2021-22 Staff and Faculty Fellows↓

Professor Elena Deanda and the Black Studies Program at Washington College
About Professor Deanda and the Black Studies Program: Dr. Deanda is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Washington College and the Director of the Black Studies Program. She received her B.A. from the University of Veracruz, Mexico, and her Ph.D from Vanderbilt University. The Black Studies Program prepares students of all backgrounds to discover, research, and demonstrate familiarity with a broad range of aspects of Black culture from a local, national, and global perspective.
About their fellowship: Using funds from its fellowship, The Black Studies program is awarding the 2021-2022 CH-BLS Student Archival Research Award to students under the Black Studies minor. This award will fund student-led research projects that aim to engage with or expand the Chesapeake Heartland’s Digital Archive.


Professor Meghan Grosse
About Professor Grosse: Dr. Grosse is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Washington College and a critical media scholar whose work focuses on media history, new media, and the continuities between them. She holds a B.A. from Lake Forest College in communication and politics, an M.A. in communication from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a Ph.D. in communication and media studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
About their fellowship: Dr. Grosse and her students are creating a podcasting studio space for members of Club F.E.A.R. (Face Everything and Rise), in the newly founded adolescent clubhouse at Minary’s Dream Alliance in Chestertown. A website to host the programs created in that studio is also being developed, with the intent that these early efforts can support podcast programming at the Clubhouse for many years.


Professors Michelle Johnson & Sara Clarke-De Reza
About the Professors: Ms. Johnson is the Elementary Education Field Experience Coordinator at Washington College and holds a B.S., Syracuse University and an M.Ed. from the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Clarke-De Reza is an Assistant Professor of Education at Washington College. She earned her B.A. in Psychology, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bard College, her M.Ed. in Child Development & Special Education at Southern New Hampshire University, and a Ph.D.in Curriculum & Instruction from the University of New Hampshire.
About their fellowship: The purpose of the fellowship is to develop an interest in, and opportunities for, K-12 teacher engagement with the Chesapeake Heartland Project archive. The professors are teaching local educators about the Heartland archive and how it might be engaged in their classrooms; developing a set of lessons related to the archive that can be implemented in a range of classrooms; and setting the stage for a series of content-focused professional development opportunities.


Professor Sufiya Abdur-Rahman
About Professor Sufiya Abdur-Rahman: Professor Abdur-Rahman is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Washington College and the non-fiction author of several publications. She earned her B.A. in Print Journalism at Howard University and her M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction at Goucher College.
About her fellowship: Wye House plantation, located in Talbot County, is an important setting in the 1845 memoir Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Using her fellowship funds, Professor Abdur-Rahman will take students in the course “Introduction to Non-Fiction” to visit Wye House plantation in the spring of 2022, with the goal of exploring its history through students’ firsthand documentation of where Douglass was enslaved.