Executive Committee

The mission of The Inside-Out Executive Committee is to serve as an advisory body for the overall strategic planning, decision-making, and implementation of the projects of The Inside-Out Center and the international Inside-Out program.

Committee Members

Kristin Bumiller (Amherst College)
Shaul Cohen (University of Oregon)
James Forman, Jr. (Yale University)
Susan Hyatt (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis)
Barbara Roswell (Goucher College)
Lucas Wilson (Mt. Holyoke College)
Janet Wolf (Children’s Defense Fund)

Kristin Bumiller is the George Daniel Professor of Economic and Social Institutions at Amherst College. She is the author of In An Abusive State (Victoria Schuck Book Prize, American Political Science Association, 2009) and The Civil Rights Society. Her numerous articles, which span a broad range of interests in anti-discrimination policy, feminist theory, gender and punishment, and disability rights, have been published in major journals in her field, including Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, Law & Society Review, Theoretical Criminology, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, and Journal of Politics. She has had a long-term affiliation with the Feminism and Legal Theory Project at Emory University and has served on the Board of Trustees for the Law & Society Association. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Shaul Cohen is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Oregon, as well as the Director of the UO Prison Education Program and the Director of the Carnegie Global Oregon Ethics Program. His teaching and research are in issues of ethnic conflict, war, and imprisonment. Though, as he says, "It’s sometimes daunting to slog through the human condition from this perspective... I am energized by some of the creative approaches that people can take, the good will that we find in (small) pockets, even in the worst situations, and the opportunity to help train people in conflict situations and our students on how to make the problems a bit smaller or more manageable."

James Forman is a professor of law at Yale Law School. He has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, numerous law reviews, and other publications. A former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, he spent six years as a public defender in Washington, D.C., where he co-founded the Maya Angelou Public Charter School. James won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2017 book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.

Sue Hyatt is a professor of Anthropology at the Indiana University - Purdue University in Indianapolis (IUPUI). After completing her MA at the University in Michigan, she left the academic world and worked for eight years as a community organizer in Southwest Chicago. After completing her PhD at the University of Massachusetts, from 1996-2004, she taught at Temple University in Philadelphia. Sue also co-founded the Indiana chapter of The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program®. She was a Visiting Research Fellow at Durham University (UK) from 2013 to 2017.

Barbara Sherr Roswell teaches writing at Goucher College and is Founding Director of the Goucher Prison Education Partnership, a program that offers a liberal arts degree to over 90 men and women incarcerated in Maryland while stimulating meaningful dialogue about justice, incarceration, and educational access (www.goucher.edu/gpep). She has been teaching Inside-Out courses since 2006 and had the great pleasure of collaborating with many Inside-Out faculty, students and alumni as co-editor of Turning Teaching Inside Out: A Pedagogy of Transformation for Community-Based Education (Palgrave, 2013). Barbara served as Founding Editor of Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric and Service Learning and is author of Reading, Writing and Gender (Eye on Education, 2002), Writing and Civic Engagement (Bedford, 2010), and View from the Hilltop (Passager, 2015).

Lucas Wilson is a professor of Africana Studies and Economics at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts. He focuses much of his work on the philosophy and methodology of economics, Marxism, the political economy of race, and exploring the various economic and noneconomic conditions that restrict opportunities and inhibit social progress for African Americans. Lucas teaches interdisciplinary courses on the economics of African American experience in the twentieth century and on African American cultural studies.

Janet Wolf – Poverty rights organizer since 1975; United Methodist pastor / clergy; college and seminary professor; learner / teacher / animator with think tanks inside prisons, focusing on system change, college classes with students from the inside and from the free world, and transformative vs. retributive justice. Engaged in public theology and nonviolent direct action organizing, currently working with the Children’s Defense Fund to disrupt and dismantle the cradle to prison pipeline through leadership by and partnership with young people struggling with school, streets and poverty, and partnership with people who are now or have been caged.