Virginia Visconti

Virginia Visconti
Public Service Research Program Director
Room 205
(650) 724–4383
vav08@stanford.edu

Virginia directs both the Public Service Scholars Program and the Community-Based Research Fellows Program, administers the Andrea Naomi Leiderman Fellowship, and teaches Urban Studies 123: Approaching Research and the Community: Principles and Practice. Through various forms of outreach, Virginia seeks to identify undergraduates who are eager to connect research with their service commitments and academic studies and to provide them with the guidance and tools they require to create research-based public service plans. Each of these responsibilities contributes to the Haas Center’s larger aim of promoting engaged research at Stanford.

Virginia’s training as an anthropologist and educator gave rise to her interest in research as a form of service. While conducting fieldwork for her dissertation on rural household economies and children’s formal schooling in a northern province of Vietnam, she worked with local communities to explore the practical applications of her research. In the process, Virginia came to appreciate the ways in which researchers forge understanding in conversation with communities as well as with university-based colleagues who value the transformative nature of inquiry.

Before coming to the Haas Center, Virginia worked as a K-12 outreach coordinator for the Center for Asian Studies and the interim director of the GLBT Resource Center both at the University of Colorado Boulder and a teacher educator for the Office of Cultural Immersion Projects at Indiana University Bloomington. She has taught at both two-year and four-year institutions in the US and abroad and has served as a volunteer educational advisor for the Institute of International Education in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Virginia holds a dual major PhD in social/cultural anthropology and education policy studies from Indiana University Bloomington, an MAT in English, also from Indiana University, and a BA in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.