Honors College Staff

The Director of the Honors College standing outside

spstacey@umbc.edu  

Dr. Simon Stacey is a political philosopher with interests in transitional justice, theories of democracy, and ethics and public policy. He teaches classes on these topics, as well as about the history of political philosophy, and American political thought. Before joining the Honors College, he was a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science at UMBC. In the last few years, he has started to explore how to support and improve student teamwork, and in particular how machine learning can be used to do so. He received his PhD in Politics from Princeton University, and his BA from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

 

 

Director of the Honors College, Jodi Kelber
jodik@umbc.edu
Dr. Jodi Kelber is the Director of the Honors College, having served previously as its Associate Director and before that, as a faculty member in Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies. She has been at UMBC since 2003. She continues to do research and teach in the areas of critical gender and race studies, LGBTQ studies, visual studies, and gender and science studies. Dr. Kelber is currently the Co-PI of UMBC’s Gender Based Harm Prevention Project, a collaboration with faculty and staff across the university in which they teach courses on gender based harm prevention and engage in research examining the efficacy of those courses on campus climate change with respect to these issues. She co-created The Baltimore Collectives and Communes Project, in which she and her colleagues collected oral histories from 1970s activists in the feminist and black power movements in Baltimore. Dr. Kelber received her Ph.D. in cultural studies from the University of Arizona (where she also earned her M.A. in art history). She currently serves as a Commissioner in the Maryland Commission for Women, and represents the Northern District on the Baltimore Police Department’s Community Training Review Committee (part of the BPD’s consent decree). Originally from Boston, she is happy to make Baltimore City her home, and volunteers regularly with social change nonprofits in the city.

 

The Assistant Director of Honors College, Curriculum and Retention standing outside

juloakes@umbc.edu
Dr. Julie Oakes has been a member of the UMBC community since 2007, teaching numerous courses for both the History Department and Asian Studies Program. After receiving her M.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University, she went on to the University of Chicago where she earned a Ph.D. in Japanese history. Her research interests center on Japanese art policy, and she is currently revising her manuscript on the creation of Japan’s National Treasure system. In the 2016-2017 academic year, Dr. Oakes served as Acting Associate Director of the Honors College, following that up with a year as the Interim Director of the Asian Studies Program. In the spring of 2019, Dr. Oakes returned to the Honors College as the Assistant Director of Curriculum and Retention, which entails working with the Honors College Faculty Fellows and the freshmen residents of the Living Learning Community. Outside of her work at UMBC, Dr. Oakes is the Baltimore seminar coordinator for the NCTA (The National Consortium for the Teaching About Asia), whose aim is to help elementary, middle, and high school educators better incorporate East Asian topics into their curricula. She also gives talks on Japanese history and culture to various community groups, ranging from elementary school students to adult learners.

 

The Assistant Director of the Honors College, Assessment and Recruitment standing outside

kwalker6@umbc.edu 
Kendyl Walker was born and raised in the Baltimore County, right outside of the Woodlawn area. She received her B.A. in English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2016 and an M.Ed. in College Student Personnel at Ohio University in 2019. Before coming to UMBC in 2022, she advised first-year and undecided students at Goucher College for three years. Kendyl’s main passions are to support students’ growth and provide students with resources that will help them succeed during their college careers.

 

Dr. Sarah Jewett

Dr. Sarah Jewett is the Director of Learning Partnerships in Research and Practice in the Honors College. In this role, she collaborates widely with campus colleagues and community college partners on applied and often interdisciplinary learning experiences. She advocates widely for transfer students, and before coming to the Honors College, she served as the Executive Director of the STEM Transfer Student Success Initiative (t-STEM @ UMBC). As an ethnographic researcher in the field of anthropology and education, she focuses on sociocultural identities, inclusive communities, participatory practices and educational equity. She is also deeply engaged in digital storytelling as a community, pedagogical and research practice. During the fall semester of 2024, she collaborated with the Storytelling Academy at Loughborough University (UK) as a Fulbright Scholar. She serves as an affiliate faculty member in Sociology, Anthropology and Public Health and in the Language, Literacy & Culture Doctoral Program, and as a co-facilitator of the Public Stories Lab. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania.

 

whittle@umbc.edu

Honors College Emeritus Faculty 

Ellen Handler Spitz was a member of the UMBC Community from 2001 to 2019. She taught interdisciplinary seminars in the Honors College in aesthetics, literature, psychology, and the visual arts. Dr. Spitz received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and held fellowships at the Getty Center, Radcliffe Institute, Stanford, Rutgers, and the Clark Art Institute, among others. She taught and/or lectured in England, France, Italy, Israel, the Netherlands, Austria, Spain, Russia, Canada, India, and the People’s Republic of China. Dr. Spitz published numerous articles and books, most notably Art and Psyche (Yale University Press, 1985), Image and Insight (Columbia University Press, 1991), Museums of the Mind (Yale University Press, 1994), Inside Picture Books (Yale University Press, 1999), The Brightening Glance (Pantheon Books, 2006; Anchor-Vintage Books, 2007), and Illuminating Childhood: Portraits in Fiction, Film, and Drama (University of Michigan Press, 2010). She also reviewed children’s literature in academic journals and for The New Republic online.