Livingstone College

SALISBURY – Livingstone College this week announced that it has filled three leadership positions.

President Jimmy R. Jenkins Sr. said he is confident that the appointments will help advance the mission of his holistic college approach to prepare students for a global society.

The appointments include:

• Dawn Brown McNair, dean of mathematics and sciences

For more than 25 years, McNair has been a mathematics educator and researcher. She most recently was associate professor of math and math coordinator at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte.

During her tenure, the division exceeded institutional projections for graduates by 40%; graduates had higher GPAs; and students were accepted to graduate school at higher rates.

McNair was the first African American to earn a doctorate in applied mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She received her master’s degree from UNCC and a bachelor’s degree from UNC-Chapel Hill.

McNair was instrumental in the procurement of more than $10 million in grant funding from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Education and the Belk Foundation. She has served as a grant reviewer for the National Science Foundation and Association of American Colleges and Universities.

McNair was one of three higher education faculty who assisted in revising the K-12 math standards for the state and served as state reviewer for the U.S. Presidential Awards for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching.

• Hilton Kelly, dean of liberal arts and humanities

Kelly received his bachelor’s degree in history from UNC-Charlotte and his master’s degree in labor studies and doctorate in sociology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His research and teaching interests include sociology of education; critical race theory; the age of Jim Crow; the lives, work and careers of African American educators; and social memory studies.

In 2010, he published “Race, Remembering and Jim Crow’s Teachers” in the Routledge Studies in African American History and Culture Series. He has received several awards, including a 2006-07 Consortium for Faculty Diversity Dissertation Fellowship; a 2011 Critics’ Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association; and a 2011-12 James Weldon Johnson Institute for Race and Difference Fellowship at Emory University.

Kelly is the immediate past president of the American Educational Studies Association, having served as president, program chairman, president-elect and vice president.

• Curtis Dean, Evening Weekend College director, ROTC director

Dean is a graduate of Livingstone College, with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. He earned his master’s degree at the University of Phoenix and his doctorate from Walden University.

After joining Livingstone in 2003 as technical director, Dean started a recording studio in which he engineered and produced three CDs. He served as project manager to secure lights and sound equipment for Varick Auditorium and was an assistant professor of the Bishop George E. Battle Jr. School of Business, Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology.

Before joining Livingstone, he served in the Army for 10 years as the noncommissioned officer in charge of the 7th Army Soldiers in Heidelberg, Germany. He also was executive musical director for several off-Broadway stage productions.