Fellowship
Sojourner Truth Fellow Position
This position is intended to recruit scholars who will bring issues of race and ethnicity into teaching and research in any substantive area related to urban and regional planning for a semester or an academic year. Professors on sabbatical, faculty beginning teaching careers, students who are writing dissertations, reflective practitioners, and individuals at any other stages of their careers are invited to apply. Applicants should have interest in educating both professionally oriented students and future scholars and are expected to be committed to scholarly and/or creative and professional work.
Sojourner Truth, a freed slave, became a leading abolitionist and feminist of the nineteenth century. One of her last major projects was an initiative to provide land to freed slaves. She was a resident of Michigan for the last 25 years of her life.
Current Sojourner Truth Fellow
Avis Vidal
2011 Sojourner Truth Fellow
Avis Vidal, a professor of urban planning at Wayne State University, is joining the urban and regional planning faculty as the 2011-2012 Sojourner Truth Visiting Professor of Urban Planning. Her teaching and research expertise is in community development and capacity building; urban economic development; community organizing; and urban policy. She has authored multiple papers and articles on community building. Most recently, her chapter on "Housing and Community Development" was published in The State of the Nonprofit Sector, 2nd edition (The Brookings Institution 2011). She has also taught at the New School for Social Research and Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. She was previously an Urban Land Institute Fellow. Vidal received her Ph.D. in urban planning and a master of city planning from Harvard University, and an A.B. in international relations from the University of Chicago. At Taubman College she will teach UP 696.1 Community Development during fall term and UP 575 Metropolitan Structure during the winter term.
