The College of Arts and Sciences is delighted to host Marsh Professor-at-Large William A. Darity Jr. for a weeklong visit in April of 2007. Named for UVM's fifth president, the program brings renowned scholars from across the U.S. to campus for several one- to two-week visits over a six-year term-of-office.
William Darity, Jr. is a distinguished scholar who holds the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina and Research Professor of Public Policy Studies, African and African American Studies and Economics at Duke University. At UNC he has served as director of the Minority Undergraduate Research Assistant Program, director of the Undergraduate Honors Program, and director of Graduate Studies. He was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center (1989-90) and a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors in 1984. Darity has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1978).
Darity's research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, schooling and the racial achievement gap, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, and the social psychological effects of unemployment exposure. He has published or edited ten books and published more than 125 articles in professional journals.
In addition to the breadth of his scholarly record, Professor Darity is deeply regarded as a mentor to students and young faculty. His warmth and concern for the social condition coupled with his intellectual achievements have endeared him to many. While he is here at UVM, Darity plans to organize a panel discussion on wealth inequality, featuring the work of one of UVM's students, Brandon Rhone, who participated in a summer research project in the summer of 2006, for which Professor Darity served as his mentor.
In addition to a major public speaking event and the panel on wealth inequality, Darity's visit to UVM in April will include a full slate of activities providing the opportunity to engage with students and colleagues from a wide range of colleges and departments on both a structured and informal basis. Darity will, for example, visit classes and faculty in Sociology, Economics, Psychology, ALANA-US Ethnic Studies, Anthropology, and Political Science Department, and conduct discussions with students from the Honors College.
The College of Arts and Sciences is pleased to have several other Marsh Professors-at-Large, each of whom will be making annual visits to UVM, and greatly enriching the intellectual life of the College. They are: Professor Sowah Mensah, ethnomusicologist and master drummer, currently at Macalester College and the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota; Dr. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley; Dr. David Hemenway, economist from the Harvard School of Public Health; Clay Jenkinson, well-known scholar of the humanities from the Dakota Sky Foundation; and author Howard Norman.
