Kristina Gaddy ’09, saves and gathers manuscripts, sheet music, pictures, maps, drawings, and anecdotes, sharing them on her blog to make public what she finds hidden in archives, private collections, and museums. For her fourth book, Go Back and Fetch It: Recovering Early Black Music in the Americas for Fiddle and Banjo (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), Gaddy teamed up with Rhiannon Giddens, a Grammy Award-winning musician who is equally passionate about digitizing and broadening access to the historical material culture of the banjo. 

Gaddy came to UMBC as a Sondheim Public Affairs Scholar. Her passion for history and languages—Swedish, German, and Spanish—led her to graduate with a dual degree in history and modern languages and linguistics. Looking back on her time at UMBC, Gaddy is grateful for the opportunities the program provided, especially the chance to study abroad in Germany. There, she combined her proficiency in German with her historical training to research the foundations of her first book.

“The Sondheim Public Affairs Scholars Program was wonderful because of the funding I received to support my research and the cohort of students,” says Gaddy. “We were all really interested and excited about social issues, public policy, and how these ideas could be used to improve the world.”

These interests inspired a career in historical nonfiction writing and led to her to write meticulously researched books: Flowers in the Gutter: True Story of the Edelweiss Pirates, Teenagers Who Resisted the Nazis (Dutton Books, 2020), Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), and A Most Perilous World: The True Story of the Young Abolitionists and their Crusade Against Slavery (Dutton Books, 2025).

Digitizing public history

Her collaboration with Giddens isn’t the first time Gaddy has written a book about banjos. “My start in music research and writing started 15 years ago when I was an AmeriCorps working with multi-instrumentalist Gerry Milnes at Augusta [Heritage Center in Elkins, West Virginia], and the friends I made while living in Elkins helped put me on the path to writing Well of Souls and Go Back and Fetch It.” 

It’s not just documents that Gaddy used in her first banjo book—which are accessible on her blog—but also sound clips, performances, and interviews. While many historical records can be found online, many more have yet to be digitized. Gaddy, who also digitized and archived the West Virginia Upshur County Historical Society‘s local history collection, has made digitization an integral part of her process. 

“Having come from the public history side of UMBC’s history department, I strongly believe in people having access to information as it pertains to their own history. It was one of the reasons I wanted to write Well of Souls,” says Gaddy, about her second book. “I had gathered all this information, and I could have shared it with just a few people, but I wanted anybody who wants access to banjo history not to have to go to some expensive conference to hear about it.”  

A revolutionary collaboration

Giddens, a MacArthur recipient and Pulitzer Prize winner, is grateful for Gaddy’s dedication to digitizing and broadening access to historical material culture. While working on pieces of music highlighting 18th-century North American, Scottish, and Irish traditions for Ken Burns’s 2025 PBS documentary The American Revolution, Giddens was looking for samples of Black music from the Revolutionary War. She wasn’t having much luck until she explored Gaddy’s website, where she not only found what she was looking for but also the inspiration for their co-authored book, Go Back and Fetch It.

“I just kept going back to Kristina’s website, where she had put up these JPEGs. I would download them, lose the JPEG, and I’d go back and, like, download it again. And then I was just like, ‘Kristina, why don’t we put all of these in a book?’” explained Giddens at the 2025 Michigan University Arts Initiative interview on Go Back and Fetch It with Gaddy.

The book is their third collaboration. In 2018, Giddens invited Gaddy and her husband, Pete Ross—banjo maker, researcher, and musician—to present at a banjo symposium during the inaugural North Carolina Folk Festival, which Giddens curated. Gaddy presented her research on the African American roots of the banjo, an experience she credits as the inspiration for Wells of Souls, for which Giddens wrote the foreword. They also collaborated in 2022 on one episode of the 10-part series The Banjo: Music, History, and Heritage for The Great Courses. 

“The idea behind the book was that there were all these little pieces of music in archives, in published books, in manuscripts that were sprinkled throughout the historic record of Black music in the Americas,” explains Gaddy in the same interview. “They weren’t compiled in one place. Rhiannon, as an artist, was frustrated that she couldn’t access them.”

For their book collaboration, they selected 19 pieces of music from 1687 through the 1860s. Gaddy wrote a historical research essay for each song explaining the types of banjos used, how and when they were played, and their socio-cultural significance across communities in the Americas and the Caribbean. Giddens transcribed the songs into modern treble clef and banjo tablature, which shows finger placement, rather than the Western classical notation tradition, making early Black Atlantic banjo music accessible to banjo players today, in the future, globally, and across all genres. 

Following the banjo around the world

Gaddy’s last five years have been busy. But dig a little deeper, ask more questions, and do a lot of listening—just as she does for all of her interviews—it turns out that Gaddy really started her musical performance research in high school while playing traditional Swedish music with her mom and traditional American music with her uncle and aunt. After college, she fell in love with the banjo while living with other artists in West Virginia, developing a connection with a vast, diverse community passionate about banjo culture and history—including in Baltimore City, where Gaddy and her husband performed some of the songs from Go Back and Fetch It at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in September, right before she moved to Nottingham, England.

Gaddy has also expanded her digital research presence to Substack, where she posted the news of her fully funded doctoral program at the University of Nottingham, where she will research Black fiddling in the 19th-century British Caribbean.

And even though she is a whole ocean away, Gaddy still feels the support of her UMBC history department.

“One of the most exciting things for me is to see other students and scholars diving deeper into these subjects,” says Gaddy. “My former history professor, Dr. Michelle Scott, recently put me in touch with Amina Thiam, a UMBC graduate student who is writing her thesis on Black banjoists and string instrumentalists in Maryland during the colonial period. I can’t wait to see what she uncovers.”

Learn more about Kristina Gaddy’s work and UMBC’s History department.

Keegan Cook Finberg, an assistant professor of English, started graduate school at UC Santa Cruz during the financial crisis of 2008, in a moment of extreme recession. “Privatization and austerity politics were everywhere. It was becoming increasingly clear that this wealth was stratifying upward, and notions of what constituted the public good were diminishing,” says Finberg. Finberg’s response to the times was to study avant-garde experimental poetry.

She notes that some might not see the connection between austerity politics and poetry. But she was excited about how poetry was engaging the public sphere. “Avant-garde poetry was obsessed with this notion of what made the public. And the category itself was becoming more interdisciplinary and more capacious,” said Finberg. “I started noticing and studying different forms of poems that didn’t look like what you might consider poetry. Poets were taking various aspects of state-controlled capitalist regimes and bureaucracy and using those forms as fodder for their poems.”

She remembers, around this time, books of poetry that were winning the major prizes were “avant-garde” in the sense that they chose words from material that wasn’t considered poetic. One poet chose words from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military Terms to make poems about love. Others used these untraditional literary materials to document their experience of going through TSA at the airport, or repeating stories about racism on the street where people live. Finberg became interested in how all of these forms that we might think of as public forms were suddenly poetic forms.

In her debut book, Poetry in General (Columbia University Press, 2025), Finberg explores the privatization of the welfare state and the way that poetry changed in relation to that notion of the public. “I located the beginning of this history around 1960, which many people consider the ballooning of the welfare state, the opposite of privatization,” says Finberg. “I started thinking about what poetic form looked like in that moment and how we might trace it to today.”

Q: What drew you to poetry?

A: I have loved poetry since I was an early reader. I was first drawn to it because it is a way of experiencing the world and understanding it. As I got deeper into my studies, I became really interested in the way that poetic form changes with history.

I’ve always been curious about how the category of poetry makes us think differently. What does it mean for us to read poetry versus the way we read other forms? Can anything be read as poetry? How do we think differently if we try to read things as poetry that aren’t poetry? 

These questions excite me. It’s a way to slow down and model reading practices, a way of interacting with language that’s very intentional and precise. I think if you’re interested in play, the unknowable, or unmasterable, it can really change the way you see your everyday life. That’s how I got interested in poetry and what still excites me about poetry.

Q: Is there a piece of poetry that challenged you to accept being uncomfortable, not knowing exactly what it meant?

A: I remember when I was assigned Gertrude Stein‘s poetry as an undergraduate, it did not make any sense to me. Why would anyone assign this to me? I was irate about it at first, but once I started working with the text and playing with it, Stein’s poetry became richer and more interesting to me.

I began practicing different modes of orienting myself towards the text. Eventually, it helped govern the way that I think about the domestic sphere, feminism, and regular objects around the house. In her book Tender Buttons (1914), Stein makes objects and foods in her house come alive. Part of my attention to language and my love of language and detail comes from the practice of trying to do this type of work. 

Q: Is there a particular poetic technique that you like best?

A: I love constraint-based processes where poets make a strict rule to limit the words they choose. Often, I find our brain is attuned to think in a certain way. These constraints help us outside of what we usually think of as creativity or imagination into this other world that we didn’t even know was possible.

The book Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, a Canadian Caribbean poet, is a great example of a constraint-based process. The language for the book-length poem comes from the only historical record of an atrocious case that became important in the British abolitionist movement. Using only the text in the court case, Philip’s poem recounts the massacre of more than 130 enslaved Africans on the slave ship, Zong, headed to Jamaica from West Africa, who were thrown overboard to drown in 1781. The enslaved were dying of starvation and disease. Insurance would not cover this kind of loss. The captain decided that death by drowning could be claimed as a loss of property insurance claim. The insurance company approved the claim, but it was later overturned. No one was charged with murder.

Philip was trying to tell the story of the people on the ship and kept coming up against all of these gaps. The court case didn’t even contain the names of the people who were murdered. She decided to take the words of the court decision as a word bank for her book, to contort the case file to fill in these silences. The result is a testament to, and critique of, the horrors of the bureaucracy of slavery and its afterlife.

Most of the poems that I look at late in my book also use the language of archival documents about a major issue related to racial capitalism and the bureaucracy of the public sphere.

Q: What are other examples of constricted processes that you cover in the book?

A: I start the book with Yoko Ono. In the 1960s, she was doing wonderful experiments that were at the edge of what was performance and what was poetry. Ono was interested in speaking back to the category of racial capitalism through humor and expressions of everyday life as art. The poems in her book Grapefruit take this premise that instructions for everyday life can be fun, easy, or even impossible.

In my book, I also talk about three feminist artists from the 1970s, Eleanor Antin, Adrian Piper, and Bernadette Mayer. Their constraints are durational experiments where they go on some sort of diet, all of them for different reasons, for about the course of a month—the duration of a menstrual cycle—and document their journey. They’re writing about welfare and food assistance and their own reproductive rights on the precipice of Roe v. Wade. They’re interested in their own reproductive possibilities, and what it means to experiment with that as duration.

Q: This is your eighth year at UMBC. How do UMBC students respond to poetry in your classes?

A: For an upper-division class on feminist poetry, I recently taught Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, a famously complex avant-garde poem about Korean independence and about the experience of immigration and colonial violence. Cha writes in multiple languages to capture the disorientation of the acquisition of a new language, of a new culture, and the difficulty and violence of assimilation. It’s complex, and it can be off-putting to students.

In situations like these, I want students to be okay with not understanding everything that they’re reading while exploring the aspects that they do understand—to explore why this author might want it to be difficult in the beginning, why there might be something important in that feeling of discomfort that they’re experiencing with the text. Can they notice moments of beauty in the text, even if they don’t yet understand what they mean? A lot of our conversations start with that sort of work. 

And once students realize that that is the goal—that they don’t need to be able to decode, they don’t have to be the person who knows it all in the room, there isn’t one right answer—it really unlocks a very different sort of space. I often watch that sort of journey with students. They realize that there’s something inherently important about this difficulty, important even to their understanding of themselves, their heritage, the way that language works in their households, even in their larger worlds. 

And for my students who may take poetry to fulfill a lower division requirement, what I want more than anything is for them to see the ways that literature and poetry are alive in the world. Poetry is interesting, it’s happening, and they can read it. They don’t have to be afraid of it. Introductory level students are asked to attend literary events to see writers come and read and talk about their work. This is happening now. This is part of your world. If you’re a nurse, a scientist, or in whatever career path you follow, poetry and literature are alive and are going to continue to be part of the world that you live in. If you pay attention, this revelation may help you understand your experiences differently, connect to others in new ways, or even create new knowledge. 

Learn more about Finberg’s work andUMBC’s English department.

Dear UMBC Community,

We are pleased to announce that nominations are now open for several awards recognizing outstanding contributions within our UMBC community. We encourage you to nominate individuals, faculty, staff, organizations, and student athletes who have demonstrated excellence, leadership, and meaningful impact.

Please use the appropriate form below for the specific award you would like to nominate someone for. You only need to complete the form for the award you are submitting a nomination for.

Submit nominations by March 29, 2026. 

1. The Jessica Soto Perez Memorial Award. Open to all graduate students EXCEPT E-Council or Senators: Award Nomination Form

2. Community Leadership Award. Open to GSA E-Council and Senators with multiple roles: Award Nomination Form

3. Graduate Student Athlete Award Nomination. Open to UMBC graduate students who demonstrate excellence in both academics and athletics: Award Nomination Form

4. The Donald Creighton Outstanding Faculty Award. UMBC faculty who actively mentor and support graduate students: Award Nomination Form

5. The Outstanding University Staff Award: Award Nomination Form
   

6. The Outstanding GSO Award. Graduate Student Organization (GSO) that significantly enhances the graduate student experience: Award Nomination Form

Thank you for helping us recognize the outstanding members of our community.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.

Best regards,
GSA 

Intern Positions

Affiliate (Peer Leader) Positions

Apply to be a Woolie!  

What is a Woolie?

Woolies are ambassadors for UMBC who help facilitate a smooth transition for new students at UMBC, acting as guides, mentors, and a resource during one of the most important transitions of a student's life. If you love UMBC and want to make a real difference for the incoming class, this is your opportunity.

What You'll Do

As a Woolie, you'll develop relationships with and encourage a group of new students to engage with events, serve as a resource throughout the first six weeks of the fall semester, and participate in training around topics relevant to welcoming new students to campus.

Day-to-day, that looks like:

• Playing icebreakers and creating community through small group time
• Encouraging attendance at events like Commons Takeover, Involvement Fest, Big Breakfast and Bingo, and more
• Being a guide to the culture and nuance of UMBC

Who We're Looking For

We're looking for a diverse group of students who have a desire and the ability to work with people from various backgrounds, excellent communication skills, leadership potential, and a genuine desire to serve the UMBC community.

You're eligible if you: Are a current undergraduate student who has completed at least one semester at UMBC and are in good judicial and academic standing (minimum 2.5 cumulative GPA).

The Commitment

• Three (3) one hour virtual sessions: various times over summer
• Virtual outreach to new students : early August
• In-person training: August 19–22, 2026
• In Person Program: August 23 through September 1
• Weekly virtual outreach during the first 6 weeks of the fall semester
• Two hours of event support in September or October.

What You Get

Woolies receive a $750 stipend, all work-related meals during in-person training and program core dates, early move-in to fall housing with all early move-in fees waived (for on-campus residents), and free Welcome, Retrievers! apparel.

How to Apply

Applications open March 2 and close March 27 at 11:59 PM.

🌟 Has a professor or staff member gone above and beyond to support your career and job search journey, grad school dreams, or professional goals? Now’s your chance to show them some love!

In the spirit of kindness, take a few minutes to recognize someone as a UMBC Career Connector.

Did they inspire you to pursue a particular path? Write you an amazing letter of recommendation?Review your resume and make it shine? Connect you with alumni or employers? Just make a positive impact in your life?

Say THANK YOU in a meaningful way! Each nominee will receive a small gift, a recognition certificate with your note, and a spotlight on our Instagram and LinkedIn during Career Month in April and throughout the summer.

How to Participate:

• Complete this short recognition survey HERE (you can submit multiple recognitions—one for each awesome person!).

Let’s spread some kindness and celebrate those who’ve made a difference. ❤️

Follow us on Instagram @UMBCcareers and LinkedIn @UMBCCareerCenter to see your nominee featured!

Nominations will be received on a rolling basis until end of April.