Lightning Round One: Partnering with Communities
Robin E. Bates, Professor of English, is the John M. Turner Chair in the Humanities and program director for the Applied and Public Humanities minor. Specializing in constructions of British national identity, especially the work of early modern writers like Shakespeare, Dr. Bates’ scholarly work, such as Shakespeare and the Cultural Colonization of Ireland (Routledge 2007/2008), has explored the complex place of literature in cultural contact zones. Her work since then has shifted to investigate how mapping and the relationship to land impact the development of national/regional identity, including chorographic writing such as John Leland’s Itinerary of England and Wales, for which Dr. Bates developed an online mapped index. She teaches coursework in Shakespeare and early modern British literature, literary criticism, and applied and public humanities.
Earl H. Brooks is a musician (saxophone) and Assistant Professor of English at UMBC. His research interests include rhetoric and composition, African-American expressive culture, and sound studies. His current book project, On the Rhetoric of Black Music, argues that there would be no Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Movement, or Black Arts Movement as we know these phenomena without Black music.
Natasha Cole-Leonard is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Honors Program Director at the Community College of Baltimore County. She has been a member of the English faculty at CCBC since 2007. She leads the Mellon-sponsored “Invisible History” activity series, which explores and documents the history of enslavement on the CCBC Catonsville campus. A native of Louisiana, Dr. Cole-Leonard holds a B.A. in English from Louisiana State University. She earned the M.A. and Ph.D. in English at Howard University.
Lisa Crutchfield is a historian of early America and the Atlantic World whose research focuses on race relations, especially frontier indigenous-Anglo interaction. She draws heavily upon history and anthropology as she examines cultures from both sides of the Atlantic. Currently, she is working on a manuscript that highlights the people who bridged those different cultures and the complexity of the relationships that were subsequently forged. She holds a Ph.D. in American History from the College of William and Mary, with an outside field in Colonial Latin America, an M.A. in history from the University of Georgia, and a B.A. in history and anthropology from James Madison University.
Mary Foltz is Associate Professor of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Lehigh University and participating scholar in the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archives in Allentown, PA. Foltz also currently co-directs South Side Initiative at Lehigh University where she fosters public humanities projects that increase democratic and civic engagement. Her public humanities projects include exhibits on regional LGBTQIA+ history, multiple regional oral history projects focused on marginalized communities, multiple public-facing literary programs, the development of a community-based news site focused on local arts and culture, and facilitation of environmental working groups to address civic infrastructure and to improve habitats for declining species.
Sarah Fouts is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies and director of the Public Humanities Minor program. Fouts’ research interests include political economy, food studies, urban studies, ethnography, labor, and community engagement. Fouts is a 2022-2023 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow for the collaborative New Orleans-based work, “Project Neutral Grounds: At the Intersection of People, Food, and the Hustle.” Fouts is the principal investigator for the 2022-2023 ACLS Sustaining Public Engagement funded project entitled, “Baltimore Field School 2.0: Undoing and Doing Anew in Public Humanities.”
Slangston Hughes (Victor Rodgers) is a National Slam Champion based out of Baltimore and Artistic Director of DewMore Baltimore. He is the former coach of the two-time world champion Baltimore City Youth Poetry Team, and founder as well as a team member of the seven-time champion Slammageddon Baltimore adult slam team, the winningest team in poetry slam history. Slangston is the author of the poetry collection, Slanguage Arts & Griot Glimpses, and the forthcoming book, God’s Favorite Breakdance Move.
Patrick Oray is Faculty in Literature at Bard High School Early College in Baltimore, where he teaches the ninth grade Literature of the Americas and the First Year Seminar courses, as well as a college elective in Social Justice and Civic Engagement. A native of Chicago, Dr. Oray moved to Baltimore in 2014 from Iowa City, IA where he completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Iowa, with concentrations in critical race theory, immigration, and media studies. In addition to his doctoral studies, Dr. Oray was also president and bargaining-at-large member of United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America Local 896/COGS (Campaign to Organize Graduate Students) and wrote for the independent news and culture magazine, Little Village.
Lightning Round Two: Practicing Inclusive Humanities
Pamela Barnett is Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences at La Salle University in Philadelphia. Barnett began her career as a professor of English and African-American Studies at the University of South Carolina. Her earlier writings focused on the literature of political and social liberation in the 1960s and 70s, while her more recent intellectual work aims to advance diversity and inclusion in higher education. In 2010, she earned a certificate in Diversity Leadership at Temple University, which has deeply informed her work as a teacher and academic leader.
Monica A. Coleman is John and Patricia Cochran Scholar for Inclusive Excellence and Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Delaware, where she is also the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Africana Studies and the Coordinator for the African American Public Humanities Initiative. Coleman is the author or editor of six books including her award-winning memoir Bipolar Faith: a Black Woman’s Journey with Depression and Making a Way Out of No Way: a Womanist Theology, required text at leading theological schools around the country. Dr. Coleman co-hosted the popular web series, “Octavia Tried To Tell Us: Parable for Today’s Pandemic.” Coleman speaks widely on mental wellness, navigating change, religious diversity, and religious responses to intimate partner violence.
Drew Holladay (he/him) is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research combines approaches from Critical Disability Studies and the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine to study in public discourses of mental health and neuroscience. His pedagogy integrates theories and practices of writing that support multiply marginalized communities by centering the individual student’s understanding of their own experiences in education and culture more broadly. Holladay’s current manuscript-length research project, Composing Bodyminds: Activist Rhetoric, Embodiment, and the Politics of Mental Health, uses material embodiment as a lens to analyze the differences between traditional medical and mental health advocacy and emerging practices of intersectional activism.
Michael A. Hunt, a native of Baltimore, received his bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and his Master of Divinity from Emory University in Atlanta. Michael has returned to his alma mater as the Director of the UMBC McNair Scholars Program, working to increase underrepresented and underserved, first-generation, and low-income students’ attainment of research-based doctoral degrees. His personal research interest seeks to bridge spirituality and STEM education by providing culturally nuanced resources for increasing self-esteem and promoting holistic critical mentoring. Michael is completing his Ph.D. at UMBC in the Language, Literacy, and Culture (LLC) Program.
Amy Tondreau is an Assistant Professor of Elementary Literacy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She holds an Ed.D. in Curriculum & Teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University. She previously worked as a staff developer and writer for the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, co-director of the Summer Literacy Clinic at Rhode Island College, and an elementary classroom teacher. Her research focuses on teachers’ and students’ literacy identities, critical literacy in children’s literature and writing pedagogy, professional learning communities, and the cross-pollination of Universal Design for Learning and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in literacy teaching and learning.
Sharon Tran is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her scholarly research focuses on multiethnic American literatures and cultures with an emphasis on Asian American studies, gender studies, and critical disability studies. Her published writing has appeared in MELUS, the Journal of Asian American Studies, Contemporary Literature, and Signs. At present, she is working on a book manuscript tentatively titled “Asian Girlhood in the Shadows of U.S. Empire,” which develops Asian girlhood as a critical analytic and methodological lens for exploring questions of race, gender, and empire.
Sabah Firoz Uddin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies at Bowie State University, in Bowie, Maryland. She holds a PhD in Women’s/Gender Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her scholarly interests range widely from global and postcolonial feminisms, gender in the Muslim world, South Asian diasporas, feminism and fashion, and gender, culture and the media. She was an Inclusion Imperative Visiting Faculty Fellow at UMBC in Fall 2022, where she explored the rhetoric of digital protest.