Dresher Center Staff

Jessica Berman (she/her)

Director

Jessica Berman is Professor of English, Gender, Women’s + Sexuality Studies and Language Literacy and Culture. She served as Chair of the English Department from 2006-2012 and currently directs the Dresher Center for the Humanities at UMBC. Her teaching and research interests include comparative literature, modernism from a transnational perspective, literature and culture, and feminist and literary theory. She also has a special interest in questions of politics in connection to twentieth- and twenty-first century world literature. Her book, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism (2011), examined the connection between ethics and politics in early twentieth-century writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Mulk Raj Anand, Cornelia Sorabji, Iqbalunnisa Hussain, Max Aub and Meridel Le Sueur, and argued for an expansive, transnational approach to the definition of literary modernism. Her previous book, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (2001, paper 2006), explored the connection between community and cosmopolitanism in the writings of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. She is the editor of A Companion to Virginia Woolf (2016) and the reprint edition of the Muslim Indian writer, Iqbalunnisa Hussain’s, novel Purdah and Polygamy (2017). She has published essays in such journals as Modernism/Modernity and Modern Fiction Studies, as well as in such influential volumes as Geomodernisms (Doyle and Winkiel eds) and Disciplining Modernism (Caughie ed.). Berman is currently at work on a book investigating global radio in relation to transnational modernism.

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

Associate Director
Director of Humanities Teaching Labs

Earl H. Brooks is a musician and Assistant Professor 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. Courtney also serves on the Public Humanities Minor Advisory Committee, and the Critical Disability Studies Minor Planning 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), and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). Courtney is also a member of the Association of Black Women Historians, ASALH, as well as the National Council on Public History (NCPH), where she currently serves on the NCPH-NPS Advisory Committee. 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 of Gender and Women’s Studies, and she is also the Director of the Women Involved in Learning and Leadership (WILL+) program, a co-curricular program and Living-Learning community sponsored by GWST. She received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric with a graduate certificate in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006. She has taught a wide range of introductory courses in gender and sexuality studies at several universities. During her four-year tenure at Tulane University, Kate presided over a curriculum revision process that resulted in tremendous enrollment growth in the Gender and Sexuality Studies department.

At UMBC she teaches Introduction to Transgender Studies, Introduction to Critical Sexuality Studies, Studies in Feminist Activism, Unruly Bodies, and Sexuality and Queer Theory.

Dr. Kate is the point person for the Critical Sexuality Studies minor that she helped develop in 2011-2012. She serves on advisory boards for the Public Humanities minor, and the Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community and Culture. She is co-chair, with Dr. Michelle Scott, of the Women’s Faculty Network.

Kate’s research interests include transgender studies, critical pedagogy, public history, and theories of activism. She is on the Editorial Board of the journal Radical Teacher and the Baltimore Heritage LGBT History Committee. She writes a popular bicycling blog that deals with local history, politics, and culture and regularly hosts walking tours about Baltimore. She has written extensively for local and web-based publications. Her latest publication is the edited volume Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City, co-edited with Dr. Nicole King and Dr. Joshua Clarke Davis (Rutgers UP, 2019).

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Jacqui Lom (she/her)

Administrative Assistant
Humanities Scholars and Linehan Artist Scholars Programs

Jacqui Lom graduated from McDaniel College in 2004 with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. Upon graduation, she worked for several years in undergraduate admissions – first at Stevenson University, as Assistant Director for Enrollment Research and Technology, then at the University of Maryland College Park, as Assistant Director for Operations and Technology. After a long hiatus from higher education, Jacqui is delighted to be back on a college campus, serving as the Administrative Assistant for the Linehan Artist and Humanities Scholars programs.

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