University of Maryland Baltimore County
Dr. Lisa CellaProfessor of Music, Flute
Department Chair, Director of Certificate ProgramsA champion of contemporary music, Lisa Cella has performed throughout the United States and abroad. She is a founding member of NOISE, the resident ensemble of San Diego New Music. With NOISE she has performed the works of young composers around the world. NOISE also presents a three-day festival of modern music entitled soundON. Lisa performs with Jane Rigler and Carrie Rose in the flute collective inHALE, a group dedicated to developing challenging and experimental repertoire for two or three flutes. She is a faculty member of the Soundscape Festival of Contemporary Music in Blonay, Switzerland and Nief-Norf in Knoxville, TN. She has studied with John Fonville, Robert Willoughby and John Oberbrunner. She is a Professor of Music at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and current chair of the department.
You can learn more about Dr. Cella here:
https://music.umbc.edu/directory/cella/
Dr. Loren Henderson
Associate Professor of Public Policy
Dr. Loren Henderson is an accomplished sociologist with a research program spanning multiple sub-disciplines of sociology, focusing on racial inequalities in wealth and health, and the challenges of promoting diversity and inclusion. Dr. Henderson’s key contribution to the field of sociology is her co-authored book, Diversity in Organizations: A Critical Examination. Dr. Henderson is also co-editor of “Race, Ethnicity, and the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Dr. Henderson is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy, Vice President of the Faculty Senate at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and the Executive Officer of the Association of Black Sociologists
You can learn more about Dr. Henderson here: https://publicpolicy.umbc.edu/loren-henderson/
Prof. Brian KaufmanAssociate Professor of Music Education
Tuba, Euphonium, Wind EnsembleAs a conductor, tubist, educator, social entrepreneur, and publicly-engaged scholar, Brian Kaufman has shared the stage as a performer and speaker alongside the likes of Pulitzer-Prize winning composer Gunther Schuller, Emmy-nominated composer and genre-bending violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR), the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, the cult pop-rock band Tally Hall, The American Brass Quintet, and Her Royal Highness Princess Dr. Nisreen El-Hashemite. His commitment to social justice and civic engagement has shaped his contributions to the schools, communities, and organizations in which he has been fortunate to serve. He is a co-founder, artistic director, and conductor of The Sounding Board, an organization that creates productions that integrate music, multimedia, spoken word, and commentary from noted public figures to inspire new perspectives and cultivate dialogue on today’s most pressing social issues.
You can learn more about Prof. Kaufman here: https://music.umbc.edu/directory/kaufman/
Dr. Jennifer MaherAssociate Professor of English
Affiliate Faculty: Language, Literacy & Communication PhD ProgramJennifer Maher is an Associate Professor in the English department’s Communication & Technology Track and an affiliate faculty member in the Language, Literacy, and Culture Ph.D. program. Her research interests include rhetorics of technology, the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition, and the city of Baltimore. She is the author of Software Evangelism and the Rhetoric of Morality (2015), which analyzes the politics of good code in software development. Her most recent work includes an exploration of the rhetoric of health and medicine as social justice in “Challenging Racial Disparities in and through Public Health Campaigns,” and she is currently working on a book on infrastructure rhetorics, which developed out of her class on Baltimore. In addition to serving on the editorial board for Technical Communication Quarterly, she is a co-developer of the open-access Miami Writing Institute.
You can learn more about Dr. Maher here: https://english.umbc.edu/core-faculty/jennifer-maher
Prof. Gary RozancAssociate Professor
Graphic DesignProfessor Gary Rozanc is a designer, developer, educator and AIGA Baltimore’s Education Director. Gary’s research interests lie in determining the necessary core competencies required to innovate communications in screen-based learning environments so that an effective pedagogy can be developed. Gary’s specifically interested in determining the skill sets required of entry-level interaction and user experience designers. Gary’s objective is to develop a supporting curriculum for these design disciplines that use inquiry and problem based learning methods applied through an observation and analysis of human-made systems to guide the identification of problems and create a culture of innovation that supports and enhances our lives.
You can learn more about Prof. Rozanc here: https://art.umbc.edu/visual-arts-at-umbc/faculty-staff/gary-rozanc/
Dr. Tanya L. SaundersAssociate Professor
Language Literacy & Culture Doctoral ProgramDr. Tanya L. Saunders is a sociologist and cultural studies scholar who is interested in the ways in which the African Diaspora throughout the Americas uses the arts as a tool for social change, specifically through decolonizing systems of thinking and knowing in the Americas. Dr. Saunders was a Mark Claster Mamolen Fellow (2022) at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & American Research, where they began working on their book tentatively entitled Estéticas do Bapho: Queering Black Brazilian Artivism and Politics of Liberation.
You can learn more about Dr. Saunders here: https://llc.umbc.edu/dr-tanya-saunders/
Dr. Fan YangAssociate Professor
Media and Communication StudiesFan Yang (杨帆) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). An interdisciplinary scholar, Yang works at the intersection of cultural studies, transnational media studies, globalization, postcolonialism/postsocialism, and contemporary China. She is a faculty affiliate in the Asian Studies program and the Ph.D. program in Language, Literacy, and Culture, and serves on the Global Studies Coordinating Committee.
Yang is the author of Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (2016). She has published on topics such as food and visual culture, urban communication, and media and environment. Her new book, Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements, is forthcoming in 2024.
You can learn more about Dr. Yang here: https://mcs.umbc.edu/fan-yang/
University of Maryland College Park
Dr. Cécile AccilienProfessor of French and Francophone Studies
The School of Languages, Literatures and CulturesDr. Accilien’s areas of studies are Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures and Film & Media Studies. She is the co-editor (with Valerie Orlando) of Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives and the co-author (with Krishauna Hines Gaither) of The Antiracism World Language Classroom. She recently published a monograph Bay lodyans: Haitian Popular Film Culture with SUNY Press. She is the 2023 president of the Haitian Studies Association. She has written for Truthout and Latin American Commentator.
Dr. Andrea E. BrownAssociate Director of Bands
Dr. Andrea E. Brown was appointed the Associate Director of Bands at the University of Maryland in 2018. In this position she conducts the University of Maryland Wind Ensemble, serves as the Director of Athletic Bands and teaches conducting. Brown is formerly a member of the conducting faculty at the University of Michigan where she served as the assistant director of bands and was a faculty sponsor of a College of Engineering Multidisciplinary Design Project team researching conducting pedagogy technology. She also served as the director of orchestra and assistant director of bands at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. She is a frequent guest conductor, clinician and adjudicator in the US, Europe and Asia.
Brown has also had several rehearsal guides published in the popular GIA Publications series, “Teaching Music Through Performance in Band” and has presented at the Midwest Clinic in Chicago, Oxford Conducting Institute, Music For All Summer Symposium, the Yamaha Bläserklasse in Schlitz, Germany, the International Computer Music Conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the College Music Society International Conference in Sydney, Australia, and multiple times at the College Band Directors National Association National Conference.
You can learn more about Dr. Brown here:
https://music.umd.edu/directory/andrea-brown
Dr. La Marr Jurelle BruceAssociate Professor & Director of Graduate Studies
Department of American StudiesLa Marr Jurelle Bruce (B.A. Columbia, Ph.D. Yale) is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar, literary and cultural theorist, Black/black studies devotee, first-generation college graduate, and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. His scholarship centers black expressive cultures—spanning literature, film, music, theatre, and the art and aesthetics of quotidian black life. A Ford Foundation Fellow and Mellon-Mays Fellow, he also studies and teaches popular culture, queer theory, disability studies, mad studies, performance theory, and psychoanalysis.
Dr. Bruce’s writing is featured or forthcoming in African American Review, American Quarterly, The Black Scholar, GLQ, Social Text, TDR, and several anthologies. His debut book, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (Duke University Press), earned the MLA Prize for a First Book from the Modern Language Association and the Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Now he’s in the thick of two projects. The first unfurls a critical theory, cultural history, aesthetic expression, and existential assertion of black love outside. The second is a study of—and an experiment in—convergences of love and madness.
You can learn more about Prof. Bruce here:
https://amst.umd.edu/directory/la-marr-jurelle-bruce
Audran DowningAssociate Dean for Academic Affairs,
Undergraduate EducationAudran Downing has served on the ARHU Dean’s leadership team for a number of years and beginning July 1, 2023 will now oversee the ARHU undergraduate curricula, Living Learning Programs as well as the Office of Student Affairs and Career Engagement. Dedicated to developing a cohesive culture of student learning, her approach merges traditional student affairs and academic affairs paradigms, emphasizing connections between the academic, career, cultural and developmental needs of undergraduate students.
Since arriving at the University of Maryland, she has received the Provost’s Commission on Academic Advising “Advisor of the Year” Award and guided her office to receive the President’s Commission on Ethnic Minority Issues- Office of Student Affairs “Award for Outstanding Service.” She has spearheaded many college and campus wide initiatives, developed numerous regional and national presentations and served in leadership roles on numerous campus and national commissions. Prior to starting with ARHU, she served as the director of the Office of Undergraduate Studies at Colgate University.
Dr. Julius B. Fleming
Associate Professor
EnglishJulius B. Fleming, Jr. earned a doctorate in English, and a graduate certificate in Africana studies, from the University of Pennsylvania. Specializing in Afro-Diasporic literatures and cultures, he has particular interests in performance studies, black political culture, diaspora, and colonialism, especially where they intersect with race, gender, and sexuality. Professor Fleming is the author of Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation (NYU Press, 2022). This project reconsiders the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of black theatre, while examining the importance of time and affect to the making of the modern racial order.
Fleming’s work appears in journals like American Literature, American Literary History, South Atlantic Quarterly, Callaloo, and The James Baldwin Review. Fleming has been awarded fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute.
You can learn more about Dr. Fleming at:
https://english.umd.edu/directory/julius-fleming
Dr. Perla M. GuerreroAssociate Professor
American StudiesAffiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean Studies
CenterDr. Guerrero’s research and teaching interests include relational and comparative race and ethnicity with a focus on Latinas/os/xs and Asian Americans, space and place, immigration, labor, U.S. history, and the U.S. South. She has received multiple awards including two from the Smithsonian Institution to be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of American History (NMAH).
You can learn more about Dr. Guerrero here:
https://amst.umd.edu/directory/perla-guerrero
Dr. Zenzele IsokeAssociate Professor, the Harriet Tubman
Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality StudiesZenzele Isoke is a black feminist theorist, urban ethnographer, and political storyteller. Drawing from the ideas of black decolonial thinkers, Isoke writes the contemporary history of cities through the political struggles of self-identified black/queer women of the African diaspora. Writing across the fields of geography, political science, and urban anthropology, her scholarship spans several cities in the U.S., Middle-East, and the Caribbean. Her book new project: Unheard Voices at the Bottom of Empire develops a set of “counterpoetic” writing practices to theorize and explore black feminist politics through the mediums of collaborative art-making, breath and meditation, and conventional grassroots organizing in racially segregated urban spaces. She is author of Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance (Palgrave 2013). Her writing has been featured in several peer-reviewed journals and anthologies including Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, Transforming Anthropology, Gender, Place and Culture, among others. She is also the mother of two teenaged black girls, a (slowly) rising poet, and organizer in her own right.
You can learn more about Dr. Isoke here: https://wgss.umd.edu/zenzele-isoke
Dr. Quincy T. MillsAssociate Professor, History
Director, Graduate Studies, HistoryQuincy T. Mills earned his doctorate in history from the University of Chicago in 2006. Prior to arriving at Maryland, he was a faculty member at Vassar College. Mills specializes in 20th-century African American business and social movement history. In 2013, he was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the author of Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). He has discussed his research on media outlets such as NPR and MSNBC. He is currently working on a new book entitled “The Wages of Resistance: Financing the Black Freedom Movement.”
You can learn more about Dr. Mills here:
https://history.umd.edu/directory/quincy-mills
Morgan State University
Dr. Dexter Blackman
Associate Professor of History & Geography
Dr. Blackman researches and studies in the fields of African American, the African Diaspora, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Cold War histories, and African-American Studies. He is currently completing the book manuscript, We Are Standing Up for Humanity: Black Power, the Black Athletic Experience, and the 1968 Olympic Project for Human Rights.
You can learn more about Dr. Blackman here:
https://www.morgan.edu/history-and-geography/faculty-and-staff/dexter-blackman
Dr. Inte’a DeShieldsAssistant Professor & Coordinator of the Digital Humanities Initiative for the College of Liberal Arts, Department of English and Language Arts
Dr. DeShields earned her doctorate in Language, Literacy, and Culture from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. There, she focused her studies and research on sociolinguistics, whiteness studies, and rhetoric and culture. Before earning her doctorate, Dr. DeShields earned a Master of Arts in Intercultural Communication & Rhetoric from Howard University and a Bachelor of Arts in Speech Communication from Morgan State University. She received her formative education in Baltimore City Public Schools.
Areas of Specialization: Langauge, Literacy & Culture; Culturally Responsive & Sustainng Pedagogies; Africology & Pan-African Studies; Digital Humanities; Whiteness Studies
Dr. Ida JonesAssociate Director of Special Collections &
University ArchivistNoted professional archivist and historian, award-winning author, educator, and recognized leader in the field of African American women’s history. She graduated from Howard University. Her dedication to her alma mater and to the identification, preservation, and use of personal papers and organizational records, created by African Americans and African American organizations, prompted her to accept the coveted position of Assistant Curator of Manuscripts in Howard University’s Moorland Spingarn Research Center where she worked for 15 years.
Her scholarship is evident in numerous publications, speaking engagements, and radio and television appearances. Her publications include numerous book reviews, a variety of encyclopedia entries, and an online exhibition for the National Women’s History Museum “Claiming Their Citizenship: African American Women From 1624-2009.” She is the author of four books: The Heart of the Race Problem: the Life of Kelly Miller; Mary McLeod Bethune in Washington, D.C.: Activism and Education in Logan Circle; William Henry Jernagin in Washington, D.C.: Faith in the Fight for Civil Rights; and Baltimore Civil Rights Leader Victorine Q. Adams the Power of the Ballot.
Dr. Anika SimpsonChair, Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies
Dr. Anika Simpson is Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Morgan State University (MSU). She is also Founding Director of Black Queer Everything, an initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation that invests in the next generation of LGBTQ+ scholars, activists, and artists working toward Black liberation. Dr. Simpson has also invested in the work of institution building through the establishment of MSU’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies program.
She is currently completing a monograph entitled Single Black Mother: Queer Reflections on Marriage and Racial Justice.A graduate of Spelman College, Dr. Simpson is deeply committed to supporting and advancing racial justice, gender justice, and LGBTQ+ equity through advocacy and education. She currently serves on the National LGBTQ Task Force Board and is a Commissioner for Washington, DC’s Office of Human Rights. Dr. Simpson lives in Washington, DC with her two daughters.
