Announcing our new Director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities

The Dresher Center is pleased to announce our new director, Professor Amy Froide.

Amy M. Froide is Professor of History and the former Chair of the History Department at UMBC. Her areas of expertise include the history of early modern Britain, European women’s history, and financial history. She is the author of Silent Partners: Women as Public Investors during Britain’s Financial Revolution, 1690-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2016). Her other books include Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), co-edited with Judith M. Bennett. She is currently working on a book about a financial scandal in eighteenth-century London as well as a project on wives who separated from their husbands in early modern Britain. She continues to study female entrepreneurs, including speculators in European mining projects. Her research has been funded by fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Henry H. Huntington Library, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the British Academy.

Professor Froide has a long standing interest in interdisciplinary teaching and research. She is the founding Director of UMBC’s Entrepreneurship & Innovation Minor and she holds affiliate appointments in UMBC’s Gender, Women’s + Sexuality Studies and Language, Literacy, and Culture Ph.D. programs. She regularly mentors Master’s degree students in both early modern British and European women’s history. Former students have gone on to Ph.D. programs in the U.S. and the U.K. and three are currently professors. In addition to her research and administrative work, Prof. Froide was the recipient of the 2018 Maryland Board of Regents’ Award for Teaching Excellence and is currently UMBC’s Presidential Teaching Professor for 2024-27. She regularly shares her Humanities research with a general audience through articles in The Conversation, podcasts, lectures with Profs & Pints, and pre-show theatre talks.

Prof. Froide looks forward to continuing the excellent work of outgoing Director Jessica Berman who has made the Dresher Center a hub of scholarly exchange and intellectual community. In addition to supporting faculty and graduate student research in the Humanities, Prof. Froide plans to promote work in new interdisciplinary fields such as Environmental and Public Health humanities, more broadly share out the innovative Humanities research being done by UMBC’s faculty, and advocate for the significance of Humanities disciplines at Public Research Universities.