E L L O W S H I P S

Visiting Chair

dream hampton is an award-winning filmmaker and writer from Detroit. Her most recent works include the LA Opera digital short “We Hold These Truths" (2022) and the award-winning short film “Freshwater” (2022) which debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Selected works include Frameline feature documentary "Treasure" (2015), the BET documentary series "Finding Justice" (2019) and Lifetime's Emmy-nominated "Surviving R. Kelly" (2019), which broke rating records and earned her a Peabody Award. She co-authored the New York Times bestselling "Decoded" (2010) with Shawn "Jay Z" Carter. Her articles have been published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Essence, and in a dozen anthologies. She serves on the boards of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, UCLA's Hip Hop Initiative, and Inside Southwest Detroit. In 2019 hampton was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world.

FDuring her 2022-23 residency, dream participated in three Klein Center events and visited 7 classes in various departmental units, including undergraduate and graduate levels. She served as the keynote speaker for the Honor's College luncheon on March 7, 2023. She will also serve as a panelist on intersectional climate justice for the Climate Action Network's annual Climate Summit on June 2, 2023, which OU is hosting. She will also screen and discuss her film Freshwater.

Faculty Fellows

Rebecca Mercado Jones is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations and an affiliate faculty member with Women and Gender Studies at Oakland University. She specializes in critical/cultural communication and her research tends to focus on how economic, political, and social encroachments influence the way women navigate life. Using feminist rhetorical analysis, ethnographic, and life history interviewing methodologies she seeks to understand how women think and speak about home, identity, and embodiment. Her work appears in Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, The Communication Review, Qualitative Inquiry, and Liminalities. In addition to her work at Oakland University, she also serves on the board of Planned Parenthood of Michigan and volunteers for Meals on Wheels.

During her time as a Klein Faculty Fellow, Dr. Jones examined how the early rhetoric of Margaret Sanger and the Federation of Planned Parenthood can reflect, select, and deflect the public discourses unfolding in our current climate.

Graham Cassano is the Director of OU’s Urban and Community Studies Concentration. He teaches in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Social Work, and Criminal Justice, where his specializations include social history, racial and ethnic relations, and social theory. He is the author of more than 20 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, as well as books on cinema ("A New Kind of Public: Community, Solidarity and Political Economy in New Deal Cinema"), music ("Eleanor Smith’s Hull House Songs: The Music of Protest and Hope in Jane Addams’s Chicago", written with Rima Lunin Schultz and Jessica Payette), and urban studies ("Urban Emergency (Mis)Management and the Crisis of Neoliberalism: Flint, MI, in Context", edited with Terressa Benz). He is also a film photographer and printer, currently enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.

During his time as a Klein Faculty Fellow, Dr. Cassano led a project for OU students to record oral histories in Pontiac, Michigan to document local culture and issues.