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Vivyan Adair will focus on her research to help disadvantaged parents earn higher education degrees
by Ross Burlingame ’09
Vivyan Adair, Elihu Root Peace Studies Professor of Women’s Studies and English at Hamilton College, will present a brown bag lecture on her research for Hamilton’s ACCESS project noon-1 p.m. Monday, Oct. 1 in the Kirby Hall of Civil Rights room 104. The lecture, “Poverty and the Transformative Power of Higher Education post Welfare Reform,” is sponsored by Women’s Studies and the English department. Lunch will be provided.
Adair created the ACCESS project to help disadvantaged parents earn higher education degrees after becoming a professor at Hamilton in 1998. Her research focuses on the experiences of the poor and on the accessibility in higher education.
The project is a demonstrational education, career, and social service which aims to take particularly low-income parents in central New York from welfare and low-wage work, to sustainable employment through the implementation of higher education. The project has given a large number of students access to a post-secondary educational degree at Hamilton College and other colleges in the Mohawk Valley region of New York.
Adair is the author of From Good Ma to Welfare Queen, A Genealogy of the Poor Woman in American Literature, Photography and Culture (2000) and the co-editor of Women, Poverty and the Promise of Education in America (2003). In 2000, she received the John L. Hatch Teaching Award at Hamilton College. In 2004 she was named the CASE/Carnegie New York State Professor of the Year, the first women’s studies professor in the nation to receive this honor. She earned a Ph.D. and master’s degree in English from the University of Washington.