Dresher Center Acting Director 2021-22

Denise Meringolo is the Acting Director for the Dresher Center for the Humanities for 2021-22. She is also an Associate Professor of History and has been the Director of Public History at UMBC since 2006. She is an expert in community based public history practice and civic engagement. Her book Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History (University of Massachusetts, 2012) won the 2013 National Council on Public History prize for the best book in the field. In 2015, she established a crowd-source digital collection, Preserve the Baltimore Uprising in order to gather and protect stories of protest and civil disobedience in Baltimore. In 2018, she won a Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship which enabled her to activate the collection to promote community-based, collaborative historical reflection and interpretation. Between 2013 and 2021, she designed and facilitated a large collaborative research project, Radical Roots: Civic Engagement, Public History, and a Tradition of Social Justice Activism, which will be published as an open source digital collection of essays by Amherst College Press this winter. She is a member of the Governance Committee of the National Council on Public History.
Please join us in welcoming Denise to the Center!