contributions to the 99 Pine Street Project were front and center at the festivities, mentioned by every speaker. Bryk and Matt Jones were asked to say a few words, too. Matt Jones and the Preservation Studies faculty and students are honored to be trusted to help document the Smiths’ remarkable stories, objects, and home. 

Towards an Understanding of Africology, now in its 7th edition, represents an essential reading for students, teachers/researchers, and administrators who seek a concise, clear and comprehensive understanding of the evolution, philosophical and theoretical foundation, mission, and functional value of Africology/Black Studies in academe and human society at large.

Serving as a comprehensive text for undergraduate and introductory graduate-

level courses in Black Studies, Towards an Understanding of Africology by

Victor O. Okafor:

• Includes a set of both new and significantly updated chapters.

• Recognizes the global context of American and African American history, and the universality of the African experience.

• Discusses the evolution, scope, and philosophical and theoretical foundation of Black Studies.

• Includes updated research and scholarship on Africa as the cradle of humankind - including recent archaeological and genetic studies.

• Examines the functional value of Black Studies/Africology in the age of multiculturalism and cyberspace educational technology.

• Elaborately clarifies misconceptions about the Afrocentric/African-Centered paradigm as a conceptual framework.

• Both paperback and digital copies of the book are available through Kendall/Hunt publishing company. 

Marie Sarnacki, M.A. in History, 2023, has just been named the Michigan History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the nation’s leading organization promoting K-12 history education.  Sarnacki is currently a history teacher at South Lyon East High School in South Lyon, Michigan and in Fall 2025, will begin the Ph.D. program in history at Wayne State University.

A glance at Marie Sarnacki’s graduate career at EMU reveals that this honor is only her most recent achievement.  Marie started the M.A. program in history in Fall 2019 as a full-time teacher.  When Covid shut down archives in 2020, she began to explore local Michigan history.  Ninety miles from EMU is Coldwater, a state institution that housed orphan children.  In 1871, Michigan’s legislature passed a bill that established the state as the guardian of needy children.  This legislation was championed by two activists in Michigan who had been vocal abolitionists.   The “Michigan System” became the model for child welfare legislation throughout the Midwest and was so influential that it was incorporated into the 1912 Children’s Bureau and the 1935 Social Security Act.  Marie traced the connections between this rural school in Michigan and the crown jewels of national progressive policy in her thesis: “Save the Child and Honor the State: Moral Reconstruction and the Origin of Progressive Child Welfare Policy,” under the direction of Professors Mary-Elizabeth Murphy, John McCurdy, and Ashley Johnson Bavery.  Terming this legislation Michigan’s “Moral Reconstruction,” her thesis offered a new periodization of the progressive movement.  Typically, most historians draw a sharp distinction between the radical abolition movement of the 1830s-1850s and then the progressive movement in the 1890s.  But, focusing on the example of Michigan, Marie Sarnacki demonstrated that activists used the period of Reconstruction in the 1870s to champion reforms that became part of the Progressive era.

Scholars around the country saw tremendous promise in Marie Sarnacki’s work because she received two prestigious awards.  In 2021, she won the Nels Andrew Cleven Founder’s Prize from Phi Alpha Theta for her paper “‘Save the Child and Honor the State’: The Michigan System and Child Welfare Reform.” In winning this distinguished award, Sarnacki beat out graduate students from across the nation.  Additionally, in 2022, the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era awarded her the Honorable Mention for their Graduate Essay competition and strongly encouraged her to submit her paper for consideration in the journal.  As an enthusiastic high school history teacher, Marie is delighted to incorporate her research into her classes.

Eastern Michigan University is expanding its nationally recognized historic preservation program with a new course titled "Building Preservation Technology," set to launch in August. Ron Staley, a nationally recognized construction executive with four decades of experience managing landmark restoration projects across the U.S. and abroad, and author of "Ruin to Revival, Restoring Michigan Central Station: The Builders' Journey,” will lead the course.

Staley brings a wealth of real-world expertise to EMU students, having led high-profile restorations, including the Michigan State Capitol, the Virginia State Capitol, the U.S. Capitol, and Detroit's newly reopened Michigan Central Station. He also served as construction manager on the restoration of Ernest Hemingway's former residence in Cuba. Beyond his preservation work, Staley's adventurous spirit once led him to pilot an ex-Russian fighter jet, demonstrating the same precision and passion he brings to historic building restoration.

“To find students with historic preservation degrees and construction background is like finding a unicorn,” said Staley. “Our goal is to prepare professionals who can effectively save and restore historic buildings.”

Designed to meet industry demand, the course equips students with technical skills, restoration methods, and material science to preserve structures built before 1975. “Unless you know how to build something, it doesn't matter what it is; preservation is icing on the cake,” said Staley. Students will explore historic sites, such as Belle Isle’s Scott Fountain and Michigan Central Station, learning to assess structural issues before applying restoration techniques.

This course is open to students across disciplines, including design, architecture, construction management, and museum studies. With preservation projects increasing in Detroit and nationwide, the demand for professionals trained in adaptive reuse and historical construction methods is at an all-time high.

The class builds on EMU’s legacy as one of the few universities in the nation with a formal historic preservation program. Staley, who holds a degree from Michigan Technological University, said he is eager to give back to the next generation of preservation leaders.

Founded in 1979, EMU’s Historic Preservation Program is the largest graduate program of its kind in the country and is certified by the National Council for Preservation Education. With evening and weekend classes, hands-on fieldwork, and partnerships with leading preservation organizations, the program has earned national and state awards for excellence in education and community impact. Drawing from decades of experience on high-profile restoration projects, Staley encourages students to immerse themselves fully in the field. “Get involved, join preservation organizations, build relationships, and be open to opportunities. You never know where they’ll lead,” said Staley. “Passion and curiosity are what set great preservationists apart.”

For more information about the course, visit EMU’s Historic Preservation Program webpage

Read the full EMU Today Story

The P/A SEA Change Committee has awarded the EMU Physics & Astronomy Department with a Bronze Award! P/A SEA Change is a program that works with physics and astronomy departments to undergo self-assessment and create an action plan so that the department can work towards being excellent by removing unnecessary barriers so that all can thrive. A Bronze Award is the first step in an unfolding journey for systemic change in US post secondary education institutions and departments. 

Dr. Ernest Behringer received the Bronze Award certificate after a plenary talk by Sean Carroll on Tuesday, August 5.  

Schedule of events: Fall 2025-Winter 2026

Film Series

Strong Hall Room 111 5-7:30pm

• Monday, October 6: Agents of Change

Facilitated by Peter Blackmer

• Tuesday, October 14: Mr. Soul!

Facilitated by Robert Fronta

• Wednesday, October 22: The Rape of Recy Taylor

Facilitated by Toni Pressley-Sanon

• Thursday, October 30: The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution

Facilitated by Caralee Jones-Obeng

Alumni Panel Discussion

Student Center, Room 320

Friday, October 10 2-4PM

Celebration Dinner

Friday, October 10 5PM

By invitation only

Exhibit: 50 Years of Black Studies

Main Lobby, Halle Library

October 1-24

Halle Library Book Display

Halle Library Gallery 

January-March 2026

For more details, visit the AAAS website