Speakers

Mebane Rash

Mebane Rash is the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of EdNC, an online platform that launched in January 2015 featuring nonpartisan news, research, data, and analysis on all things K-12 to engage the state in a bipartisan conversation about our schools.

rashheadshotMebane is a North Carolina native, an attorney admitted to the bar in both the N.C. and federal court systems.

For much of her career, Mebane worked at the nonpartisan N.C. Center for Public Policy Research as director of law and policy and the editor of N.C. Insight, the Center’s journal. During her time there, she lead extensive research on North Carolina’s mental health system and advised lawmakers on policy.

Mebane has been selected for an array of state and national honors, including national awards from the Governmental Research Association for most distinguished research, outstanding policy achievement, and most effective education of the public on an issue.

Fitzhugh Brundage

Fitz Brundage is the William B. Umstead Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and department chair in UNC’s Department of History.

His research interests are American history since the Civil War, with a particular focus on the American South. He has written on lynching, utopian socialism in the New South, and white and black historical memory in the South since the Civil War. In his work he has explored the contests over memory that divided southerners, both white and black, during the past century and a half.

He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from the University of Chicago and a Masters degree and Ph.D. from Harvard, and has been recipient of multiple grants and awards, including receiving the Charles Sydnor Award for distinguished book in Southern history from the Southern Historical Association

At present, he is working on a history of torture in the United States from 1500 to 2010.

Jon Crispin

Jon Crispin has been a full-time, self-employed photographer since 1974, dividing his time between regular freelance assignments and longer-term photo documentary projects.

crispinbiopic-3-200x300Crispin’s regular clients include national publications, colleges and universities, and non-profit organizations. His documentary projects include exhibitions and publications on 19th century New York State insane asylums; 19th and early 20th century New York State prisons; the living conditions of rural New York State residents; New York State agriculture; county fairground architecture in New York State; the architecture of Syracuse, New York; food and nutrition programs for the needy, and the Erie Canal. Many of these projects were funded by The New York State Council on the Arts and by the New York State Museum.

Crispin has exhibited his photographs extensively in museums and galleries. In the past few years, Jon has photographed over 300 plywood panels from the Fulton Street viewing area at the New York City World Trade Center site, as well as over 100 panels from Liberty Island overlooking the same location. He is currently working on a documentation of suitcases left behind by patients at the Willard Asylum in Willard, NY.

Jon has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Wittenberg University.

Rose Hoban

Rose Hoban is a registered nurse who practiced in community health settings for a decade before making a transition into reporting on health and public health issues.

rh_headshotsmallestHoban spent six-and-a-half years as the health reporter for North Carolina Public Radio – WUNC, where she covered health care, state health policy, science and research with a focus on public health issues. She started North Carolina Health News in 2011, where she is editor and reports on health care policy. She has aired stories on multiple public radio outlets, as well as published in multiple newspapers.

Hoban’s work has been recognized both regionally and nationally with numerous awards, including sharing in broadcast journalism’s highest award—the Columbia-DuPont. In 2010, she was awarded a fellowship by the Association of Health Care Journalists to do in-depth reporting on North Carolina’s mental health system and produced the five-part series, Mental Health Disorder, which focused on the dearth of housing options for people with mental illness in the state.

Preserving the Legacy of Dorothea Dix Hospital