Current Faculty Working Groups

Leader: Elaine MacDougall (UMBC)

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: Bill Shewbridge (Media and Communication Studies)

The Digital Storytelling and Civic Agency in Higher Education Faculty Working Group explores 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. They serve as a steering body for ongoing digital storytelling activities and connect with other campus work that involves storytelling for civic agency and engagement. The group promotes opportunities for faculty involved in digital storytelling research to share their experiences through presentations, workshops, round tables and a one-day conference.

Leaders: Drew Holladay (English) and Sharon Tran (English)

The Disability Studies Faculty Group group focuses on reading interdisciplinary scholarship in disability studies (DS) and its application in higher education and other contexts. They read and discuss DS and DS-related theories of embodiment, epistemology, methodology, subaltern politics, and cultural analysis. Applications of DS include programs of inclusion, universal design, and accessibility in education and elsewhere (such as accessibility in technology and digital spaces). Group conversations can include how faculty can use DS scholarship in their classes and to redesign their own teaching practices.

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.

Leaders: María Célleri (Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies), Tania Lizarazo (Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communications and Global Studies), Yolanda Valencia (Geography and Environmental Systems), and Thania Muñoz D. (Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication)

The Latin American Feminisms Working Group is an interdisciplinary multilingual research group that focuses on feminist and decolonial Latin American and Caribbean scholarship from a hemispheric perspective. Attentive to the inequitable politics of translation between South America and North America, the group centers scholarship from and for Latin America and the Caribbean. In particular, it considers the formation of Latin American and Caribbean feminisms from a decolonial and intersectional framework that honors the work of Indigenous, Black, and Brown women. They bring together faculty, graduate students, artists, and community members from the humanities and social sciences to engage in and debate issues around race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, mobility, feminism and decoloniality as these pertain to the Latin American and Caribbean hemisphere, which begins in the Southern Cone and extends to the Latinx/Chicanx diaspora. We read and discuss recent work around Latin American and Caribbean studies, invite scholars from Latin America to speak about their work, as well as collaborate to support our work and move our research projects forward.

Leaders: Lindsay DiCuirci (English); Lindsay Loeper (AOK Library Special Collecitons); and Craig Saper (Language, Literacy, and Culture)

This working group will bring together faculty and staff interested in library science, book history, printing and print cultures, book arts, archives, and preservation and access. The interdisciplinary working group will have several key functions and goals. First, the group will provide space to share research and works in progress. Second, the group will exchange pedagogical ideas and best practices, especially as it relates to collaborations between Special Collections and faculty. In this vein, the working group will conduct research together into other university programs that offer certificates or minors in print culture and archives in the hopes of developing a similar program at UMBC. Third, the group will develop ideas for other pedagogical and research innovations on campus such as the recently proposed Chesapeake Print House or other Humanities makerspaces related to printing and bookmaking. Community partnerships would fall into this category as the working group seeks to learn from and build relationships with presses, archives, libraries, book artists, and collectors in the region.

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.