As part of UMBC’s Public Humanities program, the Baltimore Field School supports an infrastructure that moves away from extractive research models to build collective humanities projects developed with community partners. In the midst of the pandemic, BFS 1.0 prioritized our partners and built trust by acting on their feedback and adjusting our objectives. The initial BFS 1.0 summer fellow program occurred in summer 2021.
BFS 2.0 further expanded these frameworks of equitable and ethical public engagement and advance these goals through: 1) establishing eight Community Fellows who helped develop models for community-centered projects and 2) eleven BFS 2.0 UMBC Fellows (graduate students, staff, and faculty) who worked on ethical humanities research, teaching, and learning. Community Fellows include leaders from intuitions like the Baltimore Beat, Mera Kitchen Collective, Beautiful Side of Ugly & Creative Alliance. Their work advocates social justice issues focused on three core tasks: public information, racial equity, and food and land justice this work built upon BFS 1.0.
In May 2026, the Orser Center for Public Humanities at UMBC and our advisory committee from across campus have designed a one-day BFS 3.0: Collaborative Teaching in Public Humanities workshop that will produce a collective toolkit including syllabus templates, assignment examples, assessment tools, and rubrics that will be localized in a shared online repository.
The planning committee for BFS 3.0 includes the following individuals from the Advisory Committee for 2026:
Michael Casiano (American Studies), Sarah Fouts (American Studies), Charlotte Keniston (Shriver Peaceworker Program), Nicole King (American Studies), and Nicole Morse (Language Literacy & Culture)
BFS 3.0 UMBC Fellows will be posted on the website in April 2026.