The Graduate Center and LaGuardia Community College are delighted to welcome Kaysi Holman as Deputy Director of the new CUNY Humanities Alliance.  Holman brings over 15 years of experience working with nonprofits and educational organizations dedicated to equity and social justice, both within higher education and achieved through access to higher education.
Holman served as a political advocate and community organizer for education and welfare reform in California and at the Alameda County Bar Association in Oakland, CA, before moving to Duke University where she directed programming and administration for HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) and the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge in the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. She holds a law degree from Arizona State University and a bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt University. Holman brings a wide array of skills, all of which she will be drawing upon as Deputy Director of the Humanities Alliance: higher education administrator, community organizer and advocate, web developer, social networker, financial manager, and mentor of doctoral students.
Funded by a $3.1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Humanities Alliance will broaden doctoral student training and improve humanities education for approximately 2,500 undergraduates at LaGuardia Community College. Beginning in Fall 2016, this ambitious new partnership will train Ph.D. students in innovative methods to teach humanities to a predominantly immigrant, low-income, urban, undergraduate community. The goal of the alliance is to support graduate students in mastering the most successful methods for teaching undergraduate general education humanities courses to increasingly diverse students while simultaneously broadening and strengthening access to and opportunity in the humanities for those undergraduates.
As Deputy Director of the Humanities Alliance, Holman will be the principal project manager and liaison between the Graduate Center and LaGuardia Community College, and will manage the day-to-day operations of the grant. She will oversee all administrative and budgetary matters related to the project; develop internal and public programming; oversee the development of an online community platform; manage public communications about the grant; foster collaboration among all of the grant’s partners; and much more.
Please join us in welcoming Kaysi Holman as the Deputy Director of the Humanities Alliance.