Faculty Bios

Carol Bier | Kay Broadwater | Brinda Charry | Adrienne Childs | Susan Douglass | Meredith Gill | Molly Greene | Quint Gregory | Matteo Randi | Joann Siegrist | Laura Smyth

Carol Bier currently teaches Islamic Art and Art History at The Johns Hopkins University and the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has studied Near Eastern Art and Archaeology at New York University and Classical Arabic at Columbia University. From 1987-2001, Dr. Bier served as Department Head and Curator of the Eastern Hemisphere Collection at The Textile Museum in Washington, DC. She has held research appointments and scholarly residencies at a variety of institutions including the University of Notre Dame, the University of Michigan, and the Freer Gallery of Art. She is currently concentrating on the role of geometry in Islamic Art.

Kay Arwady Broadwater has been a member of the art faculty at Towson University for the past 23 years. She holds a PhD in art education from Union Institute and University and was the 2002 National Art Education Association Eastern Region Art Educator of the Year. She is currently the Curriculum Expert for the Arts Integration Institute of Towson University and is involved in arts education as consultant for Young Audiences of Maryland and evaluator for the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts.
Currently, Broadwater is serving as Contributing Editor for SchoolArts Magazine where she is the writer of a monthly column. Broadwater also founded an outreach program that links university students with urban youth to explore visual arts together, break down stereotypes, learn about human commonality and difference, integrate theory with practice and encourage the urban youth in gaining a vision for attending college in the future.

Brinda Charry was born and raised in India and came to the United States four years ago for her doctoral studies at Syracuse University. Her area of research is literary representations of political, commercial, and cultural exchange between England and the Islamic East. She teaches courses in Renaissance literature, Shakespeare, literary theory, postcolonial fiction, and Indian fiction in English at Syracuse. She also writes and publishes fiction; her novel The Hottest Day of the Year was published in India and the United Kingdom in 2003.

Adrienne Louise Childs is an expert in African and European art who recently received her PhD in Art History from the University of Maryland. She has served as curator for a number of exhibits, including Successions: Prints by African American Artsits from the Jean and Robert Steele Collection and Echoes: The Art of David C. Driskell. Dr. Childs has taught at the University of Maryland and George Mason University and has given lectures on a variety of European and African art topics.

Susan Douglass is a social studies educator with experience in teaching and curriculum and instructional design. She has a MA in Arab Studies and History from Georgetown University and is currently employed as Principal Analyst for the Council on Islamic Education, working on textbooks, curriculum, and teacher resources. She also serves on the Executive Council of the World History Association. Recent publications include the reference volume World Eras: Rise and Spread of Islam, 622-1500 (Thomson/Gale, 2002) and the children’s book Ramadan (Carolrhoda Books, 2003). Other publications include Strategies and Structures for Presenting World History (1994), Beyond A Thousand and One Nights: Literature from Muslim Civilization (1999), and a teaching resource collection The Emergence of Renaissance: Cultural Interactions between Europeans and Muslims (co-author with Karima Alavi,1999). Current projects include research teamwork for an online curriculum project “World History for Us All,” sponsored by the NEH and San Diego State University, as well as a study of national and state standards for teaching world studies.

Meredith Gill is an historian of the Italian Renaissance whose current research focuses on Augustine and the arts in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This project examines the image of the saint in portraits and painted narratives, as well as the intersection of his theological writings with Renaissance aesthetics. Her ongoing scholarly interests focus on Rome, curial patronage, and cross-cultural exchange, with an emphasis on church decoration and the religious culture of death and commemoration.

Molly Greene studies the history of the Mediterranean Basin, the Ottoman Empire, and the Greek world. Her interests include the social and economic history of the Ottoman Empire, the experience of Greeks under Ottoman rule, Mediterranean piracy, and the institution of the market. After earning a B.A. in political science at Tufts University (1981), Professor Greene spent several years living in Greece and then completed a PhD in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton (1993), where she studied Ottoman history. Upon graduating she joined the Princeton faculty with a joint appointment in the History Department and the Program in Hellenic Studies. Her first book, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2000), examines the transition from Venetian to Ottoman rule on the island of Crete, which the Ottomans conquered in 1669. Professor Greene is currently working on a study of the relationship between Greek commerce and Catholic corsairing (piracy) in the seventeenth-century Mediterranean.

Quint Gregory, a specialist in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, received his PhD in that field in 2003 from the University of Maryland at College Park. He has written on still-life painting, particularly the work of the Haarlem painters Willem Heda and Pieter Claesz. The catalogue of an upcoming exhibition at the National Gallery of Art of paintings by Pieter Claesz includes an essay by Dr. Gregory on the meaning of Claesz's still lifes. Dr. Gregory worked for several years in the curatorial departments at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, focusing especially on the organization of temporary exhibitions such Johannes Vermeer, Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller and Masters of Light: Dutch Painters from Utrecht in the Golden Age. After living a year in the Netherlands on a fellowship from the Netherlands-America Foundation, Dr. Gregory returned in 2001 to the University of Maryland, where he currently works as curator of the Visual Resources Center in the department of Art History and as a lecturer in the University Honors Program.

Matteo Randi is an Italian mosaic artist who has studied at the Gino Severini Insititute of Art and the National School for the Conservation of Mosaics, both of which are in Ravenna, Italy. He has created commissioned mosaics in Europe and the United States in a variety of sites, ranging from restaurants, to churches, to private homes. He has also taught courses for adults and students at places such as Casa Italiana in Washington, DC, the Italian Cultural Society in Bethesda, Maryland, and the Washington Episcopal School.

Joann Spencer Siegrist teaches a variety of courses in children's theatre, puppetry and creative dramatics. In addition to teaching at WVU, she has worked as an instructor for St. Vincent's College and Radford University.
Nationally, she has appeared on Good Morning America representing the "Read American" literacy group and the AARP. She also served as the national educational consultant for the Puppeteers of America and Board member to the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center.

Laura Smyth has nine years of experience in research, program development, and administration in the arts. After spending several years working with capacity-building for small youth arts programs across the country, she helped develop the first master's degree program in arts administration for youth arts administrators at Columbia College Chicago. Upon completion of that project, she joined National Arts Strategies as Director of Strategic Partnerships, where her responsibilities include new business development, marketing and publications, and the EPNL-Arts Program. Smyth has a BA from UNC-Chapel Hill and a PhD in literature from Stanford.