Matthew P. Shaw, assistant professor of public policy and education and assistant professor of law, will deliver the final lecture of the spring 2021 semester for Vanderbilt Law School’s Dean’s Lecture Series on Race and Discrimination. The online event will be Thursday, April 15, beginning at noon CT. All are invited to attend.
The Dean’s Lecture Series on Race and Discrimination annually convenes scholars and thought leaders to provide the Vanderbilt community with foundational knowledge on race, civil rights, discrimination on the basis of gender and sexual orientation, and critical historical milestones and their importance. The series’ aim is to ground our understanding of present-day discourse in a deeper, historically informed context to highlight social and political movements, impetus for legal changes, and ongoing areas of contention and struggle in race, civil rights and discrimination.
Shaw joined the faculty of Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development in fall 2016 after completing his doctorate in education at Harvard University, where his dissertation, “Shaping the DREAM: Law as Policy Defining Undocumented Students’ College Access,” addressed several of his research interests, including federal law and education policy and the insularity of minority status.
He earned his law degree at Columbia in 2005, after which he served for two years as a clerk for Chief Judge W. Louis Sands of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia. Shaw practiced law in Atlanta at King & Spalding and Schulten Ward & Turner before pursuing his Ed.D. at Harvard.