BuffTalks Speakers
Sona Dimidjian
Sona Dimidjian is an award-winning associate professor in CU Boulder's psychology and neuroscience department. Her research focuses on cultivating mental health and well-being among women, children, families and communities. She studies the impact of behavioral approaches and contemplative practices, such as mindfulness meditation, in healthcare and educational settings. Her work focuses on key developmental transitions, such as the perinatal period, early childhood and adolescence. She also has an interest in expanding access to effective care using both digital technology and community-based strategies. Dimidjian received her bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Chicago and her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Washington.
Ben Kirshner
Ben Kirshner is a CU Boulder professor of education and faculty director of CU Engage: Center for Community-Based Learning and Research. His experiences working with young people at a community center in San Francisco's Mission District motivated him to study educational equity and design social justice learning environments. In his work with CU Engage, Kirshner seeks to develop and sustain university-community research partnerships that address persistent public challenges and promote education justice. In his research, he collaboratively designs and studies learning environments that support youth voice, activism and political participation. Projects of his include design-based research in action civics classrooms, critical participatory action research and ethnographies of community-based youth organizing groups. His 2015 book, Youth Activism in an Era of Education Inequality, received the social policy award for best authored book from the Society of Research on Adolescence.
Henry B. Lovejoy
Henry B. Lovejoy specializes in the history of Africa and the African diaspora in the Atlantic World during the era of the transatlantic slave trade. His book, Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions, is part of the “Envisioning Cuba” series with the University of North Carolina Press (2018). Other publications include articles in the Journal of African History, Slavery & Abolition, Journal of Global Slavery, African Economic History, among others. His research focuses on advancing methods in the digital humanities. He created Liberated Africans (liberatedafricans.org) which is an online resource tracing the lives of over 250,000 people involved in international efforts to abolish the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades after 1807. More recently, he began directing Slavery Images (slaveryimages.org) which is a website that houses historical images of the African slave trade and slave life in diaspora before 1900. Using technologies manufactured by Trimble Inc., he has begun building 3D educational environments to preserve full-scale replicas of world heritage sites related to UNESCO’s Slave Route Project; and he works with historical GIS and statistical models to determine the origins of Africans involved in the transatlantic slave trade. His innovative research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Fulbright-Hays, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, and the University of Colorado Boulder.
Celeste Montoya
Celeste Montoya joined CU Boulder's women and gender studies department in 2007. She is director of the Miramontes Arts & Science Program, a community for high-achieving first-generation or underrepresented students in the College of Arts and Sciences. In her research, she focuses on the ways gender, race, class and other forms of oppression intersect to shape social inequalities and how marginalized groups mobilize to enact change. She is author of Global to Grassroots: The European Union, Transnational Advocacy, and Combating Violence against Women and has published on immigrant rights movements, the Latino/a gender gap, gender violence, voting rights and transnational women's movements. Her current research looks at identity politics in the progressive movement, intersectional and cross-racial voting and candidate selection and Latina activism. Montoya received her Ph.D. in political science and a graduate certificate in women, gender and sexuality studies from Washington University in St. Louis.