UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND BALTIMORE COUNTY
Prof. Lynn Cazabon
Professor of Art
Director, Center for Innovation, Research and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA)Lynn Cazabon is a multimedia artist whose projects are scalable, site-specific, and utilize public participation to engage with topics at the interface between environmental and social issues. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including with Witte Rook (Breda, the Netherlands), Maryland Center for History and Culture (Baltimore, MD), National Museum of Contemporary Art (Bucharest, Romania), Tsung-Yeh Arts and Cultural Center (Tainan, Taiwan), South Bend Museum of Art (South Bend, IN), WRO Art Center (Wrocław, Poland), Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (New Plymouth, New Zealand), The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh, PA), Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (Buffalo, NY), and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (Atlanta, GA). She has received grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund, The Puffin Foundation, Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, Maryland State Arts Council, Franklin Furnace Archives, The Camargo Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Cazabon received an MFA degree in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art and BFA and BA degrees from University of Michigan.
You can learn more about Prof. Cazabon here: www.lynncazabon.com
Dr. Lindsay DiCuirci
Associate Professor, English
Affiliate Faculty: Language Literacy & Culture (LLC)Lindsay DiCuirci is an associate professor of English, Graduate Program Director, and affiliate faculty in Language, Literacy, and Culture at UMBC, specializing in early American literature and the history of the book. Her award-winning book, Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) examines the politics of collecting, preserving, and reprinting colonial books and manuscripts in the nineteenth-century U.S. Her scholarship has recently appeared in Reception, Early American Literature, Archive Journal and in edited collections. Her book-in-progress examines how spiritualist beliefs animated political movements like abolition, women’s rights, and prison reform in the antebellum U.S. Collaborative, student-led digital humanities projects are a critical part of Dr. DiCuirci’s pedagogy. These projects include Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print (with the American Antiquarian Society); Digital Cruikshank: Etching & Sketching in Nineteenth-Century Englandand the Eileen J. Garrett Parapsychology Collection Digital Exhibition (both with UMBC Special Collections).
You can learn more about Dr. DiCuirci here: https://english.umbc.edu/core-faculty/lindsay-dicuirci/
Dr. Felipe A Filomeno
Associate Professor of Political Science & Global Studies
From 2021 to 2024, he served as associate director of the UMBC Center for Social Science Scholarship. In August 2024, he became director of the UMBC Global Studies Program. Filomeno holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Johns Hopkins University, where he was a Fulbright scholar. He is the author of three monographs: Monsanto and Intellectual Property in South America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Theories of Local Immigration Policy(Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and Christian Cosmopolitanism: Faith Communities Talk Immigration (Temple University Press, 2024). In his research, he applies community-based, qualitative, and comparative-historical methods to investigate immigrant integration, intergroup relations, Latin America, and the Latin American diaspora in the United States.
You can learn more about Dr. Filomeno here:
https://facultydeia.umbc.edu/political-science/
Dr. Margaret Buck Holland
Associate Professor
Department of Geography & Environmental SystemsDr. Maggie Holland is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography & Environmental Systems (GES) at UMBC (on faculty since 2011). She currently serves as Department Chair of GES and as co-Chair of UMBC’s Inclusion Council. Since 2021, Dr. Holland has been a co-PI on a graduate research training grant (NSF-funded) known at UMBC as ICARE. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections between land relations and land justice, with global biodiversity conservation and climate policy goals. A central aim of her scholarship is to contribute to the design and implementation of forest conservation policies that seek to strengthen land tenure for communities, including current projects in Ecuador and Mozambique. Dr. Holland has more than thirty publications tied to this work and recently co-edited a book volume on Land Tenure Security & Sustainable Development, published by Springer/Palgrave Macmillan. Recent collaborations with graduate students have helped her develop a new line of research tied to urban forests and land tenure.
You can learn more about Dr. Holland here: https://ges.umbc.edu/margaret-buck-holland/
Dr. Tania Lizarazo
Associate Professor
Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics & Intercultural Communication
Affiliate Faculty: Global StudiesDr. Tania Lizarazo is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) contributing to the Global Studies Program and the Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication. She is also the Director of the Minor in Critical Disability Studies, and Affiliate Faculty of Gender, Women’s + Sexuality Studies, and Language, Literacy & Culture. Her research and teaching contribute to challenging writing as the center of knowledge production by developing collaborative digital narratives and theorizing embodied knowledge. One of her recent digital storytelling projects, mujerespacificas.org, is a collaboration with the Gender Commission of COCOMACIA, one of the biggest Colombian Black peasant organizations. Her book Postconflict Utopias: Everyday Survival in Chocó, Colombia is based on this ongoing collaboration and part of the Dissident Feminisms Series at University of Illinois Press.
You can learn more about Dr. Lizarazo on https://mlli.umbc.edu/dr-tania-lizarazo/.
Dr. Rebecca Uchill
Director
Center for Art, Design and the Visual Culture (CADVC)Dr. Uchill is Professor of the Practice and Director of the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture (CADVC), a research center and art gallery at the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. Prior to joining UMBC, she was Lecturer and Director of Community Engagement Initiatives at UMass Dartmouth. Uchill has also taught at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, the School of Architecture at MIT, and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.
Uchill brings to her work a thorough appreciation of the value of interdisciplinary research, having served as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) at MIT, where she co-convened BEING MATERIAL, the second CAST symposium. She is co-editor of two CAST/MIT Press publications: Being Material (2019) and Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense (2016), for which she was also the curator of the book’s many multi-sensorial artist contributions. Her research in the history and theory of modern and contemporary art and cultural stewardship has been published in numerous scholarly books and journals including Architectural Theory Review, Journal of Art Historiography, and Journal of Curatorial Studies, and others. She recently published her research on Nancy Holt as part of the Holt/Smithson Foundation Scholarly Texts Program.
Uchill has worked as a curator for institutions including the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and MASS MoCA.
You can learn more about Dr. Uchill here: R. Uchill CADVC
Dr. Lisa Pace Vetter
Associate Professor, Political Science
Affiliate Faculty in Gender, Women’s & Sexuality StudiesLisa Pace Vetter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science where she teaches courses in political theory. She is also an Affiliate Associate Professor in the Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies Department. An alumna of UMBC, Vetter earned an MA and PhD from Fordham University. She is the author of two books: “Women’s Work” as Political Art: Weaving and Dialectical Politics in Homer, Aristophanes, and Plato (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005) and The Political Thought of America’s Founding Feminists (New York: New York University Press, 2017). As a broadly trained political theorist with an interdisciplinary approach, Vetter seeks to uncover marginalized and silenced voices in mainstream American political thought, with particular focus on women and African Americans. She has published several articles, chapters, and papers on thinkers such as Harriet Martineau, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Wright, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Sojourner Truth, and others. Vetter is currently working on a manuscript-length overview of American political thought that seeks to recast the traditional narrative by reexamining the recent controversies surrounding The 1619 Project, exploring previously neglected time periods, and incorporating thinkers and perspectives that have been overlooked. The project expands on recent efforts to reframe American political thought to address current political concerns.
Dr. Brandy H. Wallace
Associate Professor
Sociology, Anthropology, and Public HealthDr. Wallace studies racial and gender inequities in healthcare; chronic disease management strategies of mid-life and older African American women; and, health care workers’ quality of life. Dr. Wallace is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, and has served as Co-Investigator on grants funded by the National Institute on Aging. Her work has been published in The Gerontologist, Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences, and Journal of Aging Studies. She also serves on the editorial board of The Gerontologist. Her most recent project, “Black Women in White Coats: Exploring the Intersection of Race and Gender on the Educational and Work Transitions of Black Women Physicians” examines the ways in which African-American women in medicine successfully navigate medical school and healthcare environments.
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND COLLEGE PARK
Dr. Liliane-Yvonne Bertram
Associate Professor
EnglishLillian-Yvonne Bertram is an African American writer, poet, artist, and educator who works at the intersection of computation, AI, race, and gender. They are the author of Travesty Generator(Noemi Press), a book of computational poetry that received the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary work and longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. They are the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Their other poetry books include How Narrow My Escapes (DIAGRAM/New Michigan), Personal Science(Tupelo Press), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press). Their fifth book, Negative Money, is available now. They direct the MFA in creative writing program at the University of Maryland. Their new chapbook, written with AI, is called A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content and won the 2023 Diagram/New Michigan chapbook contest.
Dr. Faedra Chatard Carpenter
Visiting Professor
School of Theater, Dance & Performance StudiesFaedra Chatard Carpenter is a professional dramaturg, theatre scholar, and cultural critic. As a professional dramaturg, Carpenter has worked on innumerable projects at venues such as the Folger Theatre, Ford’s Theatre, Round House Theatre Company, Woolly Mammoth, Olney Theatre Company, Everyman Theatre Company, Baltimore Center Stage, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Mosaic Theatre Company, Theater J, Dance Place, Crossroads Theatre Company, and Arena Stage.
Dr. Carpenter is also the author of the critically-acclaimed book, Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance, and her scholarly analysis can be found in a number of anthologies and peer-reviewed journals such as 50 Key Figures in Queer US Theatre, Cambridge Companion to American Theatre, Diverse Dramaturgy, College Literature, Theater Magazine, The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre, Theatre Survey, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Topics, Women & Performance, and Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters.
Prof. Adriane Fang
Associate Professor
Associate Director of the International Program
for Creative Collaboration & Research (IPCCR),
Dance Performance and ScholarshipSchool of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies
Adriane Fang is a dancer, teacher and choreographer with a keen interest in multi-disciplinary collaboration. She was a member of the internationally renowned dance company, Doug Varone and Dancers, from 1996-2006 and has worked with several other choreographers including Colleen Thomas, Wally Cardona, Elizabeth Shea, Bill Young, Christopher K. Morgan and Nancy Bannon.
Current projects include creative projects choreographed by Doug Varone, Bebe Miller, Keith Johnson and Kendra Portier and with collaborators Colleen Thomas, Stephanie Liapis, and Stevie Oakes as part of her Madden Professorship research.
She has been a guest teacher at Taller Nacional de Danza – San José, Costa Rica, Indiana University and the Damansara Performing Arts Center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and has taught and staged the works of Doug Varone for various universities and companies, including North Carolina School of the Arts, CityDance Ensemble, BalletMet Columbus, Juilliard School of the Arts, Ohio State University and the University of Minnesota. She was on faculty at George Mason University from 2006-2009 and at the Doug Varone and Dancers Summer Workshops from 2000-07, 2015-16 and 2020-21.
You can learn more about Prof. Fang here: https://tdps.umd.edu/directory/adriane-fang
Dr. Christina Hanhardt
Associate Professor
American StudiesChristina B. Hanhardt is an associate professor in the Department of American Studies and an active affiliate of the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research and teaching focus on the history of post-WWII U.S. social movements and cities, with particular attention to the politics of sexuality and punishment. She is the author of Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Duke, 2013), which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies and honorable mention for the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin and Lora Romero Prizes, and co-editor (with Dayo F. Gore) of a special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly titled State/Power. She has also published in Radical History Review, GLQ, QED, Women and Performance, and the Journal of American History, among other venues. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled “Left Out,” which engages debates in queer theory and politics to track the history of stigma in U.S. left social movements since the 1960s.
You can learn more about Dr. Hanhardt here:
https://amst.umd.edu/directory/christina-hanhardt
Dr. Chad B. Infante
Assistant Professor of English & Comparative Literature
Affiliate faculty: Latin American and Caribbean Studies CenterChad B. Infante earned his doctorate in English from Northwestern University in 2018. Originally from Jamaica, his research focuses on Black and Indigenous U.S. and Caribbean literature, gender, sexuality, critical theory and political philosophy. His dissertation studies representations of retribution and vengeance in Black and Indigenous literature and art as a philosophical response to colonial violence. Before coming to Maryland, he was an inaugural Franke Fellow at the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern. During his graduate studies, he co-founded the Colloquium on Native American Studies and helped create the Indigenous Studies Research Center. He is completing an article entitled “Murder and Metaphysics: Silko and Lorde” to appear in a forthcoming anthology by Duke University Press.
Dr. Thayse Leal Lima
Associate Professor
School of Languages, Literatures, and CulturesAffiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean
Studies CenterDr. Thayse Leal Lima is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She serves as director of the Portuguese and Brazilian Studies program and holds the Faculty Fellow for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion position at the College of Arts and Humanities. Her expertise spans various fields, encompassing nineteenth-century to contemporary Brazilian literature and culture, Modern Latin American literature, intellectual history, transnationalism, and international literary circulation. Her book Latino Americanizando o Brasil: A crítica Literária e o Diálogo Transnacional, [Latin Americanizing Brazil: Literary Criticism and the Transnational Dialogue] (Federal University of Paraná Press, 2021), traces the efforts of Hispanic American and Brazilian cultural critics in the second half of the twentieth century to bring Brazil more clearly into a Latin American cultural and literary paradigm. This work sheds new light on the intricate web of transnational exchanges in Latin America, uncovering their ideological, political, and intellectual underpinning.
Her current research focuses on transnational fiction and the literary cultures of the Global South. She is currently co-editing a volume tentatively titled Global Portuguese Literatures in the World, which examines the international circulation, translation, and imaginative world-making of Portuguese language literatures.
You can learn more about Dr. Leal Lima here:
https://sllc.umd.edu/directory/thayse-lima
Dr. Bayley J. Marquez
Assistant Professor, American Studies
Director of Graduate StudiesBayley J. Marquez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies, an affiliate faculty with the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Consortium for Race Gender and Ethnicity, and an Indigenous scholar from the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians. As an Indigenous scholar, she acknowledges that her work and scholarship takes place on Piscataway land, former plantation land, and within a land grant university funded by the seizure and sale of Indigenous lands. With a focus on space, land, material relations, and schooling, this acknowledgement is necessary to position her work within the structure of settler colonialism and her own lived experiences. Her research interests include settler colonial theory, Indigenous education, Black education, the history of education, abolitionist university studies, and critical ethnic studies. Her academic work is positioned at the intersection of settlement, antiblackness, imperialism and other instantiations of racialized and colonial power.
You can learn more about Dr. Marquez here: https://amst.umd.edu/directory/bayley-marquez
Dr. Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner
Assistant Professor
The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Sexuality, and Gender StudiesShelbi Nahwilet Meissner (Luiseño & Cupeño) is an Indigenous feminist philosopher. Shelbi researches, teaches, and consults on Indigenous research and evaluation methods, cultural and language reclamation, Indigenous epistemologies, Indigenous feminist interventions in critical social work, and land-based feminist coalition-building. Shelbi is fascinated by the intersections of Indigenous knowledge systems, caretaking, power, and trauma. Shelbi is a proud first-generation descendant of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, and is of both Luiseño (Payómkawichum) and Cupeño (Kupangaxwichem) descent. She is an assistant professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Maryland, College Park and the founding director of the Indigenous Futures Lab, a hub of Indigenous feminist research and evaluation.
You can learn more about Dr. Nahwilet Meissner here:
https://wgss.umd.edu/directory/shelbi-nahwilet-meissner
Dr. Randy James Ontiveros
Associate Professor
English and Comparative Literature / Director of Honors Humanities in the College of Arts and HumanitiesRandy Ontiveros is the Director of Honors Humanities and an Associate Professor in the English Department, with affiliations in U.S. Latina/o Studies, Caribbean and Latin American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland. He received his Ph.D. in 2006 from the University of California, Irvine. At Maryland, he researches and teaches in the field of Latinx literary and cultural studies.
Professor Ontiveros has published articles and book chapters on topics ranging from Latinx environmentalism to television coverage of the Mexican-American civil rights movement. His book In the Spirit of a New People: The Cultural Politics of the Chicano Movement was published by New York University Press in 2013. Currently, he is writing a book entitled “Crabgrass Frontera: The Suburbs in Latinx Politics and Cultures.” In 2015 Professor Ontiveros won the prestigious University System of Maryland Board of Regents’ Faculty Award for Teaching. In 2016 he was awarded the Donna B. Hamilton Award for Teaching Excellence in General Education at the University of Maryland. In 2023 he won the Faculty Service Award for his service contributions to the College of Arts and Humanities.
You can learn more about Dr. Ontiveros here:
https://english.umd.edu/directory/randy-ontiveros
MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
Dr. Francis Dube
Associate Professor
History and GeographyDr. Francis Dube is an Associate Professor of History at Morgan State University, where he teaches African history, Environmental history, and World history. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. His research interests are in the history of medicine and public health, global health, and environmental history. He is the author of Public Health at the Border of Zimbabwe and Mozambique, 1890–1940: African Experiences in a Contested Space(Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Dr. Dube is currently working on his second monograph tentatively titled, Livestock Diseases, the Environment and History in Zimbabwe, 1890-1954.
You can learn more about Dr. Dube here: https://www.morgan.edu/history-and-geography/faculty-and-staff/francis-dube
Dr. Denise Jarrett
Associate Professor / Acting Director
Women, Gender, and Sexuality StudiesDenise M. Jarrett, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at Morgan State University, specializing in Caribbean Literature and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the Department of English and Language Arts. At Morgan State, she currently serves as Director, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English and is a University Marshal. She has a special interest in Caribbean Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Ethnic and Cultural Studies, Black Cultural Productions, Adolescence Literature, and Women and Gender Studies. Mainly using postcolonial readings, her scholarship publications include encyclopedia biographies, journal articles, and book chapters on Caribbean authors’ works, postcolonial multicultural studies, and gender studies.
Dr. Jarrett is a reviewer on Postcolonial and Ethnic and Cultural Studies for CHOICE and a peer reviewer for several literary organizations. She serves on alumni committees and is cofounder and board member of The A. Oliver and Inez Frazer Scholarship Fund (AOIF), Jamaica.
Dr. Jarrett’s notable awards are Morgan State University-Certificate of Service, 2019 and The Mico University College’s 185th Commemorative Awards (“The Quintessential Miconian who embodies the high ideals of your alma mater” Jamaica), 2021.
Dr. Natasha Pratt-Harris
Associate Professor
Sociology & AnthropologyDr. Natasha C. Pratt-Harris is an associate professor and coordinator of the graduate programs in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. She is also a trained statistician and methodologist. She has published in the peer-reviewed African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies. She is currently conducting a qualitative research study about Black males who report that they have wrongful convictions on their criminal record.
Dr. Pratt-Harris teaches Community-Based Corrections, Criminology, Jails and Prisons, Juvenile Delinquency, Research Methods (also in Criminal Justice), Police and Society, Social Problems, the Sociology of Deviance, the Sociology of Law, and Statistics, where she addresses “dis-proportionality” at various stages throughout the juvenile and adult criminal justice system. Dr. Pratt-Harris also supervises students who are interning with criminal justice agencies. She is currently co-writing (submitted) an interdisciplinary article for the Journal of Human Behavior for the Social Environment that critically assesses police-involved shootings (homicides) of unarmed black males.