MSU COHORT

DR. IRIS LEIGH BARNES

Associate Director & Curator of the Lillie Carroll Jackson
Civil Rights Museum

Dr. Iris Leigh Barnes is currently the Associate Director and Curator of the Lillie Carroll Jackson Civil Rights Museum in Baltimore, which is an offsite unit of Morgan State University. She earned her doctorate in History with a concentration in African American and Twentieth Century United States History, her master’s degree in Museum Studies and Historical Preservation, and her bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design and Art Education. She has received numerous awards: the Excellence in Exhibitions and Programming Award from the Maryland Historical Trust, a Diversity Fellowship from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the John Kinard SEMC JIMI Award from the Smithsonian National Museum for African American History and Culture, among them. Dr. Barnes’ scholarship interests range from Civil War to Civil Rights with a particular focus on the tenacity, resilience, and brilliance of African Americans who survived and thrived against the odds.

DR. MARK BARNES

Associate Professor
History and Geography

Dr. Mark Barnes is a human geographer. His faculty appointment is in History, Geography, and Museum Studies at Morgan State University. Informing his scholarship and teaching are perspectival views from hazard, global environmental change, economic, urban, and transport geography subfields. Equity, mobility, sustainability, and environmental justice interventions relating to the causes and consequences of weather and climate extremes form the basis of his work. Dr. Barnes co-chairs the Geospatial Collaborative at Morgan and directs its Environmental Studies Program whose aim is to bridge the gap between social and physical science disciplines together for more robust solutions to environmental matters. His graduate degrees in Geography and Urban Studies are from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and Temple University, respectively. He majored in Geography and Planning at West Chester University. Dr. Barnes is a proud Philadelphian and life member of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity.

DR. HERBERT BREWER

Assistant Professor
History and Geography

Professor Herbert Brewer is an intellectual and cultural historian of eighteenth and nineteenth century African American life and culture. His research has focused on the African American Diaspora in the Atlantic World. He is currently writing a biography of the Virginia-born Joseph Jenkins Roberts, Liberia’s first president. He has taught history at the University of Maryland at College Park, the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, and at Morgan State University in Baltimore, where he now serves as an Assistant Professor of History and Coordinator of the African American and African Diaspora Studies Program. Dr. Brewer holds a PhD from the University of Maryland at College Park, and was the recipient of the 2017-2018 Mellon Fellowship for the Study of Slavery at Georgetown University. His scholarship has appeared in a variety of publications and he is a co-author of the Guide to the History of Slavery in Maryland.

DR. TRACY R. RONE

Assistant Dean
Research and Community Partnerships
School of Education and Urban Studies

Tracy R. Rone, Ph.D. is Assistant Dean, Research and Community Partnerships, and Associate Professor in the Department of Advanced Studies, Leadership, and Policy in the School of Education and Urban Studies at Morgan State University. Since joining Morgan State University in 2007, she previously served as Interim Director of Innovation and Community Partnerships in the School of Education and Urban Studies, and as Research Associate Professor at the Institute for Urban Research, where she also taught undergraduate and graduate courses in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. She is trained as a linguistic anthropologist.

DR. FELICIA THOMAS

Assistant Professor of History

Felicia Y. Thomas is an Assistant Professor of History at Morgan State University. Ms. Thomas has broad research interests in African American history, women’s and gender history, history of colonial slavery, labor history, and religious history. Her monograph, Everywhere, Nowhere: Black Women’s Emotional, Intellectual, and Spiritual Labor in Early New England is under review with the University of Massachusetts Press. Ms. Thomas has received research support from the New York Historical Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is also the recipient of an Innovation in Teaching Grant, multiple Benjamin Quarles Faculty Fellowships, and a Provost Innovation Grant from Morgan State University. Ms. Thomas’ honors include selection for the inaugural cohort of Academic Women Amplified: Faculty Writing Accelerator Program.