Notes on Contributors
Coeditors
Nicole King is an associate professor and chair of the Department of American Studies at UMBC. She received her PhD in American studies from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2008. Her research and teaching interests focus on issues of place, power, and economic development. She is the author of Sombreros and Motorcycles in a Newer South: The Politics of Aesthetics in South Carolina’s Tourism Industry, and her research on Baltimore has been published in the Journal of Urban History and the collection Engaging Heritage: Engaging Communities.
Kate Drabinski is a senior lecturer in Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies at UMBC, a member of the Baltimore Heritage LGBT History Committee, and a cofounder of the Baltimore Queerstories Collective; she also writes a regular blog about bicycling in the city. Her research interests include the histories of slavery, segregation, and sexuality and how those histories and our memories of them shape urban and rural environments. She earned her PhD in rhetoric with an emphasis in gender and sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006.
Joshua Clark Davis is an assistant professor of history at the University of Baltimore and the author of From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs. Davis’s writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and Jacobin.
Contributors
Lawrence Brown is an associate professor in the Morgan State University School of Community Health and Policy. His scholarly work focuses on the impact of historical trauma on community health and development. Brown received a BA in African American studies from Morehouse College in Atlanta, a master’s of public administration from the University of Houston, and a PhD in health outcomes and policy research from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. He is completing a book titled The Black Butterfly: Why We Must Make Black Neighborhoods Matter and is engaged with redlined Baltimore communities as an activist for equitable redevelopment.
Daniel Buccino is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Humanities Center, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, clinical manager at the Johns Hopkins Broadway Center for Addiction, and the director of the Johns Hopkins Civility Initiative.
Michael Casiano earned his PhD in American studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. His current book project is an interdisciplinary exploration of Baltimore that examines the ways that property rights and regulations were bound up in the criminalization of black life and culture during the first half of the twentieth century. He is a 2018–2019 postdoctoral fellow in Rutgers University’s Center for Historical Analysis.
Samuel Gerald Collins is a cultural anthropologist interested in the information society and globalization, primarily in the United States and Korea. His MA and PhD are from American University in Washington, D.C. Before becoming a professor at Towson University, he taught at Dongseo University in Pusan, South Korea. He spent a Fulbright year from 2006–2007 at Kookmin University in Seoul.
Shannon Darrow is a community development professional and independent scholar who lives and works in Baltimore. She studied American studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and community studies and civic engagement at the University of Baltimore. Over the past ten years she has worked at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Civic Works, and the Southeast CDC. She is currently the Maryland Project Coordinator at the National Fair Housing Alliance.
Matthew Durington is a professor of anthropology at Towson University. He received his BA in the humanities, specializing in film, anthropology, sociology and African and African American studies at the University of Texas in 1994. He completed his MA in 1999 and his PhD in anthropology from Temple University in 2003 specializing in urban and visual anthropology. He completed a postdoctorate at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa in 2004 and arrived at Towson University in the fall of that year. Durington is the director of the International Studies program in the College of Liberal Arts at Towson University and the coordinator for the anthropology concentration in the department. He has several research interests in the fields of urban, visual, and cultural anthropology.
Nicole Fabricant is an associate professor of anthropology at Towson University. She received a BA from Mount Holyoke College in 1999 in urban anthropology and a PhD from Northwestern University in 2009. She completed a presidential postdoctorate at the University of South Florida in 2010 where she focused on the global water crisis and then joined Towson University in the fall of 2010. Fabricant’s teaching interests include revolution in Latin America, life in the city, resource wars of the twenty-first century, environmental (in)justice, and gender and labor in Latin America. She has been working on a participatory action research project since 2016 with United Workers, Free Your Voice, and youth from Benjamin Franklin High School in Curtis Bay: its aim is to excavate the historic and contemporary layers of environmental toxicity in the region.
Aiden Faust is the head of Special Collections and Archives at the University of Baltimore. He received his MLS in archives and records management from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2008 and his MA in historical studies from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2015. His work focuses on community histories and the sustainability of modern archival records programs.
Jennifer A. Ferretti is the digital initiatives librarian at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is a first-generation American Latina whose librarianship is guided by critical perspectives and a disbelief of neutrality. Her work at MICA and beyond is focused on social justice and equitable access to information, as well as closing the knowledge gap between artist and archivist. Jennifer is a Library Journal 2018 Mover & Shaker.
Leif Fredrickson received his PhD in history from the University of Virginia. He is working on a book on the history of lead poisoning in Baltimore and the nation based on his dissertation, The Age of Lead: Metropolitan Change, Environmental Health, and Inner City Underdevelopment, which won the Council of Graduate School’s Distinguished Dissertation Award in the category of Humanities and Fine Arts.
Robert J. Gamble earned his PhD in history from Johns Hopkins University and currently teaches at the Park School of Baltimore. He is working on a book project, American Bazaars: Urban Political Economy in the Early American Republic, that explores the relationship between urban space, regulation, and capitalism in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Baltimore and Philadelphia. In addition to studying nineteenth-century public markets and food access, he has published on secondhand goods, street peddlers, and lotteries. He has been a research fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Library Company of Philadelphia, and Maryland Historical Society and a faculty member at the University of Kansas, Maryland Institute College of Art, and St. Albans School in Washington, D.C.
Marisela B. Gomez received a master’s degree in public health in 2001, became a physician in 1999, and earned a PhD in immunopharmacology in 1995, all from Johns Hopkins University. Gomez’s research and publications address the social factors of race, class, and community building and their impact on community health. She is the author of Race, Class, Power and Organizing in East Baltimore: Rebuilding Abandoned Communities in America (2012). In addition to her community-engaged action research and organizing, she has served as a consultant to community organizations and institutions in regard to racial equity, mindfulness and justice, organizational development, and strategic planning in Baltimore and beyond.
April Kalogeropoulos Householder is director of Undergraduate Research and Prestigious Scholarships at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Householder, a native of Baltimore, is an educator, filmmaker, and media scholar. She received her PhD in 2006 in comparative film studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests include gender, race, sexuality, media, and feminism.
Jodi Kelber-Kaye is the associate director of the Honors College at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She received both her PhD in comparative cultural and literary studies in 2003 and her MA in art history in 1994 from the University of Arizona. Her research and teaching focus on queer and feminist theories, critical race studies, and cultural studies. With coauthors Householder and Nix, she oversees the Baltimore Collectives and Communes Project, an oral history collection from people involved in radical movements in Baltimore in the 1970s.
Louise Parker Kelley is a writer and editor and has been a LGBT community organizer since 1975. She was a founder and editor of the Baltimore Gay Paper of GLCCB, wrote for Women’s Express, and was a board member of the Chase Brexton clinic, coordinator for women’s programming at GLCCB for more than ten years, Pride Festival Chair for two years, and an HIV educator for the state AIDS Administration and HERO. She served on Mayor Kurt Schmoke’s Task Force for Gay and Lesbian Issues, was active in the Baltimore Justice Campaign, and contributed more than twenty panels to the NAMES Project. Her LGBT plays have been performed in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., Amsterdam, and London.
Emily Lieb received her PhD in history from Columbia University in 2010 and her BA in history from Brown University in 1999. She teaches history and urban studies at Seattle University. Her work focuses on the ways in which housing and school segregation have shaped (and continue to shape) American cities and neighborhoods. Her book manuscript, “The City’s Dying and They Don’t Know Why,” is a biography of West Baltimore’s Rosemont neighborhood from the Progressive era through the 1970s, and her writing on Baltimore has appeared in Politico and CityLab.
Jacob R. Levin, a teacher and lecturer, received his MA in historical studies from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2011, and his BA in secondary education and social studies/history in 2006. He is currently pursuing his doctorate in history from American University. His research focuses on race, social justice, and religion, and his earlier publications have addressed the intersection of civil rights activism and sports.
Teresa Méndez graduated from Princeton University with a degree in cultural anthropology and received her MSW from the Smith College School for Social Work, where she is on the adjunct faculty. She has published and presented on the intersection of race, ethnicity, and culture; therapeutic impasse; and education. A former journalist, she currently maintains a private practice of psychotherapy in Baltimore.
Denise D. Meringolo is an associate professor in the History Department at UMBC and the director of public history. She teaches courses in community-based public history practice, museums and material culture, and digital public history. Her book Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History won the 2013 National Council on Public History prize for the best book in the field. She is creator of Preserve the Baltimore Uprising, a digital collection project that allows individuals to gather and preserve images, videos, and stories about the protests that erupted after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in April 2015. She received the prestigious Whiting Fellowship for 2018–2019 to activate the Preserve the Baltimore Uprising collection and promote community-based, collaborative historical reflection and interpretation.
Ashley Minner is a community-based visual artist, folklorist, and storyteller from Baltimore, Maryland. She earned her MFA in community arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2011. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is studying folklore, museum scholarship and material culture, and relationships between place and identity. An enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, she has been active in the Baltimore Lumbee community for many years and regularly visits communities throughout the U.S. South and Latin America. Ashley works as a folklorist for the Maryland Traditions Program of the Maryland State Arts Council and is a lecturer in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Elizabeth Morrow Nix is an associate professor in the Division of Legal, Ethical and Historical Studies at the University of Baltimore. To commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the urban unrest that followed the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Nix collaborated with colleagues, students, and community artists to create the Baltimore ‘68 project. The steering committee held a community conference and published the anthology Baltimore ‘68: Riots and Rebirth in an American City in 2011. She is the coauthor of Introduction to Public History: Interpreting the Past, Engaging Audiences, published in 2017.
Richard E. Otten has a PhD in cultural studies from George Mason University. His dissertation offers a socio-semiotic analysis of Baltimore’s decline. He received his MA from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville in English and American studies in 2001. He teaches American studies and gender & sexuality studies courses at Anne Arundel Community College and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Eli Pousson is the director of preservation and outreach at Baltimore Heritage, the city’s nonprofit preservation advocacy organization. Before moving to Baltimore, Eli worked for the D.C. Office of Historic Preservation and completed graduate work in anthropology and historic preservation at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2009.
Mary Rizzo is an assistant professor of history and director of the Graduate Program in American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. Through projects like the Telling Untold Histories Unconference, Queer Newark Oral History Project, and the Chicory digital archive of African American poetry, she has created inclusive public and digital history that centers stories that are often marginalized in traditional narratives. Her book Class Acts: Young Men and the Rise of Lifestyle was published in 2015. Her forthcoming book examines battles over cultural representations of Baltimore by writers, artists, and policy makers from 1953 to the early twenty-first century.
Fred Scharmen is an associate professor at Morgan State University’s School of Architecture and Planning. His teaching, writing, and research focus on mining the speculative and utopian impulses of the recent past for ideas relevant to the contemporary built environment. His article “What is a Big Dumb Object?” was published in the Journal of Architectural Education in 2015, and his recent Baltimore City Paper feature, “Thinking of a Master Plan: A Look at How Mckeldin Plaza Came to Be, and the Plans to Undo It All” was given the President’s Award for Architectural Journalism in 2016 by AIA Baltimore. Scharmen received a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Maryland, College Park and a master’s degree in architecture from Yale University.
Aletheia Hyun-Jin Shin received an MFA in community arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2015 and explores the transnational, intercultural nature of the Korea Diaspora through her community-based art practice. Incorporating the methodology of community organizing and storytelling in her artistic praxis, she focuses on building local leadership through creative platforms that promote solidarity and community voices in Baltimore.
Linda Shopes is an editor, with Elizabeth Fee and Linda Zeidman, of The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History, published in 1991. She currently works as a freelance editor and consultant in oral and public history. Shopes has written widely in in these fields; coedited, with Paula Hamilton, Oral History and Public Memories (2008); and served as coeditor of Palgrave Macmillan’s Studies in Oral History series.
Michelle L. Stefano is a folklife specialist (research and programs) at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.). She earned her BA in art history (Brown University, 2000), MA in international museum studies (Gothenburg University, Sweden, 2004) and PhD in 2010 from the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University (UK). From 2011–2016, Stefano worked for Maryland Traditions, the folklife program of Maryland, and led the partnership between Maryland Traditions and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she was a visiting assistant professor in American studies. She coedited The Routledge Companion to Intangible Cultural Heritage (2016), Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities (2016), and Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage (2012).
Joe Tropea is a public historian and documentary filmmaker. He received a MA in historical studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and is currently the Maryland Historical Society’s digital projects manager and curator of film and photographs. He is known for his feature documentaries Hit and Stay: A History of Faith and Resistance (2013) and Sickies Making Films (2018).
Amy Zanoni is a PhD candidate in history at Rutgers University. She received an MA in historical studies from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2013 and a BA in English and Latin American and Caribbean studies from McGill University in 2008. Zanoni’s research examines the history of social movements, welfare and health care policy, and political economy in the postwar United States. She is currently working on her dissertation, which explores the welfare state’s decline and those who fought against it in the late twentieth century through the microcosm of Chicago’s only public hospital.