Maryland Humanities Annual Meeting: The Humanities as Democratic Resistance
July 9 @ 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm
The energy doesn’t stop after the conference. Join us for our first ever Annual Meeting on July 9th from 4:30 – 5:30 p.m. at UMBC.
Maryland Humanities Annual Meeting
This Has Happened Before: The Humanities as Democratic Resistance
Historians know this playbook. When authoritarian movements rise, they target the same things: archives, libraries, universities, curriculum, public memory, and the people who ask hard questions about power. What is happening right now in the United States is not unprecedented. It has happened before, and the humanities give us the tools to recognize it, name it, and resist it.
This panel asks a harder question than simply what is under attack. It asks what the humanities missed and why. It brings together people who are not only responding to the present crisis but building something designed to outlast it: educators who have stayed in communities the humanities too often left behind, scholars who have built pipelines for the people the field was slow to include, and practitioners who have used history and law to help communities understand their own power.
Humanities education is not a cultural nicety. It is a survival skill for democracy. And the question before us is not only how we protect it, but how we teach and engage differently going forward.
Lindsey Baker, CEO of Maryland Humanities, will be in conversation with our featured panelists:
Michelle Coles is an award-winning young adult novelist, former civil rights attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice, and public speaker. She currently serves as a Commissioner on the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a first of its kind in the United States. She is a proud alumna of Howard University School of Law, where she graduated as valedictorian of her class, and the University of Virginia. Her goal in writing is to empower young people by educating them about history and giving them the tools to shape their own destiny. She lives in Maryland with her family. Her debut young adult historical fiction novel, Black Was the Ink, was published with Tu Books, an imprint of Lee and Low Books, on November 2, 2021. Black Was the Ink received numerous awards including the 2022 Grateful American Book Prize, a 2022 Skipping Stone Award, a 2023 In the Margins Award, and the 2019 New Visions Award Honor.
Ashley Minner Jones is a community-based visual artist and folklorist from Baltimore, Maryland where she has lived on the same block her entire life. Her interdisciplinary practice is deeply rooted in place—usually in the context of the U.S. South—and is focused on honoring and celebrating everyday people by lifting up their stories. As an artist, she has exhibited widely and her work is represented in several prominent collections. Her research is being archived as “the Ashley Minner Collection” in the Albin O. Kuhn Library of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where she was formerly a Professor of the Practice in the Department of American Studies and the inaugural Director of the minor in Public Humanities. Just prior to her return to independent practice, she worked as Assistant Curator for History and Culture at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. She is currently contracting with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and preparing for a fall artist residency with the Baltimore Museum of Art. Ashley is an enrolled citizen of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She earned an MFA in Community Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Maryland College Park. She loves American roots music, road trips, and spending time with her family. She lives with her husband, daughter, and turtle, Leadbelly, in the midst of many other relatives.
Dr. Kimberly R. Moffitt serves as Dean of the Cathy Hughes School of Communications at Howard University She is board president of the National Association for Media Literate Education, board member of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance, and board member and grants committee chair for Maryland Humanities.