Terry Aylsworth
Emeritus Staff
College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
Terry Aylsworth joined UMBC in 1996 as the Program Assistant for the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) and the Administrative Assistant for the Center for the Humanities. She assisted Dr. Daphne Harrison, Director of the Center, in the formation of the Humanities Scholars, and the Humanities Forum Programs. In 2000, Terry joined the College of Arts and Sciences as former Dean Rick Welch’s assistant. In 2005 the College of Arts and Sciences was reorganized and became the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences under the direction of Dean John Jeffries. She was Dr. Jeffries’ assistant until 2013 when Dr. Jeffries retired. She served as the assistant to Dean Scott Casper until her retirement. Terry was awarded the Presidential Distinguished Staff Award in 2005 and co-founded and served as President and Vice President of her Senate, NEES, since its inception in 2002. She has served on numerous committees for her Senate.
Kathleen Carroll
Associate Dean Emeritus
Associate Professor Emeritus
College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
Dr. Kathleen Carroll joined the faculty of the Department of Economics in 1987 and served as
Associate Dean in the Dean’s Office from 2014 through 2021. She also served as Vice-President
and President of the UMBC Faculty Senate and on numerous department, college, and university committees. Her research focuses on the effects of institutional arrangements on decision processes, the way that multiple decision makers affect decision outcomes, and the impact of these conditions on predicted responses to regulations. She has published numerous articles, an invited book chapter, and a book, Property Rights and Managerial Decisions in For-profit, Nonprofit, and Public Organizations: Comparative Theory and Policy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). She has worked with government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and private industry providing policy analysis and program evaluation. Dr. Carroll earned her B.A. degree from Cleveland State University and her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.
Scott E. Casper
Dean Emeritus
College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
casper@umbc.edu
Scott Casper (Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University) joined the UMBC community in 2013, after many years on the faculty of the University of Nevada, Reno. A historian of the nineteenth-century United States, he is the author of Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine (Hill & Wang, 2008) and Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), and the co-author, editor, or co-editor of seven other books, most recently The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History (Oxford University Press, 2013). He edited the annual “Textbooks and Teaching” section of the Journal of American History from 2008 to 2018, and was acting editor of The William and Mary Quarterly in 2008-09. He has worked extensively with K-12 history and social studies educators through the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, the Center for Civic Education, and the Northern Nevada Teaching American History Project. For the Walters Art Museum, he served on the advisory committee for the reinstallation of 1 West Mount Vernon Place. He currently serves on the boards of Maryland Humanities and the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance.
Jonathan C. Finkelstein
Associate Dean Emeritus
Associate Professor Emeritus
College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
Dr. Jonathan C. Finkelstein, a social psychologist with research interests in attitude change and persuasion, joined the UMBC Department of Psychology in 1971 and served as Associate Chair from 1978 to 1994. He has twice received departmental teaching awards and a Certificate of Merit from the ACT/National Academic Advising Association, in 1989. He joined the Dean’s Office as an Associate Dean in 1994. Dr. Finkelstein also directed the UMBC Judaic Studies Program. He earned a B.A. in Psychology from Temple University and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
John W. Jeffries
Professor Emeritus
Dean Emeritus
College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
jeffries@umbc.edu
Dean Jeffries specializes in twentieth-century America and American political and policy history. His distinguished teaching earned him designation as a UMBC Presidential Teaching Professor and gained him a University of Maryland Regents Award for Teaching Excellence. He is the author of articles and books on the politics and policy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt era and on the World War II American home front, including Testing the Roosevelt Coalition and Wartime America: The World War II Home Front (1996, 2nd edition 2018). He is editor of the 1929-1945 volume of the Encyclopedia of American History (2003, 2nd edition 2009). His new book, A Third Term for FDR: The Election of 1940, was published in 2017. Dr. Jeffries is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer for 2004-2019.
Jesse Mashbaum
Business Manager
mashbaum@umbc.edu
Jesse Mashbaum came to UMBC in 2001 and served as Business Services Manager of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics for seven years. In 2009, he joined the Dean’s Office as Business Manager. Earlier in his career, after graduating from Johns Hopkins University with a B.A., Jesse earned a Ph.D. in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University and taught college and adult students for nine years. He was later a vice-president in a small private company that published educational software. Jesse was named UMBC Exempt Employee of the Quarter in 2007.
Cheryl Miller
Associate Dean Emeritus
Associate Professor Emeritus
College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
Dr. Cheryl Miller joined the Departments of Political Science and Public Policy in 1988 and the Dean’s Office in 2008. Her research interests include welfare policy devolution, bureaucratic accountability, state policymaking, and the impact of race on policy outcomes. She has served as Faculty Senate President and Chairperson of the Department of Political Science. Dr. Miller also has had a variety of policy practitioner experiences since joining UMBC. She was a Senior Research Associate with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, and an intermittent instructor at the U. S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) Training Institute, where she received a Special Commendation award in 1993. Dr. Miller earned a B.A degree from Lincoln University (PA), a Master’s degree in City Planning (M.C.P) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Kathy O’Dell
Special Assistant to the Dean for Education and Arts Partnerships
Associate Professor, Visual Arts
odell@umbc.edu
Dr. Kathy O’Dell joined the Department of Visual Arts in 1992 and the Dean’s Office in 2001. An art historian and critic of modern and contemporary art, she is the author of Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (University of Minnesota Press, 1998) and co-author with Kristine Stiles of the forthcoming World Art Since 1945. Dr. O’Dell co-chaired UMBC’s Middle States Periodic Review Committee in 1999-2001 and the Task Force on the Arts in 2001-2003, and she participates in numerous statewide education and arts education initiatives. She chaired the Higher Education in the Arts Task Force (HEAT Force) of the Arts Education in Maryland Schools (AEMS) Alliance and serves on the Maryland State Arts Council. Dr. O’Dell earned her B.A. in Art and French from Colby College, M.A. in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley, and Ph.D. in Art History from the City University of New York Graduate Center
Janice O’Neill
Emeritus Staff
College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
Janice O’Neill started in the Dean’s Office in 1983 and worked with seven Deans in her 31 years at UMBC. She was originally hired as an account clerk to process travel requests for the College. As the Dean’s Office assumed more responsibilities, her portfolio of responsibilities expanded as well, eventually including expense tracking, departmental budget accounting, faculty tracking, and the once dreaded People Soft, which she helped tame with her unique combination of expertise and reassuring calm. Janice was a founding member of the Classified Staff Senate and its first Treasurer, and served on numerous university-wide search committees.