State University of New York at New Paltz
Abstract
The SUNY New Paltz team seeks to undertake a transformational leadership development and strategic planning project focused on reimagining how our units—Black Studies; Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies; Social Justice Educational Studies; and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies—can collaborate without sacrificing intellectual autonomy. Through participation in the Values-Enacted Leadership Institute, we aim to identify shared language, values, and frameworks that will allow us to explore synergies among our units; develop an alternative, non-merger structure for sustained collaboration (such as a consortium or center); and align our work with our institution’s strategic plan in ways that demonstrate the centrality of our disciplines to the university’s mission. Rather than retreating into silos or accepting pessimism as inevitable, we view this moment as an opportunity to exercise collective, values-based leadership that resists purely quantitative assessments of worth. Instead, we aspire to articulate and enact values-aligned approaches to impact, accountability, and institutional change.
Meet the Team
Heather Hewett is Professor and Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at SUNY New Paltz. From 2022-24, she served as a program officer for Higher Education Initiatives at the American Council of Learned Societies. She has published on feminist motherhood studies; feminist pedagogy and curriculum development in women’s and gender studies; and transnational literary and cultural studies, with particular attention to embodiment, migration, and gendered violence. She is the coeditor, with Mary Holland, of #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture (Bloomsbury 2021). Her opinion essays and reviews have appeared in venues including Los Angeles Review of Books, Inside Higher Ed, and The Washington Post.
Cyrus Mulready is Interim Associate Dean and Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, where he has taught courses on Shakespeare, material culture, and early British literature. He is the author of Object Studies: Introductions to Material Culture (Palgrave 2023) and Romance on the Early Modern Stage: English Expansion before and after Shakespeare (Palgrave 2013), as well as several essays on Shakespearean drama.
Robyn Sheridan is an assistant professor in Social Justice Educational Studies in the Department of Educational Studies and Leadership at SUNY New Paltz. She has an affiliate appointment in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Robyn teaches a range of courses in Educational Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, specifically Women in Pop Culture and Feminist Methods. In Educational Studies, Robyn teaches Approaches to Social Justice, Race and Gender in Education, and Feminist Pedagogies. Her interdisciplinary work explores race, gender, and sexuality as it relates to subjectivity, literacy, and affect. Robyn has a Ph.D. in Higher Education from Southern Illinois University and lives in the Hudson Valley.
Roberto Vélez-Vélez is an associate professor of sociology since 2016 and director of the Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies (LACLAS) program since 2025. His research has concentrated on the intersections between contentious politics, cultures of resistance and decolonial projects in Puerto Rico, Latin America and US Latinx communities. Roberto’s work has been published in Mobilization, Social Movements Studies, the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Centro and Current Sociology. His latest work has focused on mutual aid disaster response as decolonial prefigurative politics in post-Hurricane María Puerto Rico, funded through an NSF Collaborative Grant in 2019-23. Currently working on a book manuscript with co-author, Jacqueline Villarrubia-Mendoza (Colgate U.) on the same project.
Dr. Shelton K. Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Black Studies and affiliate faculty in the Departments of Educational Studies and Leadership, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He also serves as Co-Editor for Taboo: Journal on Culture and Education and Editor for Forbidden Knowledge: Black Education Collective with Peter Lang International Academic Publishers. A Southern-born scholar, his research engages the social foundations of education; curriculum and educational leadership; gender and sexuality; anti-racist and critical pedagogies; southern studies; jurisprudence; and the politics of identity and belonging. Using qualitative and narrative methodologies, he examines how power structures shape the social, cultural, and academic lives of Black and LGBTQ+ communities, particularly in the U.S. South. Moreover, he analyzes educational, legal, and policy systems to reveal how they function as mechanisms of regulation and exclusion, as well as potential sites of liberation. His work is grounded in a deep commitment to equity, human rights, and transformative justice.