Elizabeth Patton is an Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is the author of Easy Living: The Rise of the Home Office (Rutgers University Press, 2020). Her research focuses on discourses of gender, race and class in the history of media, representations of urbanism and suburbanism in popular culture, and the impact of communication technologies on space and place. Liz’s current book project, Documenting Black Leisure as a Form of Resistance, examines the history of Black leisure and tourism in the US through media of the Jim Crow era. Specifically, this book will focus on how home movies and photography have been used to document and promote leisure practices as a form of covert resistance. She is the recipient of the 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Recent research can be found in edited volumes such as Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures (Duke University Press, 2021) and Race and the Suburbs in American Film (SUNY Press, 2021). She currently serves as managing co-editor of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture.
Beth Saunders is Curator and Head of Special Collections and the Library Gallery at UMBC. She holds a PhD and MPhil in Art History from The CUNY Graduate Center and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A specialist in the history of photography, Beth’s writing has appeared in edited volumes, exhibition catalogs, and journals including CAA.Reviews, History of Photography, Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, Exposure, Photography and Culture, and Rivista di Studi di Fotografia. She is co-author of the exhibition catalogue Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography (The Met, 2019.)
Content Editors
The Interdisciplinary CoLab at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County is a summer internship in interdisciplinary narrative-based research. The following Content Editors served as interns over the month of June 2024, working on the project “Picturing Mobility: Black Tourism and Leisure during the Jim Crow Era.”
Corey Turner is a class of 2024 student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County where he is pursuing a degree in Computer Science. Upon completion of his undergraduate studies, he intends to pursue a career in software engineering.
Carrington Cline is a class of 2025 student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she is pursuing a degree in Media and Communications Studies, a secondary major in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, and a certificate in the Honor’s College Program. She is a member of the Sigma Alpha Lambda Honors Society, the Director of Marketing and Public Relations, and a founding member of Sisterhood: A Women of Color Coalition, as well as being a Student-Staff Intern at UMBC’s Women’s Center. Upon completion of her undergraduate studies, she intends to pursue graduate school with a focus on digital media and production.
Em Schumacher is a class of 2026 student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she is pursuing a degree in Geography and Environmental Studies and a minor in Public History. Upon completion of her undergraduate studies, Em intends to pursue a career working with geographic information systems technology.
