Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering
About
James Holly, Jr. earned a bachelor’s degree from Tuskegee University and a master’s degree from Michigan State University, both in mechanical engineering. He earned his doctorate in engineering education from Purdue University. His research paradigm is shaped by his experiences growing up in a Black church within a Black city and later studying engineering at Tuskegee University, a Black institution, three spaces where Blackness is both normal and esteemed. As such, he sees his teaching, research, and service as promoting pro-Blackness—affirming the humanity and epistemic authority of Black people—in engineering education. His scholarship focuses on the ways disciplinary knowledge (i.e., mechanical engineering) reinforces racialized power, the role of culture and cognition in teaching and learning, and preparing pre-college engineering educators to identify and counteract racial inequity. His research group's focus is to esteem the heritage knowledge of Black engineering students, faculty, and researchers, along with nourishing their self-knowledge; also, to support non-Black scholars committed to accomplishing racial justice in engineering.
Professor Holly, Jr. spent two years as an assistant professor within the Teacher Education Department at Wayne State University. In this role he worked with pre-service STEM teachers to uncover the racialized epistemic norms of science and mathematics instruction. Though his current role is more specific to engineering, he still uses his research, teaching, and service to draw upon the legacy of ingenuity from Black peoples throughout human history to portray the urban context as modern landscape of resilient intelligence. He co-leads “The Sankofa Project: Cultivating Socially Conscious Engineers,” which uses Black history and culture as a way to make visible the social and political implications of engineering work.
