RICH Announces New Board Officers and Members

Partington Takes Helm, Enos and Francis Come on Board

The Rhode Island Council of the Humanities congratulates its new officers, named at the organization's most recent Board meeting: Mary Lee Partington, Chair; Angela Renaud, Vice Chair; Al Basile, Secretary; and Lynne Malone, Treasurer.

The Council also approved the election of two new Board members: Sandra Enos and Elizabeth Francis.

Sandra Enos, Ph.D., serves as an Associate Professor of Sociology at Bryant University. She previously enjoyed a long career in the public and nonprofit sectors, serving in positions in child welfare, corrections, the office of the Governor as a policy aide, and in the fields of nonprofit development and higher education reform.   In her academic work, Dr. Enos’s research focus has been on the lives of marginalized children. Her book, Mothering on the inside: Parenting in a Women’s Prison, examined the lives of incarcerated mothers and their children and proposed social policies that would better serve not only these families but enhance public safety and child welfare outcomes as well. More recently, Dr. Enos has been tracing the history of child welfare in Rhode Island, an area that has received little attention in the research done about our state.  This project has involved work on the State Home and School Project which involved oral histories of former residents of the state’s orphanage, culminating in the production of the CD, Where a Sacred Responsibility Should Exist, featuring excerpts of those interviews and telling the story of the State Home to the general public.  Dr. Enos sees herself as a public scholar, an academic whose aim is not only to do the painstaking research that is required but to share her findings with a wider audience. She has served as an RICH Engagement Scholar and was invited to give the Newell Goff Annual Lecture in 2007, recognizing the publication of “The Emergence of Child Welfare at Rhode Island’s Public Orphanage: The State Home and School, 1884-1920” in  the journal Rhode Island History that traced the founding and development of the State Home and School. 

Elizabeth Francis, Ph.D., is director of Corporate and Foundation Relations at Brown University with a focus on biomedical initiatives. She also is a cultural historian and the author of The Secret Treachery of Words: Feminism and Modernism in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2002) as well as many essays and reviews. She has been a reviewer for the College Board and a developer of multimedia history.  With an undergraduate degree from Hampshire College and a master’s and doctorate from Brown University, Elizabeth has taught at Brown, the University of Rhode Island, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She also has been a  trustee of the International Charter School in Pawtucket. She lives in the Armory District of Providence with her daughter Lulu and partner Jack. She is interested in the potential of collaborative spaces and partnerships to spark creativity, innovation, and positive change.