Advisory Committee

Critical Disability Studies Advisory Committee

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Courtney Hobson

Joining the Dresher Center in 2017, Courtney Hobson works with the director to develop and organize scholarly events and programs for the UMBC community. This includes organizing the Humanities Forum, our public lecture series; CURRENTS, our lunch-time works-in-progress series for faculty and graduate students; social media campaigns; and other related tasks. She also serves on the Advisory Committees for the Public Humanities Program, as well as the Critical Disability Studies Minor.

Outside of UMBC, she works as a  public historian and historical consultant, collaborating with organizations including The Southwest Partnership, Inc., Historical Research Associates, the National Park Service (NPS), the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), and the National Council on Public History (NCPH). Courtney is also a member of the Association of Black Women Historians, ASALH, as well as NCPH, where she currently serves on the Advocacy Committee of the Board.

In her spare time, Courtney is a gardener, amateur archer, cat mom, collector of unread books, and queen of karaoke at her neighborhood bar in Baltimore.

Jessica Berman

Jessica Berman, Professor of English, is also Affiliate Professor of Gender + Women’s Studies and Affiliate Professor of Language, Literacy and Culture. She served as Chair of the English Department from 2006-2012 and currently directs the Dresher Center for the Humanities at UMBC.  Berman was the co-Principal Investigator of a 6-year project in the Dresher Center, The Inclusion Imperative, (2018-2023), made possible by a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which was designed to advance diversity and inclusion in the humanities at UMBC and the region. Her teaching and research interests include comparative literature, modernism from a transnational perspective, literature and culture, and feminist and literary theory. She also has a special interest in questions of politics in connection to twentieth- and twenty-first century world literature. Her book, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism (2011), examined the connection between ethics and politics in early twentieth-century writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Mulk Raj Anand, Cornelia Sorabji, Iqbalunnisa Hussain, Max Aub and Meridel Le Sueur, and argued for an expansive, transnational approach to the definition of literary modernism. Her previous book, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (2001, paper 2006), explored the connection between community and cosmopolitanism in the writings of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. She is the editor of A Companion to Virginia Woolf (2016) and the reprint edition of the Muslim Indian writer, Iqbalunnisa Hussain’s, novel Purdah and Polygamy(2017). She has published essays in such journals as Modernism/Modernity and ˆ, as well as in such influential volumes as Geomodernisms (Doyle and Winkiel eds) and Disciplining Modernism (Caughie ed.).  Berman is currently at work on a book investigating global radio in relation to transnational modernism.

Berman co-edits, with Paul Saint-Amour, the Modernist Latitudes book series at Columbia University Press. In 2016-17, she was the President of the Modernist Studies Association. She has served on the Modern Language Association’s Publication Committee, on the Board of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) and is a co-editor of Futures, the American Comparative Literature Association’s decennial Report on the State of the Discipline (Routledge, 2017).  She was the organizer of the Tenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, “Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds,” at UMBC in 2000 and a co-editor (with Jane Goldman) of the Selected Papers from that conference (Pace University Press, 2001). She has been the recipient of a Whiting Foundation fellowship, a Newberry Library short-term fellowship, and the Richard Halliday Prize of the Henry James Society, among other awards and fellowships. She has been a teaching fellow in the UMBC Humanities Scholars Program, a Bearman Foundation fellow for her first-year seminar, and was a Provost’s Research Fellow in Spring 2007. In Spring 2013 Berman was a Mellon-funded external fellow at the University of North Carolina’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities and a visiting professor in UNC’s Department of English and Comparative Literature. In 2019-2020 she was awarded the Lipitz Professorship, the highest honor recognizing distinguished teaching and research in UMBC’s College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

You can find more about her publications and other projects at
www.JessicaBerman.net

Kate Drabinski

Dr. Kate Drabinski is Teaching Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, Associate Director of the Women Involved in Learning and Leadership (WILL+) program, a co-curricular program and Living-Learning community sponsored by GWST, and Director of UMBC’s Humanities Scholars Program. She received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric with a graduate certificate in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006. She has taught a wide range of introductory courses in gender and sexuality studies at several universities. During her four-year tenure at Tulane University, Kate presided over a curriculum revision process that resulted in tremendous enrollment growth in the Gender and Sexuality Studies department.

At UMBC she teaches Introduction to Transgender Studies, Introduction to Critical Sexuality Studies, Studies in Feminist Activism, Unruly Bodies, and Sexuality and Queer Theory.

Dr. Kate is the point person for the Critical Sexuality Studies minor that she helped develop in 2011-2012. She serves on advisory boards for the Public Humanities minor, and the Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community and Culture. She is co-chair, with Dr. Michelle Scott, of the Women’s Faculty Network.

Kate’s research interests include transgender studies, critical pedagogy, public history, and theories of activism. She is on the Editorial Board of the journal Radical Teacher and the Baltimore Heritage LGBT History Committee. She writes a popular bicycling blog that deals with local history, politics, and culture and regularly hosts walking tours about Baltimore. She has written extensively for local and web-based publications. Her latest publication is the edited volume Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City, co-edited with Dr. Nicole King and Dr. Joshua Clarke Davis (Rutgers UP, 2019).

Drew Holladay

Drew Holladay, Assistant Professor of English, joined the faculty at UMBC in 2017 after completing his doctorate at the University of Louisville. He has presented at numerous national and regional conferences, including the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Rhetoric Society of America biennial conference, and his writing has been published in Technical Communication Quarterly and JAC.

Dr. Holladay’s research combines rhetorical theory, disability studies, sociolinguistics, and digital humanities to examine writing about medicine, the brain, and mental health. His dissertation focused on informal writing within online mental health discussion boards, where he investigated the strategies people use to argue and advocate for appropriate medical support and improved public understanding of their mental disabilities.

Throughout his work, Dr. Holladay studies the effect of an increasingly potent biomedical ideology on discourses of mental health–how biological explanations of brain function and behavior are taken up in psychiatric and psychological research as well as arguments in the legal and criminal justice systems, educational institutions, and government policies. He is also interested in the use of corpus linguistics to study the appearance of medical terms in popular discourse and science journalism.

Stephanie Lazarus

Accessibility Manager & Campus ADA Coordinator

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Tania Lizarazo

Tania Lizarazo is the Director of the Minor in Critical Disability Studies. She is Associate Professor in Modern Languages, Linguistics and Intercultural Communication and the Global Studies Program at UMBC. She is a neurodivergent and disabled immigrant from Colombia. Her research has used community-engaged methods, mainly collaborative ethnography and digital storytelling, to explore survival, migration, and identity. She is the author of Postconflict Utopias: Everyday Survival in Chocó, Colombia (University of Illinois Press, 2024).
Her class “I’m a Cyborg But That’s OK,” titled after a South Korean rom-com, explores the figure of the cyborg to interrogate how cultural identity and disability are constructed through social media and the role of technology in defining humanness in an increasingly digital ang global world.

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Sharon N. Tran

Sharon N. Tran is Assistant Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty in Asian Studies and Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research focuses on multiethnic American literatures and cultures with an emphasis on Asian American literature, gender studies, and disability studies. Her work has appeared in MELUS, the Journal of Asian American Studies, Contemporary Literature, Signs, and American Quarterly. Her book manuscript, Asian Girlhood in the Shadows of U.S. Empire is currently in production with University of Minnesota Press and will be forthcoming in spring 2026. She was awarded a 2021-2022 Career Enhancement Fellowship by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars in support of her research and broader commitment to eradicating racial disparities in higher education and fostering more institutional access and support for communities of color. Tran serves on the Gender and Women’s Studies Coordinating Committee as well as the Advisory Boards for the Women’s Center and the Critical Disability Studies Minor. She teaches courses on race and ethnicity in U.S. literature, disability studies, comics, and science and speculative fiction.

Semhar Yohaness

Semhar Yohannes has been serving as a Science Reference and Instruction Librarian for nearly a decade. In her current role at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), she teaches library instruction sessions, conducts reference consultations, and has developed workshops and other outreach initiatives. In 2018, she obtained her Master of Public Health (MPH) degree with a concentration on health literacy in young adults.