Dresher Center Staff

Amy Froide (she/her)

Director

Professor Froide is a Professor in the Department of History where she teaches courses in British history and European 
Women’s History, focusing on the years 1500-1800. Her areas
 of expertise include social, economic, social, women’s, and gender history. She
 is the author of Silent Partners: Women as Public Investors during Britain’s Financial Revolution, 1690-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2016). Her other books include Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England
 (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800 (University of 
Pennsylvania Press, 1999), co-edited with Judith M.
Bennett. Professor Froide has served as the book review editor for the Journal of British Studies, President of the Mid-Atlantic Conference on British Studies, and 
the founding Director of UMBC’s Entrepreneurship & Innovation Minor. She holds 
affiliate appointments in UMBC’s Gender, Women’s + Sexuality Studies and the Language, Literacy, and Culture Ph.D. program. She regularly mentors Master’s degree students in both early modern British and European women’s history. Former students have gone on to Ph.D. programs in the U.S. and the U.K. and three are currently professors. In addition to her research and administrative work, Prof. Froide was the recipient of the 2018 Maryland Board of Regents’ Award for Teaching Excellence and is currently UMBC’s Presidential Teaching Professor for 2024-27. She regularly shares her Humanities research with a general audience through articles in The Conversation, podcasts, lectures with Profs & Pints, and pre-show theatre talks.

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Earl Brooks, a Black man with short hair, is smiling.Earl Brooks (he/him)

Associate Director
Director, Humanities Teaching Labs and Humanities Retrievers

Earl H. Brooks is a musician and Assistant Professor in the Department of English. He teaches courses in sound studies, African American rhetorical traditions, media literacy, rhetorical theory, and composition. His forthcoming 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. Through rhetorical studies, archival research, and musical analysis, Brooks establishes the “sonic lexicon of Black music,” defined by a distinct constellation of sonic and auditory features that bridge cultural, linguistic, and political spheres with music. Genres of Black music such as blues and jazz are discursive fields, where swinging, improvisation, call-and-response, blue notes, and other musical idioms serve as rhetorical tools to articulate the feelings, emotions, and states of mind that have shaped African American cultural and political development. Examining the resounding artistry of iconic musicians such as Scott Joplin, Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Mahalia Jackson, this work offers an alternative register in which these musicians and composers are heard as public intellectuals, consciously invested in crafting rhetorical projects they knew would influence the public sphere. Brooks’s 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 recent 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.

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Courtney C. Hobson (she/her)

Program Manager

Joining the Dresher Center in 2017, Courtney Hobson works with the director to develop and organize scholarly events and programs for the UMBC community. This includes organizing the Humanities Forum, our public lecture series; CURRENTS, our lunch-time works-in-progress series for faculty and graduate students; social media campaigns; and other related tasks. She also serves on the Public Humanities Minor Advisory Committee.

Outside of UMBC, she works as a  public historian and historical consultant, collaborating with organizations including The Southwest Partnership, Inc., Historical Research Associates, the National Park Service (NPS), the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), and the National Council on Public History (NCPH). Courtney is also a member of the Association of Black Women Historians, ASALH, as well as NCPH, where she currently serves on the Advocacy Committee of the Board.

In her spare time, Courtney is a gardener, amateur archer, cat mom, collector of unread books, and queen of karaoke at her neighborhood bar in Baltimore.

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Kate Drabinski (she/her)

Director, Humanities Scholars Program

Dr. Kate Drabinski is Principal Lecturer in Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies (GWST) and Associate Director of the Women Involved in Learning and Leadership (WILL+) program. Her focus areas of teaching and research include queer theory, transgender studies, LGBTQ+ history, and public humanities pedagogies and practices. As co-PI with Dr. Carole McCann on the Mellon-funded Affirming Multivocal Humanities grant, she organizes the UMBC LGBTQ+ Oral History Project, bringing students into conversation with queer people both on and off campus to record and preserve the histories of our communities. Her latest publication is Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City, co-edited with UMBC’s own Dr. Nicole King and Dr. Joshua Davis of the University of Baltimore.
Outside of  UMBC Dr. Kate is an avid explorer of Baltimore’s history, present, and future, usually on her much-loved bicycle. She leads walking tours about the city’s LGBTQ+ and Civil Rights histories for Baltimore Heritage, where she serves on the Board. She organizes walking tours for students, faculty, and staff about the history of Pratt Street, public transportation, urban renewal, and more. She is keenly interested in why where we are is as it is, and how it might be otherwise.

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