Dr. Willow Lung-Amam
Associate Professor
EnglishWillow Lung-Amam, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland (UMD), College Park. At UMD, she serves as Director of Community Development at the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education, Director of the Urban Equity Collaborative, and Director of the Small Business Anti-Displacement Network. Dr. Lung-Amam’s research focuses on suburban poverty, racial segregation, immigration, gentrification, redevelopment politics, and neighborhood opportunity. She is the author of The Right to Suburbia: Combating Gentrification on the Urban Edge and Trespassers? Asian American and the Battle for Suburbia. Her research has appeared in popular media outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, National Public Radio, New Republic, Bloomberg’s CityLab, and Al Jazeera. Dr. Lung-Amam holds nonresident fellowships at the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center and the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies program.
Dr. Craig S. Fryer
Associate Professor, School of Public Health
Founding Associate Director of MD Center for Health EquityDr. Craig S. Fryer is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, School of Public Heath, Department of Behavioral and Community Health and a Founding Associate Director of the Maryland Center for Health Equity. Dr. Fryer is also the Founder and Director of the Equity, Tobacco and Health Outcome Solutions (ETHOS)Laboratory. As a behavioral scientist, he utilizes mixed methods study designs to examine the sociocultural and environmental contexts of health and well-being, with an emphasis on community engaged research. His scholarship focuses on structural drivers of racialand ethnic health inequities in substance use, specifically the intersection of tobacco andcannabis use among youth and young adult populations.Dr. Fryer’s research has been published in leading public health journals such as theAnnual Review of Public Health, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine and Nicotineand Tobacco Research to name a few. His research has been funded by the NationalCancer Institute (NCI), National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), and the NationalInstitute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD). Other funders includethe Federal Drug Administration (FDA), CDC, and a host of university seed grantmechanisms.
Dr. Elisa GironzettiAssociate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Associate Director for Undergraduate Academic Affairs
School of Languages, Literacy and CulturesMember, Maryland Language Center
Dr. Gironzetti’s research focuses on humor, pragmatics and language teaching, and Hispanic applied linguistics. She has published in international journals and edited volumes including Applied Linguistics, Discourse Processes, Intercultural Pragmatics, Humor, Journal of Literary Semantics, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor, and Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, among others. She is the founding editor of E-JournALL, an open-access scholarly publication in the field of applied linguistics and language teaching, associate editor of Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, consulting editor of HUMOR – International Journal of Humor Research, director of publications of ASELE (Asociación para la enseñanza del español como lengua extranjera), and co-editor of the book series “Routledge Innovations in Spanish Language Teaching,” showcasing cutting-edge research in the field of Hispanic Applied Linguistics. She co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Spanish Language Teaching (2018), The Routledge Handbook of Multiliteracies for Spanish Language Teaching (2024) and published the book The Multimodal performance of Conversational Humor(2022). She is currently conducting research in the areas of the multimodal studies, Spanish as a heritage language, Hispanic applied linguistics research and publishing, and the research-practice nexus in Spanish language teaching.
You can learn more about Dr. Gironzetti here: https://sllc.umd.edu/directory/elisa-gironzetti
Dr. Kate Keeney
Associate Professor / Director of Graduate Studies
School of Theater, Dance and Performance StudiesKate Preston Keeney is an arts and nonprofit management scholar and former arts administrator. Her research interests bridge arts management and nonprofit management scholarship with a specific focus on cultural policy, leadership, and organizations. Prior to her appointment at the University of Maryland, Keeney served as Associate Professor and Program Director of Arts Management at the College of Charleston.
Dr. Keeney serves as an NEA research grant reviewer, is a consulting editor for the Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, and is a board member of the international scholarly society, Social Theory, Politics, and the Arts (STP&A). In 2023, she was appointed to serve a three-year term on the Wheaton Arts and Entertainment District Advisory Board in Montgomery County, MD. Keeney especially enjoys collaborating with others in interdisciplinary work. Current collaborative research projects include place-based arts branding, program design in the arts, entrepreneurial arts leadership, and arts access afforded by the nonprofit status.
Previous professional positions include long-range strategic planning and managing the construction of the $100 million Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech. Additionally, Keeney has held positions with the National Symphony Orchestra at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Americans for the Arts, the Cathedral Choral Society, and the New York Philharmonic, and served as the second vice president for the South Carolina Arts Alliance.
Dr. Keeney holds a Ph.D. in public administration and a graduate certificate in nonprofit management from Virginia Tech, a Master of arts administration from American University, and a Bachelor of music from James Madison University.You can learn more about Dr. Keeney here:
https://tdps.umd.edu/directory/kate-keeney
Dr. Sun Young Lee
Associate Professor
CommunicationSun Young Lee earned her doctorate in journalism and mass communication from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2012. Her research interests include visual strategies in corporate social responsibility (CSR) messages, strategies to engage the public with CSR activities and the effects of CSR practices in a crisis context. Lee’s research has appeared in the Journal of Business Ethics, Communication Research, Public Relations Review and elsewhere. Her current projects focus on the role of emotions and of public empowerment in the co-creation of social value through CSR activities. Prior to arriving at Maryland, she was on the faculty at Texas Tech University.
You can learn more about Dr. Lee here:
https://communication.umd.edu/directory/sun-young-lee
Dr. Sydney F. LewisSenior Lecturer
The Harriett Tubman Department of
Women, Gender, and Sexuality StudiesDr. Sydney Lewis is a Senior Lecturer in The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Lewis’s areas of interest include Black feminist theory and culture, Black queer theory, fat studies, and intersectional Black liberation. Through an interdisciplinary approach, her research and teaching strives to blur the boundaries between the academy, art, and activism. Lewis is committed to fostering critical inquiry and transformative learning that equips students to engage in social justice movements both within and beyond the university.
You can learn more about Dr. Lewis here:
https://wgss.umd.edu/directory/sydney-lewis
Dr. Abigail McEwenAssociate Professor
Art History & ArchaeologyAbigail McEwen specializes in the history of modern and contemporary Latin American art. Her areas of research and teaching interest span the modern Americas, with an emphasis on the art of twentieth-century Cuba and Puerto Rico, the transnational history of abstraction, and the postwar avant-garde. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2010 and joined the faculty at the University of Maryland that year. She is an affiliated faculty member of the Latin American Studies Center.
Her book Revolutionary Horizons: Art and Polemics in 1950s Cuba (Yale University Press, 2016) describes the visual strategies and political purchase of Havana’s vanguardia during the Batista dictatorship. This project has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dedalus Foundation, and the Graduate School at the University of Maryland. She is now beginning research on a new book, titled Excentric Bodies: Exodus and Erotics in Post-Revolutionary Cuban Art, which considers a range of psychic and emotional responsiveness in art produced both in exile and on the island during the 1960s and 1970s. McEwen’s writings have appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues and in such publications as American Art, Art Nexus, caareviews.org, and Revista Hispánica Moderna. As a curator, McEwen has collaborated with the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C. on two exhibitions: Constellations: Constructivism, Internationalism, and the Inter-American Avant-Garde (2012), funded in part by a grant from the Latin American Studies Association and the Ford Foundation; and Streams of Being: Selections from the Art Museum of the Americas (2015), organized with The Art Gallery on campus.
You can learn more about Dr. McEwen here:
https://arthistory.umd.edu/directory/abigail-mcewen
Michelle V. Moncrieffe
Senior Lecturer, Interdisciplinary Researcher / English
Michelle V. Moncrieffe, PGDip., MA, CHES®, is a senior lecturer and interdisciplinary researcher in the English department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Moncrieffe served as the Professional Writing Program (PWP) faculty fellow from 2019 – 2022. She is the founding director of the Narratives and Medical Education (NAME) project. Her research focuses on exploring how patient narratives can influence clinical practice. Moncrieffe teaches Writing for the Health Professions; An Introduction Humanities, Health and Medicine; and a new course that she developed for freshman students – the Art of Public Health.
As well as being a certified health education specialist (CHES®), over the past three decades Michelle has worked as an independent health journalist. Her most recent article focuses on supporting the mental health of immigrant communities. Although Michelle has not lived in her hometown for many years, she still describes herself as a Londoner.
Dr. Michelle V. RowleyAssociate Professor
The Harriett Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality StudiesAssociate Faculty
Latin American and Caribbean Studies CenterMichelle V. Rowley received her: Ph.D. Clark University (2003), M.Sc. Development Studies, Consortium Graduate School, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica (1996), B.A. University of the West Indies, St. Augustine (1992)
Before joining UMD in 2006 she served in the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Cincinnati (2004-2006). She has also held a visiting appointment as a Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Carleton College. Her book is entitled Feminist Advocacy and Gender Equity in the Anglophone Caribbean: Envisioning a Politics of Coalition (Routledge, 2011).Her publications address issues of gender and development, the politics of welfare, as well as state responses to questions of Caribbean women’s reproductive health and well-being and rights for sexual minorities. Her publications include “When the Post-Colonial State Bureaucratizes Gender: Charting Trinidadian Women’s Centrality Within The Margins,” “Where the Streets Have No Name: Getting Development Out of the (RED).” “Rethinking Interdisciplinarity: Meditations on the Sacred Possibilities of an Erotic Feminist Pedagogy,” and “Whose Time Is It?: Gender and Humanism in Contemporary Caribbean Feminist Advocacy.”
Her research interests encompass issues of gender and development, transnational feminisms, the politics of welfare, Caribbean women’s reproductive health and well-being, and rights for sexual minorities. She is presently completing a manuscript that examines queer representations of “home” in the English-speaking Caribbean.
