Dr. Thomas Piechota, Vice President for Research will be joined by Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Dean Jennifer Keene and Fowler School of Law Dean Matt Parlow who will moderate the event. This timely discussion will explore the unprecedented storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The initial claim that "this is not who we are," is now being challenged with "this is exactly who we are." Faculty panelists will consider these differing perspectives, offering insight into the U.S. Constitution, white supremacy, impeachment, and the interplay between social media and politics.

For more information, visit www.chapman.edu/asktheexperts 

About the Expert Panelists

Lori Cox Han, Ph.D. is Professor of Political Science. Dr. Han’s research and teaching expertise include the presidency, women and politics, and media and politics. She is the author of numerous books, including Advising Nixon: The White House Memos of Patrick J. Buchanan (University Press of Kansas, 2019); Presidents and the American Presidency, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2018); Women, Power, and Politics: The Fight for Gender Equality in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2018); and In It to Win: Electing Madam President (Bloomsbury, 2015). She is also the editor of several scholarly volumes, including Madam President? Gender and Politics on the Road to the White House (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2020); Hatred of America’s Presidents: Personal Attacks on the White House from Washington to Trump (ABC-CLIO, 2018); and New Directions in the American Presidency, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2018). Dr. Han is past president of Presidents and Executive Politics, an organized section of the American Political Science Association devoted to the study of the presidency. She received her Ph. D. in Political Science from the University of Southern California.

Janine Young Kim joined the Fowler School of Law faculty as a Professor of Law in 2016. Her scholarship focuses on criminal law theory and race and the law. Professor Kim’s most recent works include “On Race and Persuasion” in CUNY Law Review and “Racial Emotions and the Feeling of Equality” in University of Colorado Law Review, and her forthcoming article on constitutional criminal procedure, “On the Broadness of the Fourth Amendment,” will be published later this year in SMU Law Review. Professor Kim previously taught at Marquette University Law School, Southwestern Law School, and Whittier Law School. She received her JD from Yale Law School and both her M.A. and B.A. from Stanford University. At Yale Law School, she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, a Coker Fellow, and the executive editor of the Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal.

Prexy Nesbitt holds the position of Presidential Fellow in Peace Studies at Chapman University. Born on Chicago’s West Side, “Prexy” (Rozell W.) Nesbitt has spent more than five decades as an educator, activist, and speaker on Africa, foreign policy, and racism. Prexy’s career has also included extensive consulting and training on class, race, multiculturalism and diversity. Over the course of his career, Prexy has made more than one hundred trips to Africa, including trips taken in secret to apartheid-torn South Africa.  A product of the United College of Dar Es Salaam and Antioch College, he was active in the United States, Canada and Europe in the struggle to end apartheid and worked to end colonialism in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Namibia. From 1979 to 1983, he worked worldwide as the Program Director of the World Council of Churches Program to Combat Racism based out of Geneva, Switzerland. In the late 1980s, he served as senior consultant to the Mozambique Government organizing in North America to prevent the apartheid-backed rebel movement, RENAMO, from gaining official support from the Reagan administration and its allies.

One of his most signal lifetime achievements, according to those who know him well, is that he has had the honor of knowing and working for the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Eduardo Mondlane, Samora Machel and Mayor Harold Washington. Additionally, he has worked closely with Amilcar Cabral, Julius Nyerere, Nelson Mandela, and Graca Machel.

Pete Simi, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology. He has studied social movements and political violence with a specific focus on right-wing extremism for the past 25 years. His research has taken him inside anti-government militia, Ku Klux Klan, and neo-Nazi groups across the United States and Europe, including many of the groups involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection. He has authored more than 50 peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters and co-authored the award-winning book manuscript, American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate. Much of this research has been funded by the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. He provides regular consultation on legal cases involving hate crimes and domestic terrorism and is currently serving as one of the plaintiffs’ experts in the landmark civil case related to the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that resulted in one fatality and dozens of injuries.

Kenneth Stahl is a Professor of Law and the director of the Environmental, Land Use, and Real Estate Law certificate program at the Fowler School of Law. His scholarly work focuses on the relationship between the local political process and judicial doctrine in land use and local government law, combining doctrinal analysis with insights from such disciplines as urban sociology, geography, economics, and the humanities. Professor Stahl's most recent book, Local Citizenship in a Global Age, explores how the advance of globalization and the rise of nationalist political leaders has caused local and federal citizenship to clash. Prior to joining Chapman, Professor Stahl served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York, a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Constitutional Torts, and as an Associate at the Washington, D.C. law firm of Arnold & Porter. He earned his B.A. from the University of Michigan, and his JD from Yale Law School, where he served as a Notes Editor of the Yale Law Journal and an editor of the Yale Journal of Law and The Humanities.