Previous Faculty Working Groups

Leader: Elaine MacDougall (English)

The Anti-Racism and Action Faculty Working Group seeks to promote new coalitions, conversations, and creative work surrounding anti-racism. Envisioned as a collaborative, interdisciplinary community of scholars that will support this work and spur research and teaching activity focused on anti-racism, the group meets regularly to read, discuss, listen to experts, and/or plan research and activism, as the members may decide. UMBC faculty from any department, faculty from other area colleges and universities, and advanced UMBC graduate students are invited to join.

Leader: Lee Boot (Imaging Research Center)

This working group explored the potential of multi-modal digital publishing, participatory action research, and social practice in the arts and humanities to increase the positive impact of academic knowledge and research in communities local to UMBC.

Leaders: Jessica Pfeifer (Philosophy) and Susan Sterett (Public Policy)

This working group explored problems about the questions people ask, how they share information, and how the availability of online records draws more people into surveillance by both state and private actors.

Leaders: Haniyeh Barahouie (Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication) and Landry Digeon (Language, Literacy, and Culture)

This working group explored the research focus of digital storytelling including discussions of digital literacies and competencies in the humanities and social sciences, narrative and storytelling research, and classroom work across disciplines.

Leader: Anne Sarah Rubin (History/Imaging Research Center)

This working group was open to faculty interested in broadening their digital humanities practice, regardless of their skill level.

Leaders: Jessica Berman (English), Bambi Chapin (Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health), and Gloria Chuku (Africana Studies)

Many UMBC faculty members in the humanities conduct research in fieldsites around the world, activities that are in line with UMBCs global engagement goals and our R1 status. In doing this work, interests and concerns related to designing and carrying out global scholarship often arise and need to be addressed. This group will bring faculty together in a community to share best practices and support each other in managing the logistics of global research; and discuss scholarly issues in the humanities that arise from doing work of this kind. Topics of concern might include: the role of language and translation in global research; relationships with local partners and research participants; the importance of location vs the value of comparison; the importance and challenges of connecting with histories and cultures that form the context of diverse research sites; navigating ethical concerns and local review boards; identifying and advocating for support for international research in our own university; identifying and sharing strategies for securing funding for international research; considering ways to make our research serve and benefit the communities in which we work; and how remote and digital techniques might aid our research.

Leader: Mejdulene B. Shomali (Gender + Women’s Studies)

This group focused on discussing contemporary readings and authors whose work emphasizes intersectional topics and methods.

Leader: Michele Osherow (English) and Manil Suri (Mathematics and Statistics)

“Mathematics and What it Means to be Human” was a faculty-designed project bringing together the departments of Theatre, Mathematics and Statistics, and English with the goal of creating a play script and performance. The project grew from a humanities course co-taught in Fall 2011 by Manil Suri, Mathematics and Statistics, and Michelle Osherow, English, which led to a conference presentation on ways in which scholars of various disciplines engage with mathematics.

Leader: Carole McCann (Gender + Women’s Studies)

This group discussed Sara Ahmed’s work in preparation for her campus visit in February 2019 for the Korenman Lecture and Humanities Forum Speaker Series.

Leaders: Erin Hogan (Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication) and Jules Rosskam (Visual Arts)

Screen studies brought film scholars, filmmakers, and enthusiasts from across campus together to promote screen studies and literacy of the moving image through discussions, scholarship sharing, and dynamic programming throughout and beyond UMBC.

Leader: Earl Brooks(English)

Over the past decade, sound studies has been generating a buzz in disciplines across the humanities. Contributing to that conversation, the Sound Studies Faculty Working Group seeks to facilitate more cross-disciplinary discussions about sound and bring together faculty members with shared interests to encourage collaboration. The group discusses relevant sound studies issues from different disciplinary perspectives, has informal presentations of their own in-process work, and listens to invited talks from guest speakers.

Leader: Piotr Gwiazda (English)

Kenneth Goldsmith calls translation “the ultimate humanist gesture”; he also dismisses it as mere “discourse” when contrasted with the artistic and political possibilities of “displacement” (the absence, impossibility or refusal of translation). This group worked to formulate a response – or counterargument – to Goldsmith.