Previous CURRENTS sessions

Re-entangling Identities in Mental Health Activism
Drew Holladay, English

Bouboulina’s Bones: A Comparative Osteobiography
April Householder, Director, Undergraduate Research and Prestigious Scholarships

The Afro-Techno Jeremiad
Earl Brooks, English

The National Banking Acts: One Set of Legislation, Three Distinct Narratives
Christy Chapin, History

Finding Face and Building Financially Resilient Spaces
Sonya Squires-Caesar, PhD Candidate, Language, Literacy, and Culture, UMBC

What is Hands-On Social Emotional Learning?
Amy Tondreau, Education; Kara Seidel, PhD Candidate, Language, Literacy, and Culture; and Erik Wikane, M.P.P. Candidate, School of Public Policy

Finding Zaynab in Al-Rashad
Noor Zaidi, History, UMBC; Spring 2023 Dresher Center Residential Faculty Research Fellow

Reclaiming the Body in “Hshouma” by Zainab Fasiki
Haniyeh Pasandi, Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication, UMBC; Spring 2023 Dresher Center Residential Faculty Research Fellow

Lived Experience of Ko-Ryo-In Migrant Workers in Contemporary South Korean Society
Eun-Jeong Han, Associate Professor, Communication, Salisbury University; Spring 2023 Inclusion Imperative Visiting Faculty Fellow

The National Park Service and Collaborating with Descendant Communities
Courtney C. Hobson, Dresher Center for the Humanities, UMBC

Whiteness Studies In Brazil: An Analysis of the Coloniality of Affect
Tanya Saunders, Language, Literacy, and Culture, UMBC

A Friend of Dorothy? An Ethnographic Study of the Effects of Shifting and Disappearing Space on Camp, Queer Discourse, and Baltimore’s Drag Queens
Forrest Caskey, Ph.D. Candidate, Language, Literacy, and Culture Program; Spring 2023 Dresher Center Graduate Student Research Fellow

The Sons of Neptune: An Erotic Current Among Sailors, the Sea, and Culture
Jessica Floyd, Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies, UMBC

When Freedom Isn’t Free: Patron’s Rights in Roman Slaving Law
Molly Jones-Lewis, Ancient Studies; Summer 2022 Dresher Center Fellow

Fichte on the Politics of Money
Michael Nance, Philosophy; Summer 2022 Dresher Center Fellow

Responding to Islamophobia: British Muslims ‘Talk Back’ to the UK
Sabah Uddin, Assistant Professor, Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies, Bowie State University; Fall 2022 Inclusion Imperative Visiting Faculty Fellow

Poetry in General, or, Literary Experimentalism After 1960
Keegan Cook Finberg, English; Fall 2022 Dresher Center Residential Faculty Fellow

Introducing Collaborative Visual Storytelling: Co-Producing Theory and Knowledge with Black Yield Institute
Charlotte Keniston, Ph.D. Candidate, Language, Literacy, and Culture Program; Fall 2022 Dresher Center Graduate Student Fellow

“Bad Government”: The Transformation of Urban Governance in Turn of the Century Baltimore
Michael Casiano, American Studies

“He wouldn’t come to us; we’ll come to him”: Women Activists and Baltimore ACORN Respond to Baltimore City’s Lead Poisoning Epidemic, 1999-2009
Aimée Pohl, M.A. Candidate, Historical Studies, UMBC

Trans Euphoria: Fandom in the Age of TikTok
Ari Page, M.A. Candidate, Texts, Technologies, and Literature, UMBC

Race, Gender, and Class in the thought of Angela Davis
Vanessa Wills, Assistant Professor, Philosophy, George Washington University; Spring 2022 Inclusion Imperative Visiting Faculty Fellow

Can we change people’s tendency to distort probabilities?
María Bernedo del Carpio, Assistant Professor, Economics, UMBC

Black Women’s Voices: An Investigation of Issa Rae, A Millennial Black Woman Content Creator, in Shaping the Narrative of Insecure
Morgan Smalls, Assistant Professor, School of Media Arts and Design, James Madison University; Spring 2022 Inclusion Imperative Visiting Faculty Fellow

Geek Hop: Discipline, Science, and Orientalism in Hip Hop Culture
Mark R. Villegas, Assistant Professor, American Studies, Franklin & Marshall College; Fall 2021 Inclusion Imperative Visiting Faculty Fellow

“I know the monster; I have lived in its entrails”: Latin American Immigrant Literature in the U.S
Thania Muñoz D., Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication; Fall 2021 Dresher Center Residential Faculty Research Fellow

To Understand the Other, You Have to Be a Mother: Jenna Bush Hager’s #ReadWithJenna Book Club and the Politics of Race, Empathy, and Motherhood
Tamara Bhalla, American Studies; Fall 2021 Dresher Center Residential Faculty Research Fellow

Black Women and Unmet Fertility Desires
Alyse Minter, Ph.D. Candidate, Language, Literacy, and Culture Program; Fall 2021 Dresher Center Graduate Student Research Fellow

The Afromantic
La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Associate Professor, American Studies, University of Maryland-College Park; Fall 2021 Inclusion Imperative Visiting Faculty Fellow

The Roles of Digital Media in the Discursive Construction of “Africanity”
Tracy Tinga, Media and Communication Studies

Retrospective Storytelling: Intergenerational Exchanges About Love
Shenita Denson, Ph.D. Student, Language, Literacy, and Culture Program, 2021 Baltimore Field School Fellow

Interrogating (Anti-) Extractive Storytelling Methods in Food Ethnography
Sarah Fouts, American Studies; and Director, Public Humanities Program

Signature Spain, the Un-tour
Erin Hogan, Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication; Summer 2021 Dresher Center Summer Faculty Fellow

“Someday I Will be Proved Innocent”: Henry A. Brown, Police Violence, and the Third Degree
Mike Casiano, American Studies

Get Out, Sorry to Bother You, and the Sonics of White Supremacy
Earl Brooks, English; Fall 2021 Inclusion Imperative Faculty Collaborator

“I’ve Endured”: The Music and Legacy of Ola Belle Reed
Bill Shewbridge, Media and Communication Studies; Summer 2021 Dresher Center Summer Faculty Fellow

The Uses of Beauty in Palestinian Liberation Practices
Mejdulene Shomali, Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies; Fall 2021 Inclusion Imperative Faculty Collaborator

Transgender Euphoria: Puerto Rico’s Queer Exaltation
Foster Reynolds-Santiago, MFA Candidate, Intermedia + Digital Arts; Fall 2021 Dresher Center Graduate Student Research Fellow

Who Killed Alex Odeh?: An Assassination, an Investigation, and Arab-American Media Citizenship
William Youmans, Assistant Professor, Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University; Spring 2021 Inclusion Imperative Visiting Faculty Fellow

Fake History: The Myth of Left-Wing Fascism in Interwar Britain
Dan Ritschel, History, UMBC

Argentina: Race in a Raceless Nation
Chisu Teresa Ko, Associate Professor, Modern Languages and Latin American Studies, Ursinus College; Spring 2021 Inclusion Imperative Visiting Faculty Fellow

Railway Capitalism and Dual Modernity in Early 20th Century Mukden
Nianshen Song, History, UMBC

Looking for the Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps
Rebecca Adelman, Media and Communication Studies, UMBC; Spring 2021 Inclusion Imperative Faculty Collaborator
Alyssa Brumis, Ph.D. candidate, Language, Literacy, and Culture, UMBC

Bummers, Paupers, and the “Insane”: Confinement & Institutionalization in Late Nineteenth-Century Baltimore
Michael Casiano, Assistant Professor, American Studies, UMBC

Theorizing Racial Segregation and Imperialism in South Africa: The Travel Notes of Two African American Scholars – Ralph Bunche and Merze Tate
Krista M. Johnson, Associate Professor, African Studies, Howard University; Spring 2021 Inclusion Imperative Visiting Faculty Fellow

Neurodivergent Embodiment and Material Accountability
Drew Holladay, English, UMBC

Revisiting the Reservation: The Lumbee Indian Community of East Baltimore
Ashley Minner, American Studies; Director of the Public Humanities Program

The Origin of the Concept of Knowledge
Whitney Schwab, Philosophy, UMBC; Summer 2020 Dresher Center Faculty Fellow

Radio Relations in the Global South
Jessica Berman, English, UMBC; Director, Dresher Center for the Humanities

Using PhotoVoice for African American Ethnohistory in the C&O Canal NHP
Gina Lewis, Associate Professor of Fine and Performing Arts at Bowie State University; Fall 2020 Inclusion Imperative Visiting Faculty Fellow

Maya Deren: Choreographed for Camera
Mark Durant, Visual Arts, UMBC; Fall 2020 Dresher Center Residential Faculty Research Fellow

Moving Parts
Kelley Bell, Visual Arts, UMBC

Move On Up a Little Higher: The Rhetoric of Mahalia Jackson
Earl Brooks, English, UMBC; Summer 2020 Dresher Center Faculty Fellow

La Virgen del Panecillo: Quito’s (Neo)Colonial Urban Transformation & Decolonial Future Imaginaries
María Célleri, Gender, Women’s + Sexuality Studies, UMBC

Ecological Chimerica: Rethinking Media, Politics, and the State in the Time of COVID-19
Fan Yang, Media and Communication Studies, UMBC; Fall 2020 Dresher Center Residential Faculty Research Fellow

Women, Technology, and Checks: Commercial Banking after World War II
Christy Chapin, History, UMBC; Summer 2019 Dresher Center Faculty Research Fellow

Geographies of Race: Representations of Racial Mobility
Elizabeth Patton, Media and Communication Studies, UMBC; Summer 2019 Dresher Center Faculty Research Fellow

Legislating Medical Practice in Ancient Rome
Molly Jones-Lewis, Ancient Studies, UMBC

Three and a Half Centuries of a Chinese Neighborhood
Nianshen Song, History, UMBC; Summer 2019 Dresher Center Faculty Research Fellow

Teaching and Doing Graphic Design in Ethiopia
Guenet Abraham, Visual Arts

Designing Participatory Futures: Using DIY Technologies for Inclusion and Empowerment
Foad Hamidi, Information Systems, UMBC

Sonic Waves of Grain: Paul Harvey’s American Evangelism
Jae Inscoe, PhD Candidate, Language, Literacy, and Culture, UMBC; Spring 2020 Dresher Center Graduate Student Fellow

Patrimonial Persons: Poor Devils, Their Eves, and Hegemonic Masculinities in Franco’s Spain (1939-75)
Erin Hogan, Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication; Fall 2019 Dresher Center Residential Faculty Fellow

Hope and Despair in late 1970s Black Politics
Derek Musgrove, Associate Professor of History

Visualizing the White Farmer Imaginary on California Agricultural Lands
Tracy Perkins, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University; Fall 2019 Dresher Center Inclusion imperative Visiting Faculty Fellow

ibn Batuta and the Fashioned Self Image
Corbin Jones, M.A. Candidate in the Text, Technologies, and Literatures Program; Fall 2019 Dresher Center Graduate Student Fellow

The Horizon of Representation: Nature, Otherness, Intersectionality
Christopher Tong, Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication and Asian Studies

20th Century French Historiography between the “Event” and the Longue Durée
Zakaria Fatih, Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication

Between Cloth and Skin: carrying Objects in Ancient Rome
Melissa Bailey-Kutner, Ancient Studies

Challenging Monopoly: Race and Labor in the NBA
Theresa Runstedtler, Professor of History at American University; 2018-2019 Dresher Center Inclusion imperative Visiting Faculty Fellow

Making Space for Human and Multi-Species Inclusion in New York’s Central Park
Dawn Biehler, Geography and Environmental Systems; Spring 2019 Dresher Center Residential Faculty Fellow

Global Television Formats and National Identities
Ibrahim Er, PhD Candidate in the Language, Literacy, and Culture Program; Spring 2019 Dresher Center Graduate Student Fellow

The Bicycle Craze of 1890s Ukraine from an American Perspective
Olha Martynyuk, Fulbright Visiting Researcher at UMBC; and Senior Lecturer at National Technical University of Ukraine “Ihor Sikorsky Polytechnic Institute”

The Southern Typhoid Fever Thesis and Diagnostic Racism
Katherine Bankole-Medina, Professor of History at Coppin State University; 2018-2019 Dresher Center Inclusion imperative Visiting Faculty Fellow

Pragmatic Naturalism
Eric Campbell, Philosophy; Summer 2018 Dresher Center Faculty Research Fellow

Race, Space, and Freedom: The Ongoing Fight for Mobility Rights
Jennifer Maher, English; Summer 2018 Dresher Center Faculty Research Fellow

Finding Ryukyu
Chinen Aimi Bouillon, MFA Candidate in Intermedia + Digital Arts; and Fall 2018 Dresher Center Graduate Student Research Fellow

The National Atlas as Imagined Community
John Rennie Short, Public Policy

Denazification through the Lens of Transitional Justice?
Rebecca Boehling, History, Global Studies and Judaic Studies Programs; and Fall 2018 Dresher Center Residential Faculty Fellow

The Anansi Trio: On the Path
Matt Belzer, Music

The Herd: Seeking a Swimmable Harbor
Kelley Bell, Visual Arts

Eighteenth-Century England’s Charitable Corporation: A Cautionary Tale of Micro-lending, Financial Fraud, and Government Bailouts
Amy Froide, Professor, History; and Fall 2018 Dresher Center Residential Faculty Fellow

Railroad Track of Violence: Stories About the Chinese in Nineteenth-Century America
Irene Chan, Visual Arts; and Fall 2018 Dresher Center Residential Faculty Fellow

‘They Ask, Why Do You Talk Like That; I Ask, Why Don’t You Want to Talk Like That?’: Analyzing the Online Speech and Identity Practices of Black Female Undergraduates
Erin Berry, PhD Student, Language, Literacy and Culture; and Fall 2017 Dresher Center Graduate Student Residential Fellow

The Influence of Gender on Research in Avian Behavior: Diversity of Researchers Speeds Progress
Kevin Omland, Biological Sciences

Reclaiming the Black Group Soul: Blueprints for Black Infrastructure in Claude McKay’s  Amiable with Big Teeth
Chris Varlack, English

The Posthumous Autobiography and Civil Rights Memory
Brian Norman, English, Loyola University Maryland; Dresher Center Visiting Professor

The Marginalization of Privilege: The Fracture of Upper Class Identity in WWI Britain
Mary Laurents, PhD Student, Language, Literacy and Culture; Fall 2017 Dresher Center Graduate Student Residential Fellow

The Superblock Downtown Development Debacle: “It seems like it has taken so long to get nothing started,” 2003-2015 
Nicole King, American Studies; Summer 2017 Dresher Center Faculty Research Fellow|

Shanghai Survivors: World War Two’s Displaced Persons in Asia and the International Politics of Refugee Resettlement
Meredith Oyen, History; Summer 2017 Dresher Center Faculty Research Fellow

Driveway Moments: The Public Radio Structure of Feeling
Jason Loviglio, Media and Communications Studies

Documentation of Innu: A Step toward the Preservation of Indigenous Languages of Quebec (Canada)
Renée Lambert-Bretiere, Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication

Let’s Not Talk About Sex: Prostitutes as Knowledge Brokers in the Medieval Mediterranean
Susan McDonough, History

‘All She Must Possess’, a neo-Modernist play about Etta Cone
Susan McCully, Theatre

Railroad Track of Violence: Stories of the Chinese in 19th-Century America
Irene Chan, Visual Arts

The Velvet Fist: Canadian Gay and Lesbian Liberation in 1981 Toronto
Calla Thompson, Visual Arts; and Spring 2017 Dresher Center Residential Faculty Fellow

Reconsidering Yoshida Shôin, Samurai Imperial Loyalist, through his Memory Landscape
Constantine N. Vaporis, History; Spring 2017 Dresher Center Residential Faculty Fellow

The Vanguard is Never Caught Napping: Informants and Police Inside the Black Panther Party in Baltimore, 1968-1972
Andy Holter, M.A. student, Historical Studies

The Quest for Livable Space: Futurity and Sonority in Early Twentieth-Century Black Narrative
Maleda Belilgne, Africana Studies and English

Jibooms, Barrels, and Arseholes: Singing Sex in Sea Chanteys
Jessica Floyd, Ph.D student, Language, Literacy, and Culture; and Fall 2016 Dresher Center Residential Graduate Fellow

Spanish Movies
Erin Hogan, Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication

Defining their Past and Immortalizing their Future: Women’s Monuments in Early Modern England
Kelly Daughtridge, M.A. student, Historical Studies; and Fall 2016 Dresher Center Residential Graduate Fellow

‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’: Poetry, Translation, and the News
Piotr Gwiazda, English

What is a Population-Level Cause?
Jessica Pfeifer, Philosophy

The Political Thought of America’s Founding Feminists
Lisa Vetter, Political Science

Philosophical Anarchism and Political Obligation: Kantian Questions
Michael Nance, Philosophy

Using Digital Tools to Measure Transnationalism: Developing Typologies and Methodologies for Cross-cultural Comparisons of Television Formats
Edward Larkey, Modern Languages, Linguistics and Intercultural Communication

From Paid Wailing to Protestant Tears: The Transformation of Chinese Grief
Ruth E. Toulson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Department of Humanistic Studies, MICA

Racial Violence and Vaudevillians of Color: The Makings of a Black Theater Circuit
Michelle Scott, History

The American Civilization Institute: Toward a New History of Civic Engagement
Denise Meringolo, History; and Spring 2016 Dresher Center Residential Fellow

Building an Augmented-Reality Reading Machine: A Documentary
Craig Saper, Language, Literacy, and Culture; and Spring 2016 Dresher Center Residential Fellow

Imagining Otherwise: Narrating Transformative Identity Work in a College-Level Social Justice Course
Rachel Carter, Ph.D. student, Language Literacy and Culture, Fall 2015 Dresher Center Graduate Residential Fellow

Developing a new Professional Identity: Second Career Teachers
Sarah Shin, Education; and Co-Director, M.A. TESOL Program

Sexual Necropolitics and the Gender of Betrayal in Latin American Literature and Film
Viviana MacManus, Gender and Women’s Studies

Memory and Memorialization in the midst of Colombia’s Armed Conflict
Felix Burgos, Ph.D. student, Language Literacy and Culture; and Fall 2015 Dresher Center Graduate Residential Fellow

Human Agency, Intentionality, and Niche Construction
Erle Ellis, Geography and Environmental Systems

txt me im board: The Long Poem in Contemporary American Poetry
Tanya Olson, English

Freedom Marooned: An Atlantic Slave Rebellion in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Caribbean
Marjoleine Kars, History

Design, Desire and Consumption
Peggy Re, Visual Arts

“We’ve Done Beautiful Work Here”: Resource Conservation as Intercultural Process in Mojanda, Ecuador
John Stolle-McAllister, Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication

Making Time for Carbon: Understanding the Value of Nature and the Instability of Capital
David Lansing, Geography and Environmental Systems

Acting While Black (and Male) in Disney’s Land
Kimberly Moffitt, American Studies; and Spring 2014 Dresher Center Residential Faculty Fellow

The Hopkinson Hoax of 1763
Kevin Wisniewski, Ph.D. student, Language Literacy and Culture, and Fall 2014 Dresher Center Graduate Residential Fellow

An American Enlightenment: Political Theory and the Origins of American Feminism
Lisa Vetter, Political Science

Neoliberal Globalization and the ‘Chinese Dream’
Fan Yang, Media and Communication Studies

Scribebamus epos: Identity and Confusion in Martial’s Exilic Poetry
Tim Phin, Ancient Studies

Set in Stone? Posthumous Accounts, Epitaphs, and the Writing of Mid-Tang Literati Biographies
Anna M. Shields, Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication

‘Pleading the Belly’: Convict Transportation and Motherhood
Teresa Foster, PhD candidate, Language, Literacy and Culture

Leah’s Dybbuk: A Feminist Adaptation of a Classic Yiddish Play
Susan McCully, Theatre; Eve Muson, Theatre; and Michele Osherow, English

Explosive Figures: Population Projections and the Pill
Carole McCann, Gender + Women’s Studies

Doing Feminist Translation as Local and Transnational Activism – The Turkish Translation and Reception of Virgin: The Untouched History
Emek Ergun, Ph.D. student, Language Literacy and Culture; Fall 2013 Dresher Center Graduate Residential Fellow

Improving the Art of Paper War: The Literary Gambols of Francis Hopkinson
Kevin Wisniewski, Ph.D. student, Language Literacy and Culture

Grin and Bear It: Humor as an Economy of Being
Kara Hunt, Post-doctoral Fellow in Media and Communication Studies

Beyond Representation: Approaching Violence and the Visual
Rebecca Adelman, Media & Communications Studies

Methodological Approaches and Questions in Place-based Research
Kate Brown, History; and Spring 2013 Dresher Center Residential Faculty Research Fellow; and Preminda Jacob, Visual Arts; and Spring 2013 Dresher Center Residential Faculty Research Fellow

Electronic Literature and its Emerging Forms
Dene Grigar, Director of the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver and Curator of the Library of Congress

Remaking the Malthusian Couple for the Contraceptive Age: Calibrating the Risk of Pregnancy
Carole McCann, Gender + Women’s Studies

Being There: The Adventures Most Historians Would Rather Not Admit
Kate Brown, History

One Baltimore Block from Inside Out
Amy Zanoni, M.A. Candidate, Historical Studies

Trade Networks and Tourist Messiahs
Pilar K. Rau, ’01 Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication and ’01 Intercultural Communication M.A.

Hit and Stay
Joe Tropea, ’06 History B.A. and ’08 Historical Studies M.A.