Lydia Brassard

Former Director for Institutional Diversity and Inclusion

Lydia Brassard is a public anthropologist and educator whose work grapples with public space, race, and racism in North America and the production of history.

Biography

From Fall 2015 through Fall 2017, Brassard, public anthropologist and educator, served as the director for institutional diversity and inclusion at Bennington. She has been an instructor in the Urban Studies Department at Queens College, City University of New York, as well as a tour educator at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, New York. Her engagement with students in primary school through college inform her research interests, primarily how "race" is spatialized in the contemporary United States. Brassard’s article, Standing Their Ground in #Ferguson, outlines how and why anthropology is relevant to analyzing contemporary social issues. Brassard graduated from Bennington College in 2008, upon completing her undergraduate thesis, Alumni Perspectives on Race at Bennington College. Her undergraduate research set the foundation for her doctoral research on women of color diversity practitioners at historically white liberal arts colleges in the Northeast United States. Brassard is a PhD Candidate in the Anthropology department at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. She was a visiting faculty member at Bennington from Spring 2015 through Fall 2017.