Lemuel W. Watson, Ph.D.

Senior Research Fellow

The Center for Comparative and International Education

    Lemuel W. Watson is Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs. Provost Professor of School of Education and African American and African Diaspora Studies, Co-Director of the Rural Center for AIDS/STD Prevention, and Senior Scientist at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. He is also a Senior Scholar Fellow at the Antioch Graduate School of Leadership and Change.

    He helps oversee Kinsey’s efforts to generate collaborative education, research, and fundraising related to LGBTQ+ lives and topics. This appointment includes research on LGBTQ+ youth mental health as part of the partnership between Kinsey and the Trevor Project, the world's most significant suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning youth. 

    A seasoned leader whose career spans across various industries, which include educational, non-profit organizations, private, and entrepreneurship/small businesses. Lemuel W. Watson has also been recognized as a scholar and researcher on underrepresented populations. He has worked as a consultant on public policy and talent management issues around the world. He has written books, monographs, and articles related to research on leadership, underrepresented populations, LGBTQ+, public policy, and human development. He is also Series Editor for Contemporary Perspectives on LGBTQ Advocacy in Societies with IAP. His latest scholarship can be found in Unheard Voice: A Collection of Narratives by Black, Gay & Bisexual Men (2021), Queer and Trans Advocacy in Community College (2021), Authentic Leadership: An Engaged Discussion of LGBTQ Work as Culturally Relevant, Special Issue of Leadership Journal on Race and Leadership. Watson also has secured grants totaling more than $13.5 million in research funding by an array of organizations. He has been deeply engaged with the community as a personal and professional advocate through numerous arts, community, educational, and professional boards.

    Watson has a wealth of experience in working with non-profit organizations through his international and local board commitments. He currently focuses on mindful leadership and talent management to enhance work and learning environments. Watson is also Distinguished Professor and Dean Emeritus and Founding Executive Director of the Center for Innovation in Higher Education at the University of South Carolina and the former founding Executive Director of the Center for P-20 Engagement and Dean of the College of Education at Northern Illinois University. He is past host of the South Carolina Educational Television series, Carolina Classrooms, and Fulbright Scholar to Belarus.

Brian D. Denman, Ph.D.

Senior Research Fellow

The Center for Comparative and International Education

        

    Brian D. Denman is an associate professor of teaching, learning and assessment at the University of New England, Armidale, Australia, where he teaches applied leadership and comparative and international education. He also serves as Deputy Head of School and Head of Department for Globalisation, Leadership and Policy and Diversity, Equity and Sustainability.

    Denman has developed a unique master of comparative and international education at UNE in 2021, which uses a Personal Assessment Tool (PAT) that attempts to benchmark, track and scaffold higher order skills for each student over the duration of the degree.  The degree is designed to broaden the discourse about educational equity and opportunity to master’s degree students from several institutions/countries including China, and the PAT has already shown individual and cross-cultural strengths that may assist with employment prospects.  It is generally understood that the utility of custom-tailored educational assessments benefits not only both instructor and student, but also provides a more personalised learning strategy for fundamentally transforming the way teaching and learning is approached and assessed at any given level of education.

    Denman’s current research interests focus on assessment, accountability, and visualising evidence-informed learning achievements.  Denman has held many posts, including Secretary-General of GlobalCIE and the World Comparative Education Societies (WCCES), UNESCO Fellow, UNE Council member, President of the Australian and New Zealand and Comparative and International Education Society (ANZCIES), and Editor-in-Chief of the International Education Journal:  Comparative Perspectives.  He holds a Ph.D. in social and policy studies in education from the University of Sydney.

 

MaryJo Benton Lee, Ph.D.

Honorary professor

The Center for Comparative and International Education

       

    MaryJo Benton Lee holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from the University of Maryland-College Park. She worked for five years as a journalist in the Washington, D.C., area, before moving to South Dakota where she now lives in 1982.

    MaryJo holds a Ph.D. in sociology, with a minor in Asian studies, from South Dakota State University. During her 29 years at SDSU she has held a number of positions, both teaching and administrative, including that of coordinator of the SDSU-Flandreau Indian School Success Academy. Success Academy was a nationally recognized college preparatory program for American Indian high school students. MaryJo is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Rural Studies at SDSU. She is the author of two books and the editor of a third, all dealing with race, ethnicity and education.

    MaryJo was married to SDSU Professor Emeritus of Journalism Richard W. Lee for 36 years until his death in 2018, and they have two sons. In 1991 the Lees were SDSU exchange professors at Yunnan Normal University in Kunming, the People’s Republic of China, setting off their 25-year-long love affair with that country.

    MaryJo was named a 2016-2017 Fulbright U.S. Scholar to China. As a Fulbright scholar, MaryJo taught graduate classes at the Research Institute of Higher Education at Yunnan University in Kunming. Before leaving China, she was named an honorary professor of Yunnan University.