Dr. Earl BrooksAssociate Professor of English
Associate Director, Dresher CenterBrooks is a musician and Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He currently serves as the Associate Director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities, and he teaches courses in sound studies, African American rhetorical traditions, media literacy, rhetorical theory, and composition. His book, On Rhetoric and Black Music (Wayne State University Press, African American Life Series, June 2024), examines how Black music functions as rhetoric, considering its subject not merely reflective of but central to African American public discourse. Brooks argues that there would have been no Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Movement, or Black Arts Movement as we know these phenomena without Black music. His work also appears in Sounding Out!, Rhetoric Review, Journal for the History of Rhetoric, Langston Hughes Review, and College Composition and Communication. Brooks is a past winner of the College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHSS) Early Career Excellence Award and a recipient of the CAHSS Dean’s Research Fund, the Dresher Center Residential Faculty Research Fellowship, and the Humanities Teaching Lab Course Transformation Support Grant. Brooks is also a proud alumnus of the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program, and he serves as a UMBC McNair Faculty Mentor and advisory board member. Brooks also serves on the executive board of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) as a representative of the CCCC Black Caucus.
You can learn more about Dr. Earl Brooks here: https://earl-brooks.com/about-earl-brooks-2
Dr. Ramon GoingsAssociate Professor
Director Language Literacy & Culture (LLC)Dr. Goings’ research interests are centered on exploring the academic and social experiences of gifted/high-achieving Black males PK-PhD, diversifying the teacher and school leader workforce, and investigating the contributions of historically Black colleges and universities. Dr. Goings is the author of over 50 scholarly publications including four books. His scholarship has been featured in leading academic and popular press outlets including: Teachers College Record, Adult Education Quarterly, Gifted Child Quarterly, Inside Higher Ed, Education Week, and Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. His most recent research on Black male adult learners won the 2019 Imogene Oaks Award from the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education which honors a scholar whose research contributes significantly to the advancement of adult and continuing education. Along with his scholarship Dr. Goings served as the Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of African American Males in Education from 2017-2020, was named a 2017 Emerging Scholar by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, and received the 2016 College Board Professional Fellowship.
In 2013 he served as a fellow with the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans. He earned his Doctor of Education degree in urban educational leadership from Morgan State University, Master of Science in human services from Post University, and Bachelor of Arts in music education from Lynchburg College (now University of Lynchburg).
You can learn more about Dr. Goings here: http://ramongoings.com/
Professor Lisa MorenProfessor of Visual Art
Director of the Imaging Research Center (IRC)Lisa Moren is a multi-disciplinary artist who works with emerging media, bio-matter, public space, and works-on-paper. She created an early virtual reality project, “Practically Tender”, in 1991. Since 2001, she has worked with communities to document under-represented memories from Berlin and cities in Central and Eastern Europe that were archived as interactive installations.
Lisa Moren has exhibited her work at the Chelsea Art Museum, the Creative Time summit, and the Drawing Center viewing program in New York City and in Brooklyn, the Cranbrook Art Museum and international venues including uShaka Museum [South Africa], Ars Electronica [Austria], and Akademie der Kunste [Germany], and the Artists Research Network [Australia]. She received the National Endowment for the Arts award, is a Fulbright Scholar to Czech Republic.
Her work has been featured in the Guardian, The Washington Post, B’More Art, LINK, and her writing has appeared in Performance Research; Visible Language; Inter Arts Actuel, and many other publications.
Prof. Moreno’s books include topics like Intermedia and Dick Higgins; and Issues in Contemporary Theory for “Command Z: Artists Working with Phenomena and Technology” featuring exhibited artists Paul DeMarinis, Nina Katchadourian, Ingrid Bachmann and Emile Morin & Jocelyn Robert.
Lisa Moren is a Professor of Visual Art at the University of Maryland Baltimore County [UMBC] since 1998; and taught at FAMU and AVU in Prague; and the University of California San Diego [UCSD].
You can learn more about Prof. Moren here:
https://www.lisamoren.com/
Dr. Jessica PfeiferAssociate Professor, Chair of Philosophy Department
Director of UMBC Center for Ethics and ValuesJessica Pfeifer is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department and Director of UMBC’s Center for Ethics and Values. Her research focuses on modal notions in science, in particular natural necessity, possibility, and probability. Her work on necessity focuses on how best to understand the sort of necessity involved in laws of nature, as well as the connection between our understanding of laws and other related issues, including natural kinds, abstraction, systematizing, induction, and experiment. Her research on probability focuses primarily on biology, including the use of probabilities in evolutionary theory and the use of Shannon’s information theory in biological contexts. In addition to her journal publications, she has co-edited The Philosophy of Philip Kitcher and the two–volume The Philosophy of Science: an Encyclopedia. She is a former Visiting Fellow and Associate of the world-renowned Center for Philosophy of Science, and she served for many years as the Executive Director of the Philosophy of Science Association.
Dr. Amy TondreauAssociate Professor of Elementary Literacy
Dr. Amy Tondreau is an associate professor of elementary literacy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research focuses on critical literacy in children’s literature and writing pedagogy, critical teacher education, and the intersection of culturally sustaining pedagogy and disability sustaining pedagogy in elementary literacy instruction; the latter is the focus of her recent book, Sustaining Cultural and Disability Identities in the Literacy Classroom, K-6 (Routledge, 2024), co-authored with Dr. Laurie Rabinowitz. This text illustrates Dr. Tondreau’s commitments to support and elevate classroom teachers as researchers and authors, with over twenty teacher contributors – many of whom are former students – who have written about the CSP/DSP-infused work taking place in their classrooms. You can learn more about this work at https://sustainingdisabilityidentities.com/
Dr. Tondreau’s work has also been published in forums such as The Reading Teacher, Language Arts, Journal of Teacher Education, and Action in Teacher Education. She holds an Ed.D. in Curriculum & Teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University, an M.Ed. in Reading from Rhode Island College, and a B.A. in Elementary Education and Communications from Boston College. She previously worked as a literacy coach in New York City, the co-director of the Summer Literacy Clinic at Rhode Island College, and an elementary classroom teacher in Massachusetts.
