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.

Panelists:

• Dr. Kimberly Moffit
• Michelle Coles
• Ashley Minner Jones
• Moderated by Lindsey Baker