Affiliate Faculty
Our faculty come from a variety of departments throughout the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. Interested in becoming Affiliate Faculty? Please fill out this form.
Africana Studies
Gloria Chuku, Professor and Chair of Africana Studies
Gloria Chuku is Professor of Africana Studies with a specialty in African History and the Department Chair. She is Affiliate Professor of the Gender, Women’s + Sexuality Studies Department and Language, Literacy, and Culture PhD Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA. Her research has focused primarily on Igbo history, women in colonial and postcolonial political economies of Nigeria and Africa, ethnonationalisms and conflicts in Nigeria and Africa, African nationalism and intellectual history, and gender and African Diaspora. Professor Chuku is the author of Igbo Women and Economic Transformation in Southeastern Nigeria, 1900-1960 (Routledge, 2005); editor of The Igbo Intellectual Tradition: Creative Conflict in African and African Diasporic Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Ethnicities, Nationalities, and Cross-Cultural Representations in Africa and the Diaspora (Carolina Academic Press, 2015); coeditor of Women and the Nigeria-Biafra War: Reframing Gender and Conflict in Africa (Lexington Books, 2020); and over 70 scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries. She has presented her work across Nigeria and the United States and in Brazil, Canada, Italy, Jamaica, Senegal, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, and Uganda.
Professor Chuku teaches courses in African history, contemporary Africa, contemporary African politics, West African history, Islam in Africa, African culture and development, and women in Africa and the Diaspora.
Ancient Studies
Randolph Ford
Randolph Ford is Assistant Professor of Ancient Studies. He received BA and MA degrees in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an MPhil and PhD from New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. His research and scholarship have focused primarily on the comparative study of history and historiography of the Greco-Roman world, especially in Late Antiquity, and the history and historiography of early medieval China and Central Asia. His first book, Rome, China, and the Barbarians: Ethnographic Traditions and the Transformation of Empires, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. His teaching has included courses on Classical Greece and the Hellenistic World, Republican and Imperial Rome, Late Antiquity, the Early Middle Ages, and frontiers in ancient China and Rome. He has also worked as a guide for Smithsonian Journeys in Iceland, offering lectures on Old Norse/Icelandic literature and history.
Molly Jones-Lewis
Molly Jones-Lewis is a social and cultural historian of ancient medicine. Her research focuses on the ways in which doctors and medical theories functioned within the multicultural environment of the Roman Empire, and she has published on poison and political theory in Pliny the Elder, the role of the Libyan Psylloi in the Roman medical marketplace, and the way that ancient theories of ethnicity were used to justify Roman policy on the Germania border. Her ongoing projects focus on theories of ethnicity, the doctor in Roman law, and applying a de-colonizing lens to ancient scientific literature. Pliny the elder is her favorite Roman.
Dr. Jones-Lewis teaches Latin language at all levels for the MEMS program and has directed independent studies in medieval Latin and the reception of Greek medicine in the writings of medieval Arabic physicians. Her Ancient Medicine, Warfare in the Ancient World, and Magic & Witchcraft in the Ancient World courses all cover material foundational to understanding the science and technology of the Middle Ages. She, along with Lindsay Johnson, teaches UMBC’s summer course in Experimental Archaeology. She is trained in early music performance and plays recorder with the Collegium here at UMBC.
Melissa Kutner
Assistant Professor, earned her B.A. from Rice University in 2004 and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2012. Her interests include the history and archaeology of the Roman economy, cognitive history, measurement and numeracy, domestic space, and bodily practice, including gesture and dress. She has published on the links between Roman money and numeracy and on how calculation shaped ancient notions of value, and her book project examines value circulation in the Roman Empire from the angle of practice (calculation, numeracy, and knowledge through coins, accounts, and measuring). She also investigates the economic, religious, and cultural transition from Rome to Byzantium and Islam in the Near East, especially in Jordan, where her fieldwork has primarily taken place. She is developing a field project there to examine the effect of the Byzantine-Islamic transition on the local economies and identities of small towns and villages. She has taught on a wide range of topics, including Roman art and archaeology, the archaeology of the house, money and value in the ancient world, Egyptian archaeology, and Latin literature.
Timothy Phin
Timothy Phin is a Roman historian and a specialist in Latin language and literature. Tim’s research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the Roman empire. He is particularly interested in the formation of Roman identity, the frequent use of authorial personae in Latin literature, and the lives of women, children, slaves, cinaedi, and other marginals on the edge of Roman society. Much of Tim’s work engages with prose authors like Quintilian, Pliny the Elder, and Tacitus, but he admits to being fondest of Martial’s piquant epigrams. Tim teaches courses on Roman and Greek history, Latin language and literature, mythology and the ancient imagination, children and childhood, gender and sexuality, and sport and spectacle in the ancient world. He was an Honors College faculty fellow from 2012-2014, and has served as the Director of the Humanities Scholars Program since 2018. As a member of several Digital Humanities initiatives at UMBC, Tim presents frequently on the role of technology in the classroom.
English
Raphael Falco
Raphael Falco, Professor of English. Raphael Falco received his B.A. and his Masters degrees from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from New York University. His books include Charisma and Myth (Continuum, 2009), Charismatic Authority in Early Modern English Tragedy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), Conceived Presences: Literary Genealogy in Renaissance England (University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), and Cultural Genealogy and Early Modern Myth (Routledge, 2016). His articles on literary history, Neo-Latin poetics, modern poetry, and intellectual culture have appeared both as book chapters and in a wide range of journals including Modern Philology, Shakespeare Studies, Criticism, Soundings, and Theory, Culture, and Society, Max Weber Studies, and English Literary Renaissance.
Kathryn McKinley
Kathryn McKinley, Professor of English (M.A. Classics, University of Toronto; Ph.D., University of Delaware). Dr. McKinley is founder and a former director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Minor at UMBC and was UMBC Presidential Teaching Professor for 2021-2024. Her research interests include Boccaccio; Chaucer; Latin-vernacular intersections, and the medieval reception of classical antiquity and Ovid. She has published in such journals as Le Tre Corone: Rivista internazionale di studi su Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio, The Chaucer Review, Viator, and English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700. Other publications include Reading the Ovidian Heroine: Metamorphoses Commentaries 1100-1618(Leiden, 2001); (as coeditor, with James G. Clark and Frank T. Coulson) Ovid in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2011); and Chaucer’s House of Fame and its Boccaccian Intertexts: Image, Vision, and the Vernacular (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2016). She currently works on Boccaccio’s engagement with Ovid’s poetry.
Michele Osherow
Michele Osherow, Associate Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty in Judaic Studies and Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Areas of specialization include Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, Biblical Literature, the Renaissance Bible, Shakespearean Dramaturgy and Jewish American Literature. Osherow has extensive experience in professional theatre; she served as the Resident Dramaturg at the Folger Theatre in Washington DC for over 20 years, and performed with several professional theatres in the DC area. Current research includes a project on seventeenth century women’s needlework and a guide on staging Shakespeare. Osherow is the author of Biblical Women’s Voices in Early Modern England (Ashgate) and several articles on Shakespeare, the early modern Bible, and other subjects.
Larissa “Kat” Tracy
Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her work focuses on thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth century English literature that looks back to the pre-Conquest period in England and the Viking Age, with cross-cultural contacts in medieval French, Irish, Norse, and Welsh and a specific focus on social justice, law, medicine, and judicial punishment. She also specializes in medieval sex, sexuality, obscenity, and comedy. She has published ten books including Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature (D.S. Brewer, 2012) and the edited collections Medieval and Early Modern Murder (Boydell, 2018), Treason: Medieval and Early Modern Adultery, Betrayal, and Shame (Brill 2019), and numerous articles on violence, fabliaux, comedy, Norse sagas, romance, gender, hagiography, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. She is also the series editor for Explorations in Medieval Culture (Brill). In 2016, she was a Visiting Scholar at St. John’s College, Oxford. She currently serves as the Vice President of MEARCSTAPA, a professional society dedicated to the study of medieval monstrosity. She has appeared on Great Courses’ series Sex in the Middle Ages and in several National Geographic, Discovery Channel, and History Channel documentaries including Dark Marvels and The Unbelievable! hosted by Dan Aykroyd. Her video podcast Medieval Mischief and Mayhem is available on YouTube, SubStack, and Patreon.
History
Amy Froide
Amy M. Froide, Professor of History at UMBC (Ph.D., Duke University). She researches and teaches in the fields of early modern (Tudor and Stuart) English history, European women’s history, and world history in the early modern world. She is the author of Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2005) and various articles on women and work, the life cycle and marital status of women, women and the Reformation, and the experience of early modern women in English towns. She has published a book on women investors in the first stock market, which originated in England in the 1690s: Silent Partners: Women as Public Investors during Britain’s Financial Revolution, 1690-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Susan McDonough
Susan McDonough, Associate Professor of History (Ph.D., Yale University) is a scholar of
women, gender and sexuality in the medieval Mediterranean. She regularly teaches courses on
the medieval Mediterranean, the history of sexuality, and Jews, Christians, and Muslims in
medieval Europe. She is the author of Witnesses, Neighbors, and Community in Late Medieval
Marseille, along with several articles, and the editor of Boundaries of the Medieval and Wider
World: Essays in Honor of Paul Freedman. She is currently at work on two projects: one is solo-
authored monograph on sex workers, the other, a collaboration with Michelle Armstrong-Partida
of Emory University, began with Mediterranean singlewomen and has grown to include single
men, migration, shared cultures of sexuality, and gender identity. Her work has been supported
by fellowships with the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the Newberry Library.
Constantine Vaporis
Constantine N. Vaporis, Professor of History and Director, Asian Studies Program (Ph.D., Princeton University). His research focuses on the social history of early modern, or Tokugawa/Edo Japan. He is the author of Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan; Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service in Edo and the Culture of Early Modern Japan; and Voices of Early Modern Japan: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life during the Age of the Shoguns. Recently, Vaporis acted a consultant and writer for the National Geographic Museum’s exhibit “Samurai: The Warrior Transformed.” He has also taken part in a number of public forums at the Freer Gallery and for the National Consortium for Teaching About Asia.
Music
Lindsay Johnson
Director of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Associate Teaching Professor in Music, Affiliate Faculty in Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies (Ph.D. in Musicology, University of California, Los Angeles, 2013). Her primary research focuses on seventeenth-century Italian nuns and their music through the lens of sacred eroticism and performed embodiment. Professor Johnson directs the Early Music Collegium at UMBC and teaches courses related to music in history and society. She, along with Molly Jones-Lewis, teaches UMBC’s summer Experimental Archaeology course. She has conducted and performed with UCLA’s Early Music Ensemble and the Salem College Orchestra, and was a member of the Eugene Vocal Arts Ensemble in Eugene, Oregon.
Art History
James Magruder
PhD, 2014. Johns Hopkins University, Art History. My 2014 dissertation at Johns Hopkins focused on Byzantine Cameos and the Aesthetics of the Icon. The topic necessarily broadens my professional interests to the western medieval revival of cameos in the Gothic period. I am particularly interested in the different structure of the jewelry industries of eastern and western Europe in the later Middle Ages, and the trade routes that supplied them.
Emerita Faculty
Stephen Caracciolo
Stephen Caracciolo, Assistant Professor of Music (D.M.A., Indiana University),is a choral conductor recognized for his passionate artistry and creative teaching, and is a nationally known composer and arranger whose choral works have been performed throughout the United States and Europe. His specializations are Choral Composition, 16th Century Parody Mass Technique, and Vocal and Choral Pedagogy.
Robin Farabaugh
Robin Farabaugh, Senior Lecturer Emerita, English (Ph.D. Cornell) specializes in Shakespeare and the writings of Early Modern women. She has published on classical allusions in the work of Lady Mary Wroth, and on using digital resources in teaching Shakespeare, and has lectured on Ovidian influences and translation in the writing of the Countess of Pembroke.
Thomas Field
Thomas Field, Professor of Linguistics and French. (Ph. D., Cornell). Thomas Field is a sociolinguist whose research is centered on southern France. He is currently developing an online database of Medieval Gascon texts and is using this material to study literacy and cultural dynamics in the region over a period stretching from 1100 to the fifteenth century. He has published on the troubadours and on cultural relations within the domain of the langue d’oc and is beginning work on a large-scale project on literacy practices in a minority language.
James Grubb
James S. Grubb, Professor of History (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is author of Firstborn of Venice: Vicenza in the Early Renaissance State and Provincial Families of the Renaissance: Private and Public Life in the Veneto, both published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, and has published two critical editions of Renaissance family memoirs and an edition of Battista Pagliarino’s Cronicae in addition to some two dozen articles and book chapters. He is currently working on a book to be titled Managing Magnificence: Venice’s Noble Commoners and the Creation of a Service Elite. He has served on the Executive Board of the Renaissance Society of America.
Gail Orgelfinger
Gail Orgelfinger, Senior Lecturer Emerita, English (Ph. D., University of Chicago). Dr Orgelfinger specializes in the literary and historical legacy of Joan of Arc and has recently published Joan of Arc in the English Imagination, 1429-1829 with the Penn State Press. She is also interested in the ethical dimensions of chivalry, especially as it is explored in French and English medieval literature. Her edition of the 1518 romance The Hystorye of Olyver of Castylle was published by Garland. An additional interest is medievalism, which Leslie Workman defined as “the continuing process of creating the Middle Ages,” and in that context, she has published on Carl Dreyer’s film The Passion of Joan of Arc and on the significance of allusions to the medieval bestiary in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels.