Lauren S. Cardon
Lauren S. Cardon is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama, with a PhD from Tulane University. She has authored three academic monographs, as well as a co-authored book, Inclusive College Classrooms: Teaching Methods for Diverse Learners, forthcoming with Routledge. In addition, she has published pedagogical articles in Change: The Magazine for Higher Learning and the collection Quick Hits: Teaching with Digital Humanities (University of Indiana Press).
Dr. Cardon has taught at the college level for seventeen years, received multiple grants for digital humanities initiatives, and been awarded two prestigious teaching fellowships: a Learning in Action Fellowship and a three-year Distinguished Teaching Fellowship with Technology at the University of Alabama. She has also been a keynote speaker on digital humanities pedagogy for the Alabama Association of College and Research Libraries Annual Meeting and has led inclusive pedagogy workshops at multiple academic institutions. For the past two years, she has acted as Diversity Initiative Coordinator to promote inclusive teaching in her department.
Cassander L. Smith
Cassander (Cassie) Smith is the Associate Dean for academic affairs in the Honors College and an Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama. She joined UA in 2010 after completing a PhD in early American literature at Purdue University. Dr. Smith teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in early African American, American, and Caribbean literature. Both her teaching and research focus on representations of black Africans in early Atlantic literature, emphasizing the racial/cultural ideologies that helped shape English encounters with the early Americas and helped shape the literature produced about those encounters.
Dr. Smith has published three books, including a volume of essays titled Teaching With Tension: Race, Reality, and Resistance in the Classroom (Northwestern University Press, 2019), which examines the ways in which scholars from a range of disciplines have encountered and addressed obstacles for teaching race. A fourth book, co-edited with Dr. Zachary Hutchins (Colorado State University), is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press. Titled The Earliest African American Literatures: A Critical Reader, the book is a pedagogical tool providing teaching strategies that highlight the literary contributions of African Americans in early America. Dr. Smith currently is a UA Provost Faculty Fellow, focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. She has led workshops and published on a range of topics related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice.