Public Humanities Panelists
Olvin Abrego Ayala (He/Him/Él) (Panel 5) is a Honduran-born undergraduate student at Dartmouth College. He is majoring in Latin American & Caribbean studies with a focus on Central American Studies. He is currently a student researcher for the Central America Project alongside Prof. Jorge Cuellar and co-leads his school’s first Central American Club, CAUSA.
Allie Alvis (Panel 1) is a book historian, social media enthusiast, and communicator – you may know them as @Book_Historia on Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and elsewhere. Allie is a rare book cataloguer at DC antiquarian bookseller Typer Punch Matrix. They are the former special collections reference librarian of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, and hold masters degrees in book history and information management from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow. They have spoken and published widely on a variety of topics, including the use of arsenic in bookbindings, the history of bookshelf organization, and glove use with rare books (recently featured in the New York Times!).
Anthony Batts II (Panel 6) is a lifelong learner and educator from Prince George’s County, Maryland. As a Lead teacher within the Friendship Public Charter School network, Dr. Batts helped train teachers within the Early College Academy while working towards a Master’s in Secondary Education (2013). In 2019, he transitioned to Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, MD, ranked third in Maryland for academic achievement. As an educator within the Montgomery County public school system, he developed an understanding of the importance of student discovery and the social connection of literacy amongst youth. This transformed into his primary research topic, with which he earned a Doctorate of Education in Leadership and Management from Drexel University (2020).
As founder and CEO of the Batts Educational Network, Dr. Batts promotes academic strategies surrounding literacy development for students within the African American community. He published Deuce: A Second Chance at Life in 2021. This book recounts an African American adolescent navigating childhood depression and issues of self-confidence and self-consciousness to find an eventual appreciation of life. His second book, A Book of Selected Short Stories: by Dr. Anthony Batts II, is a collection of dynamic stories in which the different characters learn life lessons through their interactions. Dr. Batts works on literary projects to create enthusiastic reading communities amongst younger generations.
Dr. Batts continues his passion for teaching as Lecturer of Academic Writing at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Christopher Bonner (Plenary) specializes in African American history and the nineteenth-century United States. He published his first book, Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship, in March 2020 with the University of Pennsylvania Press. This book centers free black Americans in the legal transformations of the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. Prof. Bonner is currently at work on a project considering how enslaved people navigated commercial networks as they sought to purchase freedom in the early nineteenth century. He is also a member of the CLCS Steering Committee.
Lee Boot (Plenary) is a media artist and researcher. He is Director of the Imaging Research Center, and Affiliate Associate Professor of Visual Arts, Computer Science and Engineering at UMBC. His practice involves bringing values, modes and methods from the arts into multidisciplinary teams addressing serious societal challenges such as substance misuse, low education achievement, healthcare and the epidemiology of pandemics. Such teams work to develop and test new approaches to the configuration of technology, and to the design of media and visualization forms and content.
Jorge Cuéllar (Panel 5) is Assistant Professor of Latin American, Latinx & Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College where he writes and teaches courses on modern Central America, migration, race, and critical social theory. Jorge’s work on the politics, culture, and the history of Central America and its diasporas has been published widely across a variety of academic and public venues. Founded in 2019, Cuéllar also advises the Central America Project, a student-driven public humanities initiative focused on drawing attention to Central American intellectual and cultural production in the U.S. and in the region. Most recently, this collective work yielded the exhibition Bolas de Fuego: Culture and Conflict in Central America at the Hood Museum of Art.
Fernando Duran (Panel 5) is a Doctoral Candidate in English at the University of Maryland. He studies Latinx literature and culture. His research examines the relationship between Central American literature and the environment, with a focus on how Central American writers reimagine literary genres as a means of environmental critique during the rise of multinational agribusiness, war and armed conflict, and migration from and within Central America.
Erin Green (Panel 2) is a PhD Student in English at the University of Maryland specializing in community-engaged writing. Erin’s research examines literacy practices of social justice/community organizers, specifically how critical race theory-counterstory is used in prison/police abolition movements. They also are committed to abolitionist teaching praxis.
Denise Griffin Johnson (Plenary) is the Former Director of the Arch Social Community Network, current Principal Director, and 49 Whitman Fellow for the West Baltimore Re-imaging Culture and Economic Project. Denise has decades of experience as an organizer and advocate in Baltimore, during which she has held many positions in government and nonprofit organizations and served on numerous boards and advisory groups. She is a co-founder of CultureWorks Baltimore, a member of the national network Alternate ROOTS, and a Cultural Agent with the US Department of Arts and Culture (a non-government entity).
Eileen Harrington (Panel 4) is the Assistant Director and Health & Life Sciences Librarian at the Priddy Library, a branch of the University of Maryland Libraries at The Universities at Shady Grove. Eileen has been a formal and informal educator both in the United States and in Latin America. Her research interests include health humanities, libraries and health literacy, and informal science education. She has a BA in environmental studies and biology from Macalester College, a master’s degree in environmental studies from York University, Toronto, and a master’s degree in library and information studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Kahdeidra Monét Martin (Panel 3) is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where she manages the Black Academic Development Lab led by Associate Dean Anne Charity Hudley. She is a Manbo Asogwe, a priestess in the asson lineage of Haitian Vodou. Through the lenses of critical race theory, intersectionality, and translanguaging, Dr. Martin examines raciolinguistics and the co-naturalization of language, race, and spirituality in the lives of African descendant people globally. She received her Ph.D. in Urban Education at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her dissertation received the 2022 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Qualitative Research SIG of the American Educational Research Association.
Nat McGartland (Panel 1) is a PhD candidate in English working in digital studies and the history of the book. She is particularly interested in the affordances of technology—both print and digital media—and our affective responses to its material and visual properties. As a BookLab Graduate Assistant, Nat works on critical making and craft activism. Her protest art has been featured in the New York Times, Reuters, Politico, and more. As an instructor, she teaches introductory writing, media studies, and digital humanities. Nat is also the chair of the Graduate English Organization (GEO).
Denise Meringolo (Plenary) is a scholar-practitioner in the field of public history. Her first book Radical Roots: Public History and a Tradition of Social Justice Activism(Amherst College Press, 2021), grew out of a collaborative research study for which she served as the primary investigator and project editor as well as a contributor. She is the creator of the crowdsourced digital collection, Preserve the Baltimore Uprising. She currently serves as the Vice-President/President-Elect of the National Council on Public History.
Michelle V. Moncrieffe (Panel 4) is a lecturer, advisor and transdisciplinary researcher. She is the Principal Investigator/Director of the NAME project. As well as being a certified health education specialist (CHES), Michelle is a freelance health journalist. Over two decades, her work has been published in Baltimore Magazine, Johns Hopkins Health Review and local newspapers across the U.S. Michelle earned her MA in Journalism (with a focus on health communication) from the University of Iowa. Thereafter, she was a research associate for a global health project at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Michelle’s first teaching experience was at the Tanzania School of Journalism, in Dar es Salaam. Although Michelle has not lived in her hometown for many years, she still describes herself as a Londoner.
Shannon Neal (Panel 1) explores affect and trauma in global modernist literatures, with an eye to gender and sexuality, visual arts and culture, and the reverberations of imperialism. Prior to entering the Masters in English literature program at the University of Maryland, they worked in the field of public humanities in archives, libraries, and museums. They earned a BA in English from Washington College and are a current Poetry Screener for Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal @ Washington College.
Maureen O’Neill (Plenary) is a Library Media Specialist and Film Teacher at the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute where she also coordinates GSA advisers for the Baltimore City Schools. Dr. ONeill was named Baltimore City History Day Teacher of the Year in 2015 and was presented the American Association for School Librarians Collaborative Teaching Award in 2009. Dr ONeill values more than a decade of collaboration with the faculty and staff at UMBC.
Ricardo L. Ortiz (Reflections) is a Professor of US Latinx Literature and Culture in the English Department at Georgetown University; he also serves as Director of Georgetown’s Master’s Program in Engaged and Public Humanities. Prof. Ortiz completed a three-year appointment on the Executive Committee of the Association of Departments of English, serving as its President in his final year, in 2022. In 2019 he organized and published a scholarly cluster for Post-45 on “The Public Humanities as Comparatist Practice,” and from 2016 to 2018 he contributed to the Modern Language Association’s Mellon-funded “Connected Academics” national project on the future of humanities graduate training as part of Georgetown’s partnership in the project.
Jonathan Peraza Campos, M.S. (he/him/él) (Panel 5) is the Program Specialist for Teaching Central America at Teaching for Change. Additionally, he is an educational professional and community organizer who studies, teaches, and organizes at the intersection of racism, imperialism, immigration, militarism, incarceration, policing, and education, especially pertaining to the US South and Central America/ns. He is an educational consultant and an abolitionist educator and organizer invested in building the next generation of leaders. Much of his work has focused on teaching Latinx and immigrant youth about their histories, writers, thinkers, and movements through an ethnic studies lens.
Clotilde Puértolas (Panel 4) is the Program Manager for Adults and Older Adults at the Montgomery County Public Libraries (MCPL), where she arranges and manages programs, special events and other initiatives. She has been working at MCPL since 2011. Previously, Clotilde worked on organizations focused on education and services around the issues of sexual assault, child abuse and women’s rights. Clotilde holds a PhD in history from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and has taught history at the undergraduate level.
Fatima Seck (Panel 3) is a PhD student in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Maryland – College Park. She obtained her M.A. in French and Francophone Studies from George Mason University. Fatima Seck is an editorial assistant at the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, where she alongside others host the segment Conversations in Atlantic Theory.
Siril Stephen (Panel 4) is a junior at the University of Maryland studying biochemistry with aspirations to become a dentist. He is interning for the NAME Project, where he aims to increase awareness of the inequities in access to dental care. With experience in dental offices, from the front desk to assisting, he understands patients' concerns about the cost of dental work. Siril hopes to dispel the fears and stereotypes associated with visiting the dentist to improve public oral health. Siril is eager to utilize his knowledge and expertise to improve his community's overall health and well-being, bringing smiles to the faces of those he serves.
Sheryl Syme (Panel 4), RDH, MS, Associate Professor, Division of Periodontics, University of Maryland School of Dentistry (UMSOD) served for many years as undergraduate and graduate Dental Hygiene Program Director and is founder of the Dual Degree BS/MS Clinical DH Leader Track. Sheryl obtained her B.S. degree from the UMSOD and her M.S. degree from the UMB Graduate School. Sheryl received prior grant support for developing the UMB CURE Scholars Oral Health Promotion and Sealant Program for adolescents aimed to increase underrepresented minorities in biomedical sciences and to serve as a foundation for oral health improvement in West Baltimore’s most underserved schools.
Isaiah West (he/him) (Panel 2) is the Teen Services Specialist for the Prince George's County Memorial Library System (MD). With 10 years of experience working with teens, tweens, and young adults, Isaiah focuses on empowering teens while maintaining strong connections through community partnerships to ensure teen-friendly communities.
Historical artist Lillian Young (Panel 1) depicts forgotten or not well-known moments in the historical Black experience, focusing on lesser-known Black leaders, stories, events, and objects commonly known within Black communities. Her work has appeared in galleries across the United States and is currently on view in South Africa. Lillian is the Family Programs Coordinator at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. She received her BFA in Studio Art from Texas Christian University and in the Spring of 2022, she received her MFA in Studio Art with a certification in Museum Studies from Michigan State University. Lillian has worked at the Kimbell Art Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The National Portrait Gallery, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.