Jill Koyama Appointed as Director of Institute for LGBT Studies

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Jill Koyama Appointed as Director of Institute for LGBT Studies

Research, Discovery and Innovation
July 6, 2018

The office for Research, Discovery & Innovation is pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Jill Koyama, Ph.D., as Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies effective August 13, 2018. 

"We were so impressed with Jill's record of collaborative leadership, community engagement and scholarship at the intersection of social inequities and educational policy," said Associate Vice President for Research R. Brooks Jeffery. "She will continue the Institute's legacy of supporting faculty to advance interdisciplinary LGBTQ research and broadening impact across communities at multiple levels."

Dr. Koyama, a cultural anthropologist, is currently Associate Professor in Educational Policy Studies & Practice and is Coordinator for the Educational Leadership Program in the College of Education. She also has joint appointments in Teaching, Learning & Sociocultural Studies, as well as Second Language Acquisition & Teaching, Human Rights Practice, and Social, Cultural, & Critical Theory Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs. She currently serves as the Faculty Fellow at the Women's Resource Center.

Her research has centered on how refugees, asylum seekers, and other newcomers access and create support networks, make space for their families, and engage civically in the United States. Her publications challenge notions of global citizenship, civic engagement, and public education. They include Making Failure Pay: High-Stakes Testing, For-Profit Tutoring, and Public Schools (The University of Chicago Press, 2010), US Education in a World of Migration: Implications for Policy and Practice (Routledge Press, 2014; co-edited with Mathangi Subramanian) and several journals, including American Journal of Education, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Educational Policy, Educational Researcher, Journal of Education Policy, and Urban Review.

According to Dr. Koyama, what drives her scholarship, teaching, and community work is "a deep commitment to identifying, developing, and participating in creative and generative spaces in which people, especially those who have traditionally been marginalized, can push against the societal and cultural policies and practices that reify stratifications and inequities."

The Institute for LGBT Studies is one of 13 university-wide research institutes and centers overseen by RDI whose common mission is to bring together researchers across campus in large-scale, interdisciplinary collaborations that advance scholarship and community impact in critical areas of inquiry. Dr. Koyama succeeds Dr. Denis Provencher, who has served as Acting Director since January 2018.   

For more information about the Institute's ongoing and emerging research initiatives, see https://www.lgbt.arizona.edu.

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