Exciting Changes for UMBC’s Center for the Humanities

May 31, 2007
To: The UMBC Community
Fr: Arthur T. Johnson, Provost
John W. Jeffries, Dean, College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Re: UMBC’s Center for the Humanities
We are pleased to announce important changes involving the UMBC Center for the Humanities. Thanks to a generous gift from the Dresher Foundation, the Center will now be known as the James T. and Virginia M. Dresher Center for the Humanities. The Dresher Center for the Humanities will have an expanded mission to support and enhance research in the humanities while continuing to manage the existing Humanities Scholars Program and Humanities Forum lecture series. This larger mission for the Center is a priority of the University administration and of the current Capital Campaign.
Professor Rebecca Boehling will be Director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities, and Professor Michele Osherow will be Associate Director. We are fortunate to have such well-qualified leaders for the Dresher Center and its programs. An Associate Professor of History who received her B.A. from Duke University and her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Professor Boehling is a scholar of 20th -century German history. She is author of A Question of Priorities: Democratic Reform and Economic Recovery in Postwar Germany as well as of numerous articles and essays, and she has two book manuscripts currently underway. She has also received a number of research awards, including a prestigious Volkswagen Foundation Research Fellowship and a Visiting Research Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. She has served as Graduate Program Director in the Department of History and as Acting Director of the Honors College, and she is affiliated with the Gender and Women’s Studies Program and the Judaic Studies Program.
Professor Michele Osherow will teach in the Department of English as Clinical Assistant Professor while serving as Associate Director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities. She has previously been Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Assistant and Associate Director of the Shakespeare Association of America, and Acting Director of the UMBC Center for the Humanities. A scholar of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, Professor Osherow earned her B.A. from Carnegie Mellon and her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research combines her interests in early modern literature and biblical studies, and she is completing a book manuscript on this topic. She has also published a number of articles and is a dramaturg and an actor at the Folger Theatre and other theatres.
We look forward to the James T. and Virginia M. Dresher Center for the Humanities taking on a major role in promoting scholarship in the humanities on campus and in the region.