UMD COLLEGE PARK COHORT

Dr. Cécile Accilien

Professor of French and Francophone Studies
The School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Dr. Accilien’s areas of studies are Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures and Film & Media Studies.  She is the co-editor (with Valerie Orlando) of Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives  and the co-author (with Krishauna Hines Gaither) of The Antiracism World Language Classroom. She recently published a monograph Bay lodyans: Haitian Popular Film Culture  with SUNY Press.  She is the 2023 president of the Haitian Studies Association. She has written for Truthout and Latin American Commentator.

Dr. Andrea E. Brown

Associate Director of Bands

Dr. Andrea E. Brown was appointed the Associate Director of Bands at the University of Maryland in 2018. In this position she conducts the University of Maryland Wind Ensemble, serves as the Director of Athletic Bands and teaches conducting. Brown is formerly a member of the conducting faculty at the University of Michigan where she served as the assistant director of bands and was a faculty sponsor of a College of Engineering Multidisciplinary Design Project team researching conducting pedagogy technology. She also served as the director of orchestra and assistant director of bands at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. She is a frequent guest conductor, clinician and adjudicator in the US, Europe and Asia.

Brown has also had several rehearsal guides published in the popular GIA Publications series, “Teaching Music Through Performance in Band” and has presented at the Midwest Clinic in Chicago, Oxford Conducting Institute, Music For All Summer Symposium, the Yamaha Bläserklasse in Schlitz, Germany, the International Computer Music Conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the College Music Society International Conference in Sydney, Australia, and multiple times at the College Band Directors National Association National Conference.

You can learn more about Dr. Brown here:
https://music.umd.edu/directory/andrea-brown

Dr. La Marr Jurelle Bruce

Associate Professor & Director of Graduate Studies
Department of American Studies

La Marr Jurelle Bruce (B.A. Columbia, Ph.D. Yale) is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar, literary and cultural theorist, Black/black studies devotee, first-generation college graduate, and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. His scholarship centers black expressive cultures—spanning literature, film, music, theatre, and the art and aesthetics of quotidian black life. A Ford Foundation Fellow and Mellon-Mays Fellow, he also studies and teaches popular culture, queer theory, disability studies, mad studies, performance theory, and psychoanalysis.

Dr. Bruce’s writing is featured or forthcoming in African American Review, American Quarterly, The Black Scholar, GLQ, Social Text, TDR, and several anthologies. His debut book, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (Duke University Press), earned the MLA Prize for a First Book from the Modern Language Association and the Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Now he’s in the thick of two projects. The first unfurls a critical theory, cultural history, aesthetic expression, and existential assertion of black love outside. The second is a study of—and an experiment in—convergences of love and madness.

You can learn more about Prof. Bruce here:
https://amst.umd.edu/directory/la-marr-jurelle-bruce

Audran Downing

Associate Dean for Academic Affairs,
Undergraduate Education

Audran Downing has served on the ARHU Dean’s leadership team for a number of years and beginning July 1, 2023 will now oversee the ARHU undergraduate curricula, Living Learning Programs as well as the Office of Student Affairs and Career Engagement. Dedicated to developing a cohesive culture of student learning, her approach merges traditional student affairs and academic affairs paradigms, emphasizing connections between the academic, career, cultural and developmental needs of undergraduate students.

Since arriving at the University of Maryland, she has received the Provost’s Commission on Academic Advising “Advisor of the Year” Award and guided her office to receive the President’s Commission on Ethnic Minority Issues- Office of Student Affairs “Award for Outstanding Service.” She has spearheaded many college and campus wide initiatives, developed numerous regional and national presentations and served in leadership roles on numerous campus and national commissions.  Prior to starting with ARHU, she served as the director of the Office of Undergraduate Studies at Colgate University.

Dr. Julius B. Fleming

Associate Professor
English

Julius B. Fleming, Jr. earned a doctorate in English, and a graduate certificate in Africana studies, from the University of Pennsylvania. Specializing in Afro-Diasporic literatures and cultures, he has particular interests in performance studies, black political culture, diaspora, and colonialism, especially where they intersect with race, gender, and sexuality. Professor Fleming is the author of Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation (NYU Press, 2022). This project reconsiders the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of black theatre, while examining the importance of time and affect to the making of the modern racial order.

Fleming’s work appears in journals like American Literature, American Literary History, South Atlantic Quarterly, Callaloo, and The James Baldwin Review. Fleming has been awarded fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute.

You can learn more about Dr. Fleming at:
https://english.umd.edu/directory/julius-fleming

Dr. Perla M. Guerrero

Associate Professor
American Studies

Affiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Center

Dr. Guerrero’s research and teaching interests include relational and comparative race and ethnicity with a focus on Latinas/os/xs and Asian Americans, space and place, immigration, labor, U.S. history, and the U.S. South. She has received multiple awards including two from the Smithsonian Institution to be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of American History (NMAH).

You can learn more about Dr. Guerrero here:
https://amst.umd.edu/directory/perla-guerrero

Dr. Zenzele Isoke

Associate Professor, the Harriet Tubman
Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Zenzele Isoke is a black feminist theorist, urban ethnographer, and political storyteller. Drawing from the ideas of black decolonial thinkers, Isoke writes the contemporary history of cities through the political struggles of self-identified black/queer women of the African diaspora. Writing across the fields of geography, political science, and urban anthropology, her scholarship spans several cities in the U.S., Middle-East, and the Caribbean. Her book new project: Unheard Voices at the Bottom of Empire develops a set of “counterpoetic” writing practices to theorize and explore black feminist politics through the mediums of collaborative art-making, breath and meditation, and conventional grassroots organizing in racially segregated urban spaces. She is author of Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance (Palgrave 2013). Her writing has been featured in several peer-reviewed journals and anthologies including Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, Transforming Anthropology, Gender, Place and Culture, among others. She is also the mother of two teenaged black girls, a (slowly) rising poet, and organizer in her own right.

You can learn more about Dr. Isoke here: https://wgss.umd.edu/zenzele-isoke

Dr. Quincy T. Mills

Associate Professor, History
Director, Graduate Studies, History

Quincy T. Mills earned his doctorate in history from the University of Chicago in 2006. Prior to arriving at Maryland, he was a faculty member at Vassar College. Mills specializes in 20th-century African American business and social movement history. In 2013, he was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the author of Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). He has discussed his research on media outlets such as NPR and MSNBC. He is currently working on a new book entitled “The Wages of Resistance: Financing the Black Freedom Movement.”

You can learn more about Dr. Mills here:
https://history.umd.edu/directory/quincy-mills