The Certificate Program in Museum Scholarship and Material Culture is directed by Dr. Paul Jaeger.
Dr. Paul T. Jaeger
Paul T. Jaeger, Ph.D., JD, MEd, MLS, joined the MSMC team in June 2021 as the Co-Director and became the Director in July 2023. He is also a Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher in the College of Information (INFO) and Associate Director of the Maryland Initiative for Digital Accessibility at the University of Maryland. His teaching and research focus on the impacts of law and policy on information access and behavior, with a focus on issues of human rights and civil rights. He is the author of more than two hundred journal articles and book chapters, as well as twenty books. His research has been funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Science Foundation, the American Library Association, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among others. Dr. Jaeger is Co-Editor of the journals Library Quarterly and Including Disability, as well as the Co-Chair of the Including Disability Global Summit. In 2014, he received the Library Journal/ALISE Excellence in Education Award.
Contact: pjaeger@umd.edu
Lydia Curliss
Lydia Curliss (Nipmuc) is the current graduate assistant to the MSMC program. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Information Studies in the College of Information (INFO). Her dissertation research focuses on understanding the changing relationship between Indigenous Tribal Communities in Southern New England, their knowledges, and Cultural Heritage Memory Institutions (CHMIs). Her career has involved working and interning at a number of museums and other cultural heritage institutions, including American Museum of Natural History (NYC) and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). She has an MLS/MIS from Indiana University, and a BA from Oberlin College.
Contact: lcurliss@umd.edu
Neil Dhingra
Neil is the academic advisor to students in the MLIS program. He also supports all MSMC students with graduation-related paperwork. He has been a member of the College of Information (INFO) since 2021. He holds degrees in history from Northwestern University and the University of Notre Dame and is a doctoral student in the College of Education at the University of Maryland with research focuses in education, law, and theology. He is happy to talk about any subject, really.
Contact: ndhingra@umd.edu
Dr. Quint Gregory
Quint Gregory wears many hats at the University of Maryland but spends most of his time in the Michelle Smith Collaboratory for Visual Culture, a space he designed and runs, collaborating with teachers, researchers, and students interested in employing digital technologies to enhance their work, be it pedagogical, academic or rhetorical. He has taught seminars for the Honors College at the University of Maryland that focus on museums and society, inspiration for which he drew from nearly a decade’s worth of work in area museums (National Gallery of Art, Walters Art Gallery) while pursuing his doctorate, a goal only accomplished after his Fulbright-fueled year of research in the Netherlands in 2000-2001.
Quint first came to the University of Maryland as a graduate student focused on seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting (he worked on such exhibitions as Johannes Vermeer, and Jan Steen), a subject for which he retains great passion, even if he does not wade in those waters daily at present.
Contact: quint@umd.edu
Lesley Langa, Ph.D.
Lesley Langa, Ph.D., is the Associate Research Scientist at OCLC Research. She is a strategic research and program manager with over 15 years of experience managing national initiatives that address the needs of libraries, museums, and other heritage institutions. Her work focuses on access to information and cultural heritage collections, including who has access vs. who does not, how we curate and protect information for future study and use, how we support the cultural sector in its daily work to improve access and sustain our collective history. She is a policy-driven action researcher who aims to provide useful tools that can affect practice in the field and deliver practical solutions for cultural heritage professionals and helping to evaluate the mechanisms we use to do all of this. Her work has spanned several areas including digital collections, metadata management, evaluation and research, and user experience across the cultural heritage sector in museums, federal cultural agencies, and small nonprofits. She recently completed a Ph.D. at the University of Maryland’s College of Information (INFO).
Contact: llanga@umd.edu
Dr. Diana Marsh
Diana Marsh is an Assistant Professor of Archives and Digital Curation in the College of Information (INFO). Her work focuses on how changing technologies, cultures, and values affect the communication of knowledge in heritage institutions. Her current research focuses on access to anthropological archives and the circulation of digitized ethnographic collections in Native communities.
She was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives (NAA). From 2015–2017, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow at the American Philosophical Society where she curated exhibitions drawing primarily on archival collections (Curious Revolutionaries: The Peales of Philadelphia, April–December 2017 and Gathering Voices: Thomas Jefferson and Native America, April–December 2016). In 2014–2015, she was a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow in Museum Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) where she taught courses in museology and heritage. She completed her Ph.D. in Anthropology at UBC, where she conducted an ethnography of exhibition planning and the renovation of the National Museum of Natural History’s fossil hall. She has an MPhil in Social Anthropology with a Museums and Heritage focus from the University of Cambridge and a BFA in Visual Arts and Photography from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Her work has been published in Journal of Material Culture, Museum Anthropology, Practicing Anthropology, Archivaria, and Archival Science. Her book, Extinct Monsters to Deep Time: Conflict, Compromise, and the Making of Smithsonian’s Fossil Halls, was recently published with Berghahn Books Museum and Collections Series.
Contact: dmarsh@umd.edu