UMD COLLEGE PARK COHORT

Dr. Liliane-Yvonne Bertram

Associate Professor
English

Lillian-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 Studies

Faedra 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 Scholarship

School 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 Studies

Christina 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 Center

Chad 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 Cultures

Affiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean
Studies Center

Dr. 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 Studies

Bayley 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 Studies

Shelbi 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 Humanities

Randy 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