Mission:  

The Orser Center at UMBC fosters innovative collaborations among scholars, students, and local community organizations. The Center seeks to put humanities research to work as a creative response to problems, challenges, and issues identified by communities in the greater Baltimore region.

For over four decades, Professor Ed Orser embodied quality community engagement in his research and teaching on Baltimore at UMBC. He set a high standard as an engaged scholar and public intellectual. Upon Ed’s retirement in 2011, the Orser Center was founded to amplify such community and place-based work and focus on better understanding the Greater Baltimore Region and support the grassroots attempts to build a more just city for the future.

The Center focuses on how the local region has been affected by global trends in fleeing manufacturing, how neighborhoods change/gentrify, and new patterns of immigration and place making. Exploring the relationships between the local and the global—a “grounded globalism”—builds diverse research, teaching, and public programming opportunities.

The Center is both a physical and digital space located within the Department of American Studies, which provides a blog, social networking infrastructure, university/community events to connect people interested in research and development in the areas of place, community, and culture at UMBC and beyond.

In Fall 2019, the Orser Center became the home of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS) Minor in Public Humanities at UMBC. In Spring 2025, the Orser Center and the Minor in Public Humanities merged to form the Orser Center for  Public Humanities.

For more information about the work of the Orser Center for Public Humanities, follow us on instagram: umbcpublichumanities