The Department of English presents a film screening and discussion with director, Leslie Askew.

In Search of Phillis Wheatley Peters is a 35-minute short film that reveals the little-known love story of Phillis Wheatley —America’s first published Black poet—and John Peters, a free Black man she married in 1778. Drawing from the groundbreaking scholarship of historian Dr. Cornelia Dayton, the film brings new archival discoveries to life, revealing the couple’s struggles for autonomy, dignity, and survival in Revolutionary-era Boston. Featuring insights from leading scholars and poets, the film reimagines Phillis not just as a literary icon, but as a woman who chose love, partnership, and resistance against extraordinary odds.

Click HERE to watch the trailer. 

This event is sponsored by the Department of English, Africana Studies, and the Dresher Center for the Humanities. All are welcome to attend and refreshments will follow the event.

Please join the Center for Social Science Scholarship for a faculty workshop with Professor Adam Seth Levine.

Adam Seth Levine, SNF Agora Institute Professor of Health Policy and Management Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University and President of research4impact

This workshop is designed for researchers who have unmet desire for new cross-sector collaborative relationships themselves (with policymakers or practitioners), and/or lead institutes/programs/initiatives in which the people they work with have this unmet desire. We’ll talk through what makes building these relationships challenging and, as a result, how to start (and how not to start). It’ll include some lecture-style material with empirical data that is (in part) tailored to the goals of the audience, and then also have significant time for interaction and questions.

REGISTER HERE

For their Social Science Forum, the Center for Social Science Scholarship presents:

Policymakers' Unmet Desire for Science

Adam Seth Levine, SNF Agora Institute Professor of Health Policy and Management Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University 
President of research4impact

We often think of policymakers in the US as either pro-science or anti-science. In his talk, Dr. Adam Seth Levine will argue for a third possibility as well: many of them have an unmet desire for science. He will discuss why it’s important to measure this unmet desire and then, using a series of nationally-representative studies and randomized-controlled trials, how to surface and meet it (as well as assess the impact of doing so). The data come from federal, state, and local policymakers, and a wide variety of research areas relevant to policy challenges they face (e.g., the environment, mental health, bioethics, neuroscience, child and family policy, etc.). The goal is to provide insights that are both interesting and actionable, including evidence-based strategies that attendees can implement (if they wish) to deepen their own connections between research and policy.

Organized by the Center for Social Science Scholarship. Cosponsored by the Department of Political Science, the Division of Research and Creative Achievement, the Dresher Center for the Humanities, the Erickson School of Aging Studies, the Global Studies Program, iHARP, the Public Health Research Center, and the Sondheim Public Affairs Scholars Program.

CS3 sponsored events are open for full participation by all individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or any other protected category under applicable federal law, state law, and the University’s nondiscrimination policy.

Join senior seminar and graduate class “Work and Contemporary Literature” for three discussions on new books about work. Authors will join virtually.

Amy De’Ath, Assistant Professor of English at Tufts University, will discuss Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction (Stanford University Press, 2026).

In this daring study, Amy De'Ath develops a new type of literary criticism attuned to the way our lives are shaped by capital's impersonal compulsions – by what happens "behind our backs." Challenging the symptomatic interpretive methods of Western Marxism, De'Ath argues that value-critical accounts of Marx's work enable a feminist reading method that understands how value dissimulates itself from the social forms it generates, obscuring their historical content.

Close reading works by Kay Gabriel, Bernadette Mayer, Bhanu Kapil, Marie Annharte Baker, Alli Warren, and Hannah Black, Behind Our Backs explains how these examples of feminized ingenuity reveal capital to be the expression of a social relation that must take form—an abstract logic realized every day, and one whose gendering inversions are felt and critiqued in the poetic experiments of trans, queer, Indigenous, and diasporic writing. Feminized poetry, De'Ath demonstrates, is both a central archive and theoretical powerhouse for the critique of capitalist political economy.

This mini-series is organized by the Department of English and co-sponsored by the Dresher Center; the Department of American Studies; and the Language, Literacy, and Culture program.

Register on the original myUMBC post

Following "Touring the Abyss: Unwellness in the University," and office hours, this workshop (open to faculty, staff, and students) will include a collaborative close-reading of syllabi through a critical approach or "access audit." Dr. Mimi Khúc will share her "starter kit" for access audits as well as some concrete examples of changes she has made in her own teaching.

Mimi Khúc, PhD, is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is the Co-Editor of The Asian American Literary Review and an adjunct professor in Asian American studies and disability studies. Her work includes Open in Emergency, the Asian American Tarot, and dear elia: letters from the Asian American Abyss, a deep dive into unwellness at the intersection of ableism, model minoritization, and the university. She loves cats more than you can probably imagine.

The UMBC Shriver Center, School of Education, and Community Leadership Programs invite you to join them for a conversation with author Elaine Weiss and UMBC’s Dr. Brandon Beck!

Spell Freedom: The Story of the Underground Schools that Built the Civil Rights Movement

Elaine Weiss is a journalist, popular speaker, and media commentator. She wrote an award-winning account of the women’s suffrage movement, The Woman’s Hour. Her acclaimed book Spell Freedom highlights the story of Black activist Septima Clark and her Civil Rights colleagues in creating schools that trained tens of thousands of aspiring Black voters across the South.

Dr. Brandon Beck is an Assistant Professor in the UMBC School of Education. His scholarship and teaching center on the history of Black education, community- based pedagogies, and the use of oral history for reparative social justice. His research examines how historical narratives can be reclaimed to highlight the transformative role of Black educators and community organizing in Civil Rights history.

Registration is required: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfTu-0sfLW6RI-jXTacTnWuqJdQDwyVDLRZDxnM6o2oCKEBDQ/viewform

Co-sponsored by Center for Social Justice Dialogue; the Department of Political Science; the Dresher Center for the Humanities; the George and Betsy Sherman Center; the Orser Center for Public Humanities; the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Center; and the Women's, Gender, and Equity Center.

This event is open for full participation by all individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or any other protected category under applicable federal law, state law, and the University's nondiscrimination policy.

What is a zine?

Zines (ZEEN) are non-commerical, small-circulation magazines which their creators produce, publish and distributethemselves.

What can zines do?

Mini zines that explore and express our own stories of justice and how they intersect with design, community building, joy, belonging, and access. How will our zine creations amplify overshadowed disabled narratives, holding space for conversations on Feminism, Disability Design Futures, LGBTQ+, Anti-Racism, Disability Justice,equity, belonging, access, and collective liberation for all.

What are we making?

The practice of zine-making emphasizes creative storytelling, self-advocacy, and photography through the use of paper and craft materials. Zine content can be in the form of social justice political prose, or poetry often those stories left out of mainstream media.

Jen White-Johnson is an Afro-Latina, disabled artist, designer, educator, and activist, whose visual work explores the intersection of content and caregiving with an emphasis on redesigning ableist visual culture.

Masks are required and will be provided.

Join senior seminar and graduate class “Work and Contemporary Literature” for three discussions on new books about work. Authors will join virtually.

Annie McClanahan, Associate Professor of English at UC Irvine , will discuss Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work (Princeton University Press, 2026).

Today, 80 percent of U.S. workers do service work, from delivering takeout to mopping floors to teaching. Each time we are handed a bag of groceries or a cup of coffee, call for a cab or have our homework graded, we confront both the enormity and the intimacy of the contemporary service sector.

Do these jobs have anything in common? Who is doing this work? And what kind of labor politics does it generate?

If service work has often been treated as a footnote to modern capitalism, Beneath the Wage reveals it as crucial to understanding how exploitation functions today. Uncovering a history that runs from eighteenth-century servants to present-day gig workers, Annie McClanahan retheorizes capitalism from the perspective of the service economy, challenging conventional assumptions about how work is waged, regulated, managed, and automated.

Assembling a diverse set of sources for understanding and reimagining service work—from reality television and conceptual poetry to novels and workers’ own descriptions of what they do—McClanahan explores three paradigmatic types of contemporary service labor: superexploited tipwork, deskilled clerical microwork, and informalized gigwork. She shows how work done “beneath the wage” depends on racialized and gendered forms of economic domination, is often excluded from labor organizing and regulation, and yet has begun to generate a new politics of social reproduction and solidarity.

This mini-series is organized by the Department of English and co-sponsored by the Dresher Center; the Department of American Studies; and the Language, Literacy, and Culture program.

The Department of Africana Studies presents the 48th Annual W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture

"On Deviance and Defiance: Commandeering Futures Through Poor Black Women’s Social Reproduction”

As poor Black women’s wage labor and fertility remained foundational sites of political and economic governance and surveillance, women have devised resistance practices that we have come to understand as deviant and unhealthy. Dr. Harper-Shipman’s talk invites us to explore deviant and unhealthy practices of poor Black women within a liberatory framework for collective reproductive and material freedom for all people. It will examine how poor Black women in North Carolina and Senegal craft alternate routes and ends to reproductive freedom, and how we can expand these practices as anti-capitalist and anti-fascist world-making efforts.

Takiyah Harper-Shipman is the Chair of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Davidson College in North Carolina. Her scholarly work explores political economy at the intersections of race and gender. Dr. Harper-Shipman has authored two books:Unruly Fertility: Race, Development, and Decolonial Reproductive Politics (Stanford University Press, July 2026) and Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa (Routledge, 2019); and published in leading scholarly journals, including Third World Quarterly, Journal of Asian and African Studies, International Studies Review, and Philosophy and Global Affairs. 

Co-sponsored by Office of the Dean for the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences; the Center for Social Science Scholarship; the Shriver Center; and the Dresher Center for the Humanities.

The Asian Studies Program presents

Food, Empire, & World History

Food stood at the center of Mussolini’s attempt to occupy Ethiopia and build an Italian Empire in East Africa. Simone Cinotto illustrates the workings of empire in the circulation of migrants, foodways, and colonial practices, as well as African anticolonial resistance. In going beyond simple colonizer/colonized binaries, this study offers a nuanced picture of lived, multisensorial experiences with food in the Italian imperial context.

Simone Cinotto is Professor of Modern History at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy, where he is the Director of the master’s program in World Food Studies and Reference Professor for Fulbright cultural exchange programs between Italy and the United States. Cinotto is the author of several books, including Gastrofascism and Empire: Food in Italian East Africa, 1935-1941 (Bloomsbury, 2024), The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City (University of Illinois Press, 2013), and Soft Soil Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California (New York University Press, 2012).

Co-sponsored by the Dresher Center for the Humanities; the Department of American Studies; the Department of Political Science; and the Department of Media and Communication Studies.

This event is open for full participation by all individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or any other protected category under applicable federal law, state law, and the University's nondiscrimination policy. 

Join senior seminar and graduate class “Work and Contemporary Literature” for three discussions on new books about work. Authors will join virtually.

Sarah Dowling, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at University of Toronto, will discuss Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form (Northwestern University Press, 2024).

The prostitute, the protester, the murder victim, the invalid, the layabout, the depressive: all are associated with lying down. Skewing and flattening the perpendicular axis that defines the human in Western philosophy, art, and humanist inquiry, these downward-directed figures’ refusals or failures to hew to the moral and postural logics of uprightness enable a reassessment of subjectivity, ecological relation, and representation—that last of which is, after all, a process of standing-in-for. Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form works across an array of well-known and counter-canonical texts, showing that recumbent figures saturate the literary arts of the present and respond to the proliferation of contemporary forms of grounding, in all its meanings. Reading these figures in dialogue with critical Indigenous studies, disability studies, and horizontalist feminisms, Sarah Dowling reveals the potential in thinking with and through a position stretched out across, dependent on, and undetachable from the earth.

This mini-series is organized by the Department of English and co-sponsored by the Dresher Center; the Department of American Studies; and the Language, Literacy, and Culture program.