Timothy K. Eatman

Timothy K. Eatman is co-director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA) and a Syracuse University (SU) faculty member within the department of higher education in the School of Education. As IA’s research director for eight years, Eatman has provided leadership on key research and action initiatives that have shaped regional, national and global conversations about publicly engaged scholarship. As co-principal investigator of the Tenure Team Initiative on Public Scholarship, he co-wrote its seminal report, “Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University” (2008) with IA’s founding director, Julie Ellison, and organized a series of regional meetings with Campus Compact that involved more than 60 higher education institutions. This work on faculty rewards developed into a second national study by Eatman on the career aspirations and decisions of graduate students and early-career academic professionals who identify as publicly engaged scholars.

Eatman, who transitioned with the IA headquarters from the University of Michigan to SU in 2007, has championed the expansion of the consortium’s research enterprise. He has represented IA and SU nationally and internationally through keynote addresses, workshops and consultancies that have increased conceptual understanding about and visibility for publicly engaged scholarship, forging critical relationships with several leading higher education associations. This summer for a second consecutive year he was a faculty member of the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ Institute on High-Impact Practices and Student Success. He serves on the leadership team of IA’s collaborative action-research project with Columbia University Law School’s Center for Institutional and Social Change on diversity and engagement, and will soon begin a two-year appointment as an Honorary Professor at the University of South Africa.

An educational sociologist, Eatman received his Ph.D. in educational policy studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a master’s degree in college student development at Howard University and a bachelor’s degree in early childhood development at Pace University. He is the recipient of the 2010 Early Career Research Award from the International Research Association for Service Learning and Community Engagement.