Dresher Center Faculty Fellows for Summer and Fall 2026
The Dresher Center for the Humanities Advisory Board has awarded fellowships to the following UMBC faculty for Summer and Fall 2026
Summer 2026
Haniyeh Barahouie, Associate Professor, Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication - Sahelian Sisterhood: Reproductive Tenderness and Women’s Resistance in Moolaadé, Le Pagne, and Lingui
This project examines how three Sahelian films, including the Senegalese Ousmane Sembène’s Moolaadé (2004), the Nigerien Moussa Hamadou Djingarey’s Le Pagne (2015), and the Chadian Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Lingui (2021), portray women supporting one another through reproductive crises such as female genital cutting, rape, and illegal abortion.
Lisa Cassell, Assistant Professor, Philosophy - Logic's Own Epistemology: Two Notions of Rationality
This project provides a foundational account of logic that centers systems of probabilistic reasoning. Cassell will argue that what looks like a foundational problem for systems of probabilistic reasoning is actually the result of conflating two notions of rationality that are both assumed to provide the normative foundations of these systems. The first of these is a scientific notion of rationality, whereas the second is an economic notion of rationality.
Iris Blake, Assistant Teaching Professor, American Studies - Undisciplining the Voice
Undisciplining the Voice proposes that aligning voice with sound and the human has been central to the colonial project of modernity. Focusing on the North American settler context, Blake examines a range of archival and artistic sources – including sound technologies, performances, and installation artworks – to trace not only definitions of voice that have consolidated colonial and heteropatriarchal power structures, but also decolonial genealogies of voicing that I term voicing otherwise.
Fall 2026
Jason Loviglio, Professor, Media and Communication Studies - Smart Speaker as Cassandra
This project draws critical attention to a lively, if overlooked, narrative preoccupation rippling through audio fiction about the role that home-based “smart” appliances play in re-shaping the dynamics of gendered work, domestic power relations, and corporate surveillance.
Brian Van Wyck, Assistant Professor, History - Making Turks, Making Muslims: Islam, Education, and Turkish Migration in the Federal Republic Germany, 1961-2006
The manuscript traces ideas about Turkishness and Islam between Turkey and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from the 1960s to the 1990s. It centers on teachers and imams from Turkey who served the substantial Turkish-origin population in the FRG.
Please join us in congratulating these fellows!
Posted: May 11, 2026, 9:00 AM