Tickets & Packages
Home | Our Academics Committee

Our Academics Committee Sponsors

Scot French, Ph.D.

Committee Chair
Associate Professor of History
Director of Public History
University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL
Michelle Cowin Gibbs, Ph.D., M.F.A.

Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts
Program Liaison for the BA in Theatre Arts
California State University Long Beach, CA
Walter Greason,  Ph.D.

DeWitt Wallace Professor of History
Chair, Department of History
Macalester College, St Paul, MN

Anna Lillios, Ph.D.

Professor of English
University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL

Kibibi Mack-Shelton,  Ph.D.

Professor of History
Coordinator of Africana Studies Program
University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL

Aman Nadhiri, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of English and Arabic

Chair, Department of Arts and Humanities
Johnson C. Smith University, Charlotte, NC
Christopher Peace, Ph.D.

Assistant Teaching Professor of Business Communications
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
Trent Tomengo, MFA

Distinguished Professor

Seminole State College of Florida
Sanford, FL

Clarissa West-White, Ph.D.

University Archivist & Assistant Professor
Bethune-Cookman University, Daytona Beach, FL
Sidney Rose McCall

Associate Member

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History
College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA

N. Y. Nathiri

Executive Director, Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, Inc. (P.E.C.), Ex-Officio

Scot French, Ph.D.

Committee Chair Associate Professor of History Director of Public History University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL

Dr. Scot French is an Associate Professor of History and Director of Public History at the University of Central Florida. He is author of The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory (Houghton Mifflin, 2004) and has published extensively on African American history, culture, and sites of memory. His 2018 article, “Social Preservation and Moral Capitalism in the Historic Black Township of Eatonville: A Case Study of ‘Reverse Gentrification,’” is drawn from a forthcoming book spanning the town’s founding era to the present. French chairs the ZORA! Festival Academics Committee and serves as lead organizer of its annual two-day conference.

Michelle Cowin Gibbs, Ph.D., M.F.A.

Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts Program Liaison for the BA in Theatre Arts California State University Long Beach, CA

Dr. Michelle Cowin Gibbs is assistant professor of Theatre Arts at California State University Long Beach. Her research interests are in interdisciplinary fields in early twentieth-century Black theatre and performance, dance criticism, performance studies, and critical identity studies. She has publications in the Black Theatre Review; Journal of American Drama and Theatre; Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies; Detroit Dance Research; and book chapters in Impacting Theatre Audiences: Methods for Studying Change (Routledge 2022), Enveloping Worlds (University of Michigan Press 2025), and forthcoming, Hurston in Context (Routledge 2026). Most notably, Dr. Gibbs is a Zora Neale Hurston theatre studies scholar. She examines Black womanhood across Hurston’s body of theatrical work and makes connections among her anthropological and ethnographic research with play analysis. She is currently working on a landmark book project that brings together a collection of critical essays that examine and analyze Zora Neale Hurston’s theatre works. 

Aman Nadhiri, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of English and Arabic Chair, Department of Arts and Humanities Johnson C. Smith University, Charlotte, NC

Aman Nadhiri is an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at Johnson C. Smith University, where he teaches English literature and Arabic. He earned his doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored in Medieval Literature and minored in Arabic. His book, Saracens and Franks in 12th – 15th Century European and Near Eastern Literature: Perceptions of Self and Other, explores the ways in which individuals and societies approach difference. It is intended to contribute to a greater understanding of the development of the Other as a concept through time, and its relevance in the current context. His passion lies in investigating the development of concepts of race and ethnicity in Sahelian West Africa prior to the seventeenth century. His current research is rooted in the Diaspora, recounting the work of the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community in safeguarding the cultural integrity of Eatonville, Florida, the place Zora Neale Hurston – writer,  folklorist, anthropologist, and literary icon – popularized as the nation’s oldest incorporated African American township, from gentrification from 1987-Present.

Christopher Peace, Ph.D.

Assistant Teaching Professor of Business Communications, Carnegie Mellon University

Christopher Peace, Ph.D. (Celebrating Zora Neale Hurston’s World Conference), is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Business Communications at Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining CMU, he was a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

His current practice aims to build on students’ rhetorical audience awareness of professional genres, self-branding, intercultural rhetorics, and effective writing strategies when communicating to multiple business audiences.

His personal research interests include writing with ethnographic methodologies that examine rhetorical strategies of professional identity formation within African American esotericism, Hoodoo, and spirit communication. He also serves on the Academics committee for the ZORA! Festival of the Arts and Humanities.

Clarissa West-White, Ph.D.

University Archivist, Assistant Professor & Faculty Athletics Representative, Bethune–Cookman University

Clarissa West-White, Ph.D. (Sankofa Showdown & Celebrating Zora Neale Hurston’s World Conference), is the University Archivist, Assistant Professor, and Faculty Athletics Representative at Bethune-Cookman University. A native of Quincy, Florida, she has degrees in Creative Writing, Curriculum & Instruction, English Education, and Information from Florida State University.

She has varied educational teaching and leadership experiences that span almost three decades across public and private, state and county, national and international, in-person and online, library and archive spaces.

She is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, Incorporated; her hobbies include traveling, road trips, photography, and more recently, knitting. She is married with two sons.

N.Y. Nathiri, M.S. (Library Science)

Executive Director, Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, Inc. (P.E.C.) & "Eatonville Rising" Project Manager

N.Y. Nathiri, M.S. (Library Science), “Eatonville Rising” Project Manager, is the executive director of the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, Inc. (P.E.C.), a historic preservation/cultural arts/community revitalization organization committed to promoting the town’s considerable heritage and historical resources as a means for its revitalization and economic development.

Under her leadership, P.E.C. has earned national recognition for its programs and festivals. Nathiri holds a B.A. in history from Ithaca College, an M.S. in library science from Syracuse University, and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Rollins College. She is the editor of ZORA! Zora Neale Hurston: A Woman and Her Community and serves as Vice President for Cultural Heritage Tourism for the Historic Black Towns and Settlements Alliance.