Six RCAH Faculty Promoted

September 18, 2020

By RCAH Communications

The Residential College in the Arts and Humanities (RCAH) at Michigan State University is celebrating the recent promotions of six faculty members.

The promotions include Joanna Bosse to professor; Kevin Brooks to continuing appointment status as an academic specialist; Guillermo Delgado to continuing appointment status as an academic specialist; Dylan Miner to professor; India Plough to associate professor; and Chris Scales to professor.

“Now that the RCAH is 14 years old we can look around with great pride at the number of our colleagues who have been granted promotions and tenure, who have accomplished stature in their disciplinary fields here at MSU and beyond,” said Anita Skeen, Professor Emerita and the Series Editor for Wheelbarrow Books who was the chair of the Full Professor Review Committee.

“These faculty members represent the best and most diverse aspects of our college,” said Skeen, the former director of the RCAH Center for Poetry, who retired last year . “They are artists, scholars, exceptional teachers, engaged community activists, and supportive and innovative colleagues. They bring enthusiasm for the mission of the college to their work and encourage our students to promote the values, and the necessity, of the humanities with them into the larger world when they graduate.”

Below, RCAH Dean Stephen Esquith comments on each faculty member's contrubutions to RCAH and MSU.

 

 Dr. Joanna Bosse, Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Programs
"Joanna Bosse epitomizes what the University prizes most: excellence across the mission and high praise nationally as a major figure in her profession of ethnomusicology. Her performance-based pedagogy at all levels of the curriculum has been a model for her RCAH colleagues and an inspirational influence on her students. Her research on social dance has led to both a pathbreaking book, Becoming Beautiful, and an award-winning film. She has done all this while leading curriculum reform and faculty development initiatives as Associate Dean."
—Dean Stephen Esquith

 

 

 

 

 Dr. Kevin L. Brooks, Academic Specialist for Diversity and Civic Engagement
"Kevin Brooks has expanded the opportunities for community engagement with minoritized and underserved communities, especially with young people. As the Academic Specialist for Diversity and Civic Engagement, he has developed summer programs for young people from around the state.  He is an active scholar, focusing on the health and wellbeing of young people in contemporary African American communities. As a teacher, he has mentored numerous students, many of whom have worked side by side with him to present their research at professional conferences."
—Dean Stephen Esquith

 

 

 

  

 

Guillermo Delgado, Academic Specialist in Community and Socially Engaged Arts

"Guillermo Delgado has led several notable and high-impact curricular and co-curricular arts and community engagement programs. As an academic specialist in this field, he has brought his students into new places to meet community partners they would not have otherwise met and been able to learn from. His courses on poetry, painting and yoga in state correctional facilities and youth detention centers, his mural project with disabled adults and newcomers to the United States, and his enthusiasm in all areas of community art together have created a network of classes from which RCAH students and community partners will benefit going forward." —Dean Stephen Esquith

  

 

Dr. Dylan Miner, Professor

"Dylan Miner has achieved success as an arts activist locally, regionally, and internationally. He has exhibited his work in some of the most prestigious museums in North America, and he has engaged with local indigenous and Latinx communities in ways that have enriched RCAH student learning and community development.  As Director of the MSU American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program, his powerful voice for the sovereignty of indigenous peoples has been a model for RCAH students and colleagues committed to social justice."

—Dean Stephen Esquith

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. India Plough, Associate Professor

"India Plough, as the Director of the RCAH Cultures and Languages across the Curriculum program, has created a model for language learning that stresses speaking proficiency.  Through her highly regarded research on this subject, the testing tools she has designed, and the many practical activities she has developed in RCAH, she has given RCAH students and the Graduate Language Fellows she has mentored a unique and unmatched opportunity to learn and put to use knowledge of world languages and cultures, whatever their specific areas of interest may be."

—Dean Stephen Esquith

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Chris Scales, Professor

"Chris Scales has established himself as one of the finest scholars and producers of native music in North America. His book Recording Culture: Powwow Music and the Aboriginal Recording Industry on the Northern Plains is the definitive work on this subject. His excellence as a scholar is matched by his originality and creativity as a teacher, combining the study of traditional music and its performance that all of his students—both proficient musicians and novices—have found transformative. As the Director of the Arts Programs in RCAH, he is now leading an unprecedented partnership with Detroit-based Masterpiece Studio that celebrates Motown recording artists and prepares the next generation of musicians who are carrying on that tradition."

—Dean Stephen Esquith