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Public Humanities

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Media Coverage:

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Faculty Team, Inheritance Baltimore, 2021-present

I am a team member of Inheritance Baltimore, a multi-year reparations program for humanities education and arts-based public engagement in black Baltimore. Through an investment in black history and the arts, it seeks to redirect a portion of the social and institutional capital that Johns Hopkins University has accumulated for more than a century in its defense of white intellectual and material interests in Baltimore. A collaboration between the Program in Racism, Immigration and Citizenship, the Billie Holiday Project for Liberation Arts, and the Sheridan Libraries , this project  puts forth the arts and archival work as mechanisms for ameliorating deep historical wrongs. 

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Images, Fellowships, and Media Coverage:

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Director, Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center, Johns Hopkins University, Oct 2020-present

I direct the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center, which advances original research and public humanities scholarship by connecting faculty, students, staff, and the larger Baltimore community to the Sheridan Libraries & University Museums’ special collections of rare books, manuscripts, and archives. The Tabb Center cultivates an exchange of knowledge between Johns Hopkins University and the larger Baltimore community through participatory action research, oral history initiatives, performance, community-based learning, exhibitions, and lectures. 

Director, The Peabody Ballroom Experience, Oct 2018-present

The Peabody Ballroom Experience is a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and the queer and trans artists of color who make up Baltimore’s ballroom scene. The project cultivates an exchange of knowledge between JHU and ballroom, bringing together faculty, students, and ballroom leaders as partners in education, and approaches performance as a repository for history and knowledge, expanding what “public history” can look and feel like. Project components include film screenings, panel discussions, dance workshops, oral histories, a documentary film, and a culminating ball performance competition at the opulent George Peabody Library.

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Winner of the National Council on Public History's  Outstanding Public History Project Award, 2023. 

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Essays and Media Coverage:

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  • Ten-minute film profiling the project, produced by the Johns Hopkins Film & Media Studies MA program.

  • “Ballroom Blitz,” Johns Hopkins HUB, Oct. 15, 2019.

  • “No Glitter Allowed: Ballroom 101,” Bmore Art, Apr. 18, 2019.

  • Rose Wagner, “Baltimore Was One of the First Cities to Celebrate Drag Culture,” Washington Post, June 2021.

  • “Hard Histories” review by Dr. Martha S. Jones, 2023. 

Director, Vanguard Revisited, Jan. 2010-June 2011.

I structured Vanguard Revisited as an imagined conversation between two cohorts of homeless and marginally housed youth activists in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district: one which in 1966 founded the seminal organization Vanguard and another which in 2011 “reconstituted” the organization around contemporary concerns. Instead of simply transmitting historical evidence to contemporary queer youth, I enlisted youth in documenting, interpreting, and performing the history of the Tenderloin in relation to their own lives—to enter into conversation with the Tenderloin’s history and to position themselves as part of a genealogical lineage. Project outcomes included a historical zine linking past and present; walking tours; street theater reenactments; intergenerational discussions; and a national speaking tour of homeless youth shelters.

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Essays and Media Coverage:

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Director, Polk Street: Lives in Transition, Oct. 2007-Dec. 2009

I drew on original oral histories to intervene in debates about gentrification, homelessness, sex work, queer politics, and public safety in the highly polarized setting of gentrifying San Francisco. Project outcomes included historical narrative commissioned by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY; multimedia exhibit; professionally mediated neighborhood dialogues; oral history “listening parties” and other public events; hour-long radio documentary distributed nationally via NPR.

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Media Coverage:

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  • “Oral Histories Tell Polk Street’s Story,” San Francisco Chronicle, Aug 8, 2009.

  • “Profile in Ministry: Expanding the Definition of an LGBT Advocate,” Human Rights Campaign Newsletter, March 4, 2009.

  • “Polk Street Profiles,” KALW’s Crosscurrents radio program, Jun 24, 2009.

Oral History and Audio

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Media Coverage:

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Director, San Francisco ACT UP Oral History Project, July 2017-July 2018

This project documented San Francisco’s AIDS direct action movement by recording oral histories with people who were involved in Enola Gay, the ARC/AIDS Vigil, AIDS Action Pledge, ACT UP/Golden Gate, Prevention Point, and ACT UP/San Francisco, a highly visible and influential group of militant AIDS activists associated with a national network of independent organizations that shared the name AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. ACT UP/San Francisco emerged from earlier AIDS direct-action efforts in the city starting in 1984; it remained active into the mid-1990s. Project outcomes included oral histories with more 40 ACT UP veterans; an exhibition at the GLBT History Museum; and a multimedia Internet presence.

  • “Polk Street Stories,” hour-long oral history piece distributed nationally via NPR’s HearingVoices, Jun. 21, 2010. Adapted for the stage and produced by Georgetown University’s Mask and Bauble Dramatic Society in 2013.

 

  • “Re-Interviewing the San Francisco Street Patrol,” audio piece commissioned by “OUT/LOOK & The Birth of The Queer: Today’s Artists and Writers Respond,” University of California Santa Cruz Arts Research Institute, Fall 2017.

 

  • Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn School of Inquiry Project, Jan. 2012-present. For three successive years, recorded “life histories” from roughly three hundred precocious six-year-olds.

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  • LGBT Family Histories Project, Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities, Summer 2012. Conducted oral histories with leaders of the GLBT families movement in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

 

  • “Growing Home Community Garden,” Project Homeless Connect, San Francisco, 2011. Commissioned to create audio portraits of six homeless participants.

 

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Young adult in Plaster's Black Arts course interviews at Baltimore's Arch Social Club

Exhibitions

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  • Curator, Our Vast Queer Past: Celebrating GLBT History, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society Museum, San Francisco, Aug 2010

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  • Curator, Forty Years of Pride. Contractor with the San Francisco Pride Committee, Apr 2010

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  • Curator, Polk Street: Lives in Transition, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society main gallery, San Francisco, Jan 2009-Aug 2009

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