Leadership and Staff

Matthew Dimick is Professor of Law at the University at Buffalo School of Law and, from 2024, director of The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy. His scholarship can be broadly categorized under the heading of law and political economy. He is the author of the forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press, The Law and Economics of Income Inequality: A Critical Approach. Recent work has explored the epistemological status of “race” under capitalism, labor law and the republican theory of domination, a comparative evaluation of antitrust and labor law in correcting for firms’ market power, and the relationship between altruism, income inequality, and preferences for redistribution in the United States. He is currently undertaking a study on capitalism and antidiscrimination law and, along with John Abromeit and Paul Linden-Retek, is editing a volume on Jürgen Habermas’s legal and political theory.

Dimick’s research has appeared in both law reviews and economics, political science, and sociology journals, and has been featured in The Atlantic, Vox, Jacobin, and the On Labor blog. He has made regular contributions to Jacobin magazine and the Legal Form blog. He teaches regularly in contracts, law & society, labor law, employment law, and employment discrimination law and has also taught courses in federal income taxation, tax policy, and comparative and international labor and employment law.

Dimick holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a JD form Cornell Law School. Prior to coming to the University at Buffalo Law School, he was a Law Research Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center. After law school and before graduate school, he worked for the Service Employees International Union in Washington, DC.

Amanda M. Benzin is the Associate Director of The Baldy Center, effective November 28, 2022. She is responsible for managing various activities in The Center. Benzin graduated summa cum laude from UB with a BFA in Dance and minor in Business Administration. She holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Colorado Boulder with concentrations in performance, choreography, women and gender studies, somatics, and pedagogy.

Benzin is a somatically conscious, rhythmically and passionately driven scholar-artist, educator, Emmy-Award-winning performer, choreographer, and administrator. Most recently she served as Dance Program Coordinator and Assistant Professor of Dance at Colorado Mesa University. Benzin's current research exists at the intersection of pedagogy, ethical practices, somatic techniques, and vulnerability.

Email: ambenzin@buffalo.edu

Debra Kolodczak, PhD (American Studies, University at Buffalo) is a multimedia artist, photographer, content developer, and AEM6 managing editor. At UB she designs and develops numerous websites, while teaching hybrid courses in communication graphics. In 2015, she led the design and launch of The Baldy Center website, and today is responsible for developing content in the interest of mobilizing knowledge.

As a Fulbright Research Fellow (Canada), her graduate work was supervised by John Mohawk, Michael Frisch, and Oren Lyons. Her dissertation uses the idea of the canoe as a way to think about the native/newcomer encounter. Canoe stories connect the past, present, and future of North America's indigenous nations, making it possible to better understand the irony of how the original inhabitants are among the most impoverished communities living amid two of the world's wealthiest nations.

Kolodczak's ongoing work involves an environmental literacy project that sustains an 1830s era farmstead in Western New York. The Pre-Civil War property is adjacent to an inland waterway, indicative of the indigenous canoe routes that connect both continents of the Americas. In addition, Kolodczak is developing a manuscript to represent a collection of original papers, letters, hand-written notes, UN speeches, Akwasasne Notes, course syllabi, and other research materials generated by Oren Lyons and John Mohawk during their development of the Indigenous Studies Program at UB's Center of the Americas.

Email: dmore@buffalo.edu