Dr. Brittany Frederick

Dr. Brittany Frederick (she/her) serves as the Director of the Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Multicultural Education. She provides strategic oversight for the programs, services, and initiatives that cultivate an inclusive campus community. Dr. Frederick also partners with campus stakeholders to identify best practices and implement data-driven decisions that effectively recruit, retain, and foster a sense of belonging for WPI students.

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Dr. Yelana Sims

Dr. Yelana Sims is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on Black women’s lived experiences with technology and innovation, particularly interrogating the historical and theoretical relationships between Black women and workplace technologies. Her forthcoming book, tentatively titled When the Flesh Knows it is Flesh: Black Women, Sex Work, and Technology 1880-2000, examines Black sex workers’ relationship to technology usage within the sex industry and their practical acknowledgements of their own bodies and images as meaning-making machines. Dr. Sims has published on the archiving of digital material in women’s history as well as how digital humanities can help academic journals understand their review and submission processes' effect on the diversity of their authorship and readership. She currently serves as a trustee and the co-lead for the Early Career Scholars Initiative for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. 

Dr. Cécile Yézou

Cécile is a Researcher with the Tulane University History Project, developing a detailed history of the University and its campuses, with respect to its racial history. She was previously a Black Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Baylor University, after completing her Ph.D. in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her current book project is tentatively titled "'Very Jim Crow:' Black Women's World-Making in the Wake of Racialized Sexual Violence in the U.S. South, 1894-1947." She is also the archivist for Chicago-based organization A Long Walk Home (ALWH), which empowers girls and young women through art, to act against gender-based and racial violence.