HTLab: Revealing Invisible Histories

What untold stories echo through the halls and grounds of your campus? Whose presence has been ignored or erased? 

In this Humanities Teaching Lab (HTLab), Dr. Natasha Cole-Leonard, of the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC), will discuss “Invisible History: Exploring the CCBC Hilton Center's Past,” a five-week collaborative Summer Research Experience in partnership with UMBC’s Denise Meringolo, Director of Public History, and Lindsey Loeper, Reference and Instruction Archivist, as well as Molly Ricks, Baltimore Heritage. As part of the Mellon Foundation-sponsored Humanities for All Initiative, the project helped students place CCBC’s antebellum Hilton mansion, a recently-renovated estate on campus grounds, into a more complete historical context, exploring the lives and legacies of enslaved Africans and laborers who played roles in the campus and local region's development. Through this intensive research experience, students developed interdisciplinary humanities-based projects that interrogate public history monuments, exhibits, texts, and artifacts, and seek to re-envision acts of commemoration with an emphasis on repair and reconciliation.  

In this HTLab, participants will:

• Learn about CCBC’s “Humanities for All” initiative and the Universities Studying Slavery Consortium

• Explore Curatescape, the geo-based web and mobile-app platform for digital publication of student research 

• Participate in a history-themed poetry exercise led by Baltimore-based poet Abdul Ali

• Consider how inter-institutional partnerships can enrich community-engaged projects

Registration is required to attend this HTLab. Please register by Monday, February 7.