ACE Fellows Program

Dr. Alexandrea Brewer has been a Sociology Professor at Wake Forest since Fall 2020. In her research, Brewer examines the impacts of social inequality in the healthcare system. Through her work as an ACE Fellow, Brewer hopes to bring a community perspective to her course Opioids in American Society by partnering with Twin City Harm Reduction Collective. Brewer is excited for her research to connect with the community so that she might learn more about the practical ways to fight the opioid crisis in Forsyth County.

Learn more about Dr. Brewer

Dr. Erin Brinkley serves as an associate professor, counseling and the school counseling program coordinator at Wake Forest. As an ACE fellow, she will work alongside Brian Calhoun – associate professor of practice in the Department of Education – bringing both their experience and expertise together to create a podcast highlighting the different ways that individuals and organizations on Wake Forest’s campus serve the Winston-Salem community. Through their podcast, Calhoun and Brinkley will highlight the various activism-focused volunteer efforts in the Wake Forest and Winston-Salem communities, helping to generate enthusiasm and participation with OCCE initiatives. 

Learn more about Dr. Brinkley

Brian Calhoun is an associate professor of practice in the Department of Education. He teaches classes with the College to Career series in the undergraduate college with a research focus on career interventions that assist students with developing and learning more about their career options in the world of work. As an ACE fellow, he will work alongside Dr. Erin Brinkley – associate professor of counseling and school counseling program coordinator – bringing both their experience and expertise together to create a podcast highlighting the different ways that individuals and organizations on Wake Forest’s campus serve the Winston-Salem community. Through their podcast, Calhoun and Brinkley will highlight the various activism-focused volunteer efforts in the Wake Forest and Winston-Salem communities, helping to generate enthusiasm and participation with OCCE initiatives. 

Learn more about Brian Calhoun

As an assistant professor of engineering, Dr. Courtney Di Vittorio plans to include her students in bridging the gap between civil engineering scholarship and community organization decision-making. Dr. Di Vittorio is excited to inform local water quality management in local watersheds to make decisions that are socially, economically, and environmentally responsible based on her research in hydrology and remote sensing. Dr. Di Vittorio is especially interested in the cohort component of the fellowship and is looking forward to sharing ideas, strengthening ongoing initiatives and identifying and collaborating on new opportunities with her colleagues.

Learn more about Dr. Di Vitorrio

Dr. Andrea Gómez Cervantes studies how immigration policies impact LatinX individuals and communities. In her new course “Immigration Lab” Dr. Gómez Cervantes plans to guide sociology students in their understanding of immigration policies by partnering with immigrant-led/immigrant-serving organizations in Winston-Salem. Through the fellowship, Dr. Gómez Cervantes is looking forward to meeting other faculty with similar interests, and enhancing her teaching pedagogies as it relates to community engagement and service-learning. 

Learn more about Dr. Gómez Cervantes

As an assistant teaching professor of writing, Dr. Harrison is hoping to deepen her students’ direct engagement with local leaders in the Winston-Salem community through collaboration. She is looking forward to developing a unit of her course that examines how food-based organizations use rhetoric and marketing to express their mission, allowing students to write for and with local food actors. As an extension of the course, she hopes to turn the classroom-based experience to create a small internship program where students would work hand-in-hand with a community partner to develop a marketing plan for the semester, using writing and visual design to promote their mission and goals.

Learn more about Dr. Harrison

As an assistant teaching professor of Spanish at Wake Forest, Dr. Lauren Miller is looking to develop a long-term partnership with Speas Elementary – a dual immersion school -and a Hispanic-serving, English-only elementary school in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School system that would allow Wake Forest students to tutor minority and majority language-speaking children and encourage bilingualism in our community. Her hope is that this work would create additional partnerships and internships for graduate students enrolled in the Interpretation and Translation Program at Wake Forest.

Learn more about Dr. Miller

As an ACE Fellow, Dr. Ryan Shirey plans to work with local writing centers by piloting a “training trainers” model that would help community members enhance their peer writing tutoring and mentoring skills so that they can work with their peers and neighbors in various community contexts. A key aspect of his work is developing a durable, sustainable network of community-based writing centers. He hopes to build relationships with organizations and community members by providing workshops, training sessions and writing feedback. 

Learn more about Dr. Shirey

Dr. Mir Yarfitz is excited to explore how his scholarship as an associate professor of history intersects with the Winston-Salem community. Dr. Yarfitz is actively involved in social change in Winston-Salem and is specifically interested in the intersection between Latin American Studies and LGBTQ+ history. One of his goals as an ACE Fellow is to continue to develop Neighbor-to-Neighbor – a mutual aid project he began at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has helped more than 300 families throughout the Piedmont Triad – with more connective opportunities for members of the Wake Forest community. 

Learn more about Dr. Yarfitz

Dr. Farmer teaches courses in both American Literature and the Environmental Humanities that encourage students to think about the relationships between literature and our communities. Students in her course on Environmental Destruction work on group projects that will eventually include community partners. And students in her course on Slave Narratives, Global and Local, will be working with people at Old Salem Museum and Gardens to help develop their “Hidden Town” project, which aims to make hidden histories of the roles that slaves held in our community far more visible. 

Dr. Gallegos teaches and does research in the areas of phenomenology, philosophy of emotion, and Latin American philosophy. As a teacher, he is constantly experimenting with new ways to get students to appreciate the real-world relevance of what is being discussed in class. Together with Dr. Ivan Weiss (Journalism), he launched the Truth and Authenticity Lab in 2019, in order to support the work of individuals both on- and off-campus who are using the tools of multimedia documentary to examine the philosophical questions generated as the ancient ideals of truth and authenticity face unprecedented challenges in the digital age. 

Dr. Hayden focuses on the integration of practice, research and theory in relation to the career development of military-associated individuals, He has provided career support to veterans experiencing homelessness residing at Veterans Helping Veterans Heal in Winston-Salem. Prior to his time at Wake Forest, he established a relationship with the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center in Virginia to offer career and personal counseling to active duty service members and veterans afflicted with a traumatic brain injury. He is currently working to create a career development resource in Winston-Salem that utilizes an empirically-supported, career development approach to assist veterans with a service-related injury.

In both his teaching and research, Dr. Rahman engages with questions of inter-community relations, cross-cultural encounters as well as multiple facets of diversity in societies across India and South Asia. Always keen to explore ways of understanding the role of diverse communities in our immediate surrounding on issues of global import and in the spirit of the engaged liberal arts, Dr. Rahman is interested in enhancing student learning in his classes by way of community engagement and developing a richer understanding of the interplay between the local and the global.

Senior directs the School of Divinity’s Art of Ministry program, which includes its field education curriculum. His research and teaching focus on pastoral formation for ministry, field-based learning, ministry leadership in both ecclesial and public settings, and the role of theological education in preparing leaders for a wide variety of institutional contexts. Trained in Christian ethics and the sociology of religion, Senior is also interested in political theology and ethics and earth-centered approaches to ministry and the moral life. He is the author of A Theology of Political Vocation: Christian Life and Public Office (Baylor University Press, 2015) and is currently working on a book project on emerging patterns and practices of leadership in ministry. Senior is an ordained Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Ivan Weiss is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in the Journalism Program. He is a documentary filmmaker, writer, and photographer. His documentary work has explored such themes as integration and the civil rights movement, experimental music, and urban gentrification. His films include “The Education of Ida Owens” about the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D from Duke University, “Nazoranai: A documentary” about an improvisational sound trio, “Leaving Traces” about photography and minor league baseball, and “Festival: A Month in Durham” about a changing city as seen through the lens of three music festivals. Check out more of his work here.

Dr. Barrella brings her background in civil engineering and city planning to community-based contexts through partnerships with Boston Thurmond United, Mixxer, WSFCS, and Forsyth Country Day School. Dr. Barrella does research related to transportation access and the lived experience of the built environment in connection with the Spatial Justice Studio at Winston-Salem State University and has been leading an undergraduate student research team at Wake Forest that is collaborating with residents to use walking interviews as tools for neighborhood-led audits of accessibility and infrastructure.

Professor Erhardt comes to academia with extensive community-based experiences including serving as an Americorps VISTA and managing a state-wide VISTA Project for Wisconsin Campus Compact. At a previous institution, she co-created a writing workshop at Oakhill Correctional Institution. As a new faculty member at Wake Forest, Professor Erhardt brings this experience, as well as her experience as a resident of Winston-Salem to her writing classes. In 2019/20 Professor Erhardt’s classes will work with the Triad Branch of the North Carolina Diaper Bank.

Dr. Gellar-Goad teaches courses on Greek & Roman Comedy where students prepare performances that are given at the North Carolina Junior Classical League annual convention for middle and high schoolers studying classics. Dr. Gellar Goad helped to host this conference at Wake Forest this year and is interested in opportunities to broaden access to the classics.

Justin Green and Amber Kelsie serve as professors and as debate coaches for Wake Forest’s championship debate team. Through their leadership, Wake Debate has expanded it’s debate offerings for community members, offering public forum debates on important topics including the annual environmental debates at the Piedmont Earth Day Fair, a culmination of the environmental debate program, a partnership with Piedmont Environmental Alliance and public high schools in WSFC. Dr. Green and Professor Kelsie are developing an urban debate league that will support the growth of debate at public schools in WSFC.

Amber Kelsie and Justin Green serve as professors and as debate coaches for Wake Forest’s championship debate team. Through their leadership, Wake Debate has expanded it’s debate offerings for community members, offering public forum debates on important topics including the annual environmental debates at the Piedmont Earth Day Fair, a culmination of the environmental debate program, a partnership with Piedmont Environmental Alliance and public high schools in WSFC. Professor Kelsie and Dr. Green are developing an urban debate league that will support the growth of debate at public schools in WSFC.

Dr. Kirby-Straker has extensive experience doing community-based work in the public sector. Originally from St. Vincent & The Grenadines, Dr. Kirby-Straker worked for the fisheries department in her home country, developing cooperatives of fisher-people and doing environmental education. She has combined this experience with her expertise in public speaking to launch Wake Speaks, a campus and community public speaking resource center. Additionally, she has engaged students with organizations like Habitat Forsyth and Boston Thurmond United through her classes on listening. Dr. Kirby-Straker also co-chairs the Environmental Justice Knowledge Community with Marcus Hill. She is developing a community-engaged global learning summer course examining communication about sustainability with Dr. Ron Von Burg, Communication.

A new faculty member at Wake Forest, Dr. Mathis brings experiences in teaching service-learning and community-engaged courses from her previous institution. She has taught community-engaged writing courses at Wake Forest, working with partners including Experiment in Self-Reliance and Lead Girls of NC. Dr. Mathis is the vice-chair of the board at Lead Girls and is advising a student organization that partners with the organization.

Dr. Ramachandran directs the Religion and Public Engagement program in the Department for the Study of Religions which helps students connect their academic learning with community-based goals. Dr. Ramachandran is working to expand the program, increasing the number of community partners that RPE students work with, and grounding the program in social justice.

Drs. Sampson and Shaner co-lead Curating Brave Spaces in the School of Divinity, an opportunity for black and white women in ministry to build relationships across racial differences. They are working to expand the program in community and congregational spaces

Drs. Shaner and Sampson co-lead Curating Brave Spaces in the School of Divinity, an opportunity for black and white women in ministry to build relationships across racial differences. They are working to expand the program in community and congregational spaces.