From Robert E. Palazzo, Dean, UAB College of Arts & Sciences:
Dear Colleagues, I am pleased to announce that Dr. Angela Lewis, professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration (formerly Government) and director of the Political Science Program, has agreed to serve as interim chair of the department effective December 1, 2017.
Dr. Lewis is a Birmingham native who received her B.A. in political science with a concentration in regional and urban planning from the University of Alabama. She received a master’s in public administration at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville before completing her Ph.D. there in political science/regional and urban planning. She joined UAB in August, 2003.
Dr. Lewis is a prolific scholar whose research appears in the National Political Science Review, American Review of Politics, Journal of African American Studies, Polity, the International Journal of African Studies, Whose Black Politics, and The Constitutionalism of American States. She is the author of Conservatism in the Black Community: To the Right and Misunderstood.
She is a highly-regarded instructor and was been nominated for the Alumni Teaching Award in the former School of Social and Behavioral Sciences in 2008. She is active in various professional associations including the American Political Science Association, the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, and the Southern Political Science Association, where she has held a variety of leadership positions. She is currently the chair of the Committee of the Status of African Americans in the South in the Southern Political Science Association.
Over the course of her career, Dr. Lewis has received numerous awards including the Anna Julia Cooper Teacher of the Year, UAB Black Student Awareness Committee Faculty Award, and the Southeastern Association of Educational Opportunity Program Personnel, TRIO Achiever Award. She is a member of Omicron Delta Kappa, Pi Sigma Alpha and Pi Alpha Alpha.
Dr. Lewis assumes leadership of the department from Dr. Wendy Gunther-Canada, who served as chair since August, 2009. We are grateful to Dr. Gunther-Canada for her dedicated leadership and her deep investment in the people and programs in the department. Wendy will remain a professor in the faculty and will continue to contribute in her research areas of gender and citizenship, political philosophy, and the history of ideas.
Dr. Lewis will lead the department while we embark on a national search for a full-time chair. Please join me in congratulating her.
