Category Archives: Faculty profiles

Meet Marisa Williamson. The Harvard-educated assistant professor in the University of Virginia art department works in video, image-making, installation and performance art around themes of “history, race, feminism, and technology,” according to her UVA faculty page. Most recently, she co-curated the EscapeRoom exhibition at the Ruffin Gallery, which we highlight in a companion article.

Williamson, who has worked at UVA since 2018, was one of the first faculty members hired under the “Race, Justice and Equity” initiative made possible by grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

She described her approach to art in a 2021 conversation with Tori Cherry, a Charlottesville artist and UVA Grad, hosted by Charlottesville’s New City Arts.

“One of my big goals is to unsettle and to figure out how to haunt, how to keep things moving, how to agitate through these various forms of performance and monument,” Williamson said. Continue reading →

Rachel Spraker (she/they) is assistant vice president of equity and inclusive excellence at the University of Virginia, one of fifteen staff members in the university’s Division for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).

Here’s how the web page describes her job (words in bold highlight rhetoric characteristic of intersectional-oppression ideology, colloquially referred to as wokeness):

Rachel develops, implements, and evaluates policies, practices, and programs which seek to advance the representational diversity, inclusive capacity, and sense of belonging of the University’s workforce and learning community. Rachel has previously served on the executive board of the American Association for Access, Equity, and Diversity and as an equity consultant for institutions of higher education.

Rachel grew up in a small town in rural Appalachia in what is now called Virginia, on the traditional territory of the Tutelo people. Rachel was a first generation student at UVA where they earned their bachelor’s degree in history and foreign affairs. Rachel holds a Master of Science in Sociology from Virginia Commonwealth University with work focused on landscapes of racial violence and is currently a doctoral student at UVA in the School of Education and Human Development.

Spraker has not published any academic articles, but her approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion can be discerned by the ideological framework employed in her master’s thesis and articulated in several video recordings. Of particular interest are her thoughts about “environmental violence,” “dying of whiteness,” “white toxicity,” the “emotionality” of whiteness, and the justification of racial preferences. Continue reading →

Assistant professor Lanice Avery has a joint appointment to the departments of Psychology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Virginia. Her research interests, she says on her university profile page, lie at “the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and media.” In her LinkedIn page, she describes herself as a “board-certified sexologist.” This semester she is teaching one course on Black feminist theory.

In this post we highlight her work in her own words, both in writing and on video. (We have highlighted key phrases to show how her work conforms to the intersectional-oppression paradigm, commonly referred to as wokeness, that is increasingly prevalent at UVA.) From Avery’s university web profile:

She is interested in Black women’s intersectional identity development and how the negotiation of dominant gender ideologies and gendered racial stereotypes are associated with adverse psychological and sexual health outcomes. … Her work examines how exposure to gendered racism impacts Black women’s psycho-social development, and the contributing role of media (mainstream, digital, and social) use on Black women’s identity, self-esteem, victimization experiences, and mental health outcomes.

Avery has co-authored numerous articles appearing in scholarly journals. According to Google Scholar, her articles have been cited 717 times. Here follow excerpts from the abstracts of articles published since 2020 and listed on her web profile. Continue reading →