| Division: | Liberal Arts |
| Chair: | English and Languages Department |
| Education: | B.A., Brooklyn College M.A., Temple University |
| Office: | LA 157 |
| Extension: | 3570 |
| E-Mail: | duncan@mccc.edu |
Tell us about some of your volunteer work.
I volunteer with the Diocese of New Jersey and I do a lot of anti racism training. Most recently I’ve been volunteering with a tiny school in Trenton: the Trinity Cathedral Academy. In the past, I’ve only worked with adults. I see this as a way to begin to think of ensuring that small children have the same kinds of visions and dreams as adults and most importantly that they are supported and taught well.
Tell us about the Africans in the Diaspora project.
The Africans in the Diaspora lecture series is a series by Mercer County Community College faculty. It is a way to introduce the academic community, not just our students but the whole community, to the knowledge that many scholars in the West don’t readily acknowledge. That is the fact that so much of western scholarship is derived from African intellectual thought. When I designed this initiative, I thought we would use seven faculty and that it would be cross disciplinary. In other words I would select colleagues who could talk about their scholarship in the context of African Diaspora studies. So I asked the seven faculty members and then I got a flood of emails saying, "How come you didn’t ask me?" So this series crosses disciplinary borders and allows people to think of academic scholarship as a broad study that isn’t limited to English or Mathematics or Sociology.
Any closing thoughts?
I am really excited that we have gotten new faculty members at Mercer. The new faculty brings new life and new ways of thinking. I’ve been out of graduate school for many years, and there are new things happening in graduate school that I’ve never heard about: new kinds of scholarship, new ways of reading text. I want them to be able to continue to have that same enthusiasm. We are very lucky to get this whole new influx, because there is a point at which we have to leave… we can’t stay here forever. Our new faculty members are going to be here after we are gone and these are the people who are going to do the things that we had hoped to do, but never quite finished.
