New Faculty Profile: Donna Lee Granville
Assistant Professor Donna Lee Granville, Department of Sociology.
Welcome, Assistant Professor Donna Granville! The newest member of the Sociology Department came on board as a full-time tenure-track assistant professor in fall 2019. No stranger to the department, Granville was already a valued member of the faculty, having served as an adjunct and substitute lecturer in the department for several years. She taught an amazing variety of courses for the department while an adjunct and substitute lecturer, including Race and Ethnicity, Social Problems, Urban Caribbean Diaspora, Sociology of Law, Political Sociology, Aging in Society, the classic Brooklyn College course People, Power & Politics, and the Sociology of Immigration. She has taught the 90-student Introduction to Sociology as a hybrid course and the Sociology of Hip Hop, a course she developed. Granville also taught a variety of sociology courses at other institutions before being hired full time at Brooklyn College. She taught Introduction to Sociology and Multiculturalism and Diversity at SUNY-Farmingdale, Gender in Global Context at St. John's University and Social Problems and Research Methods at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
Granville's educational background and research interests established her expertise in these subjects early on. She earned her bachelor of arts in sociology from the premier women's HBCU, Spelman College in Atlanta. She went on to the University of Illinois-Chicago, where she earned her M.A. in sociology and then her Ph.D. a few years later. Her master's thesis, "Hip-Hop, Hooray and Hallelujah: Institutional Entrepreneurship in a Hip Hop Church," established one of her areas of expertise. Then for her Ph.D. in sociology, her area of concentration was race, ethnicity, and gender, and her dissertation was "Out of Many, One People: Race, Naturalization and Belonging in the Process of Becoming American," the foundation for many of her subsequent invited lectures and manuscripts in progress.
Assistant Professor Donna Granville (center front with hat) and her students.
Not unusual for an institution in need of full-time professors, Granville's talents are in great demand for her department and the college. Even while on a sub-line, she was asked to share her insights to students of color by giving a talk, "Lessons from Graduate School," at the 2018 Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, and another on "The Successful College Student," for the Black and Latino Male Initiative. As soon as she was hired full time, in fall 2019, she became a member of the department's outcomes assessment team and joined the steering committee of the Center for the Study of Brooklyn. Then this spring, she became a faculty facilitator for the Black and Latino Male Initiative Women's Weekly Group and a faculty facilitator for the Roberta S. Matthews Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL).
But Granville's earlier training in online and hybrid course development at SUNY-Farmingdale positioned her to make a critical contribution to preparing faculty for CUNY's unprecedented requirement that all classes immediately go remote due to the coronavirus outbreak. Her technical expertise and vibrant instructional style have proved to be an invaluable asset to Professor Madelaine Fox at the CTL, handling in-person and online sessions to train faculty in remote learning platforms and techniques. As a result, this semester, in addition to handling her own classes, Granville has been a part of the CTL team offering online workshops for faculty twice a week, entitled, "Teaching Online (and in a Crisis): Pedagogical Tips and Strategies."
Another one of Granville's contributions to the Brooklyn community has been as the organizer, curator, and licensee of TEDxFlatbush. TEDx is a grassroots initiative, created in the spirit of the TED Talk's mission to discover "ideas worth spreading." Granville is one of the energetic and dedicated individuals who uncover new ideas, share the latest research in their local areas. and generate conversations in their communities, abiding by the TED format and guidelines. As a TEDx organizer and licensee, Granville is a part of the global TED family that offers more than 3,000 events annually.
Assistant Professor Granville introducing a TEDxFlatbush event.
Growing out of her research interests in race and ethnicity, immigration, black diaspora studies, and Afro-Caribbean migrations, Granville has given several invited lectures, including "From Alien to Citizen: Race, Naturalization, and the Manufacturing of American Citizens by Choice" at the12th Social Theory Forum, University of Massachusetts, Boston; and "Black in the Immigrant Marketplace: Framing the Absence of Black Immigrants in Newspaper Coverage of Immigration Reform" at the Migration Studies Workshop at Harvard University. Her specialty in black immigration has led to her paper in revision for the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, "Becoming a Non-American Black: Racial Naturalization, Ethnic Options, and the Boundaries of Blackness," and a current book manuscript under review, Making Ameri-cants: How We Manufacture Black Citizens and What It Means for America.
Her research interest in pop culture (particularly hip-hop culture), new media, and the sociology of religion led to the publication of her book chapter, "New Life Covenant Church." in How Religious Congregations are Engaging Young Adults in America, for the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, and her online publication, "A Snapshot of Youth and Young Adults in New Life Covenant Church," available at faithcommunitiestoday.org. She gave a talk on the subject entitled, "Hip-Hop, Hooray, and Hallelujah: An Organizational Analysis of a Hip Hop Church" at the Chicago Ethnography Conference in Chicago, and has prepared a manuscript on the same topic.
Given her specialty in race and ethnicity, she was recently called on to share her insights into the impact of the coronavirus crisis on the community. She is extensively quoted in a recent article on the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for black communities in Brooklyn in The BK Reader issue of April 24, 2020, entitled "COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories Abound, As Fallout from the Virus Exposes Inequalities," written by Nigel Roberts.
We are more than pleased to welcome this talented, creative, and energetic young professor to the Brooklyn College campus!
