Endowed Chairs

Maura Keefe, Professor of Dance, School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. Maura Keefe is a contemporary dance historian. She is a scholar in residence at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, where she writes about, lectures on, and interviews artists from around the world. Keefe has also given lectures and led audience programs nationally at places such as Princeton University, UCLA, the Goethe Institut (Los Angeles), the Kennedy Center, New York Live Arts, the Joyce Theatre, and New York’s City Center, and internationally for the Festival Internacional Danza Extremadura in Monterrey, Mexico.

Lisa Nathans, Associate Professor, School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. Lisa Nathans is an Associate Professor of Voice and Acting within the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland. She is a certified Colaianni Speech Practitioner and a Designated Linklater Voice Instructor. Lisa received her MFA in Voice Studies through London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She has taught previously for CalArts/California Institute of the Arts, Stella Adler Academy (Los Angeles), the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (England), Royal Welsh College (Wales), Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (England), University of Washington: Professional Actor Training Program (MFA), and the University of Minnesota/Guthrie Theater Program (BFA).

Larissa Dedova, Professor, School of Music. For over 30 years Larissa Dedova has appeared in solo and chamber recitals in concert halls throughout the world. A prodigious technique and musical aplomb have earned her the most important honors and awards. Dedova was a winner of the Bach International Competition in Leipzig and “Pro Piano” International Piano Competition in New-York, among others. A dedicated teacher, highly regarded for her masterclasses presented throughout the US, Europe and Asia, Dedova has prepared many winners of most notable international piano competitions.

Mayron Tsong, Associate Professor, School of Music. A Steinway Artist, Mayron Tsong has traveled the globe and performed in across the continental United States, Canada, Russia, Sweden, Italy, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. After her solo recital debut at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall, Harris Goldsmith of The New York Concert Review praised it as "an enlivening, truly outstanding recital.” Fanfare Magazine called her “a genius, pure and simple… perhaps, a wizard.” 

Mikhail Volchok, Lecturer, School of Music. An internationally renowned professor of piano studies across Russia, South Korea, Italy and the United States, Mikhail Volchok studied with many of the most renowned teachers in Russia's best schools. Volchok studied with Yakov Zak at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory and with Pavel Serebrjakov at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory, and at the age of twenty-five went on to win the Bach International Competition, as well as the competitions of the Pan Soviet and the Russian Contest.

Matthew Suriano, Meyerhoff Center and Program in Jewish Studies. Matthew Suriano specializes in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, ancient Near Eastern religions, Northwest Semitic epigraphy, and the archaeology of the Levant. His first book The Politics of Dead Kings: Dynastic Ancestors in the Book of Kings and Ancient Israel (Mohr Siebeck, 2010) examined the motifs used to describe a king's death. His recent book, A History of Death in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press, 2018), which won ASOR's Frank Moore Cross Award, looks more broadly at death and burial in biblical literature.

Eric Kutz, Associate Professor, School of Music. Eric Kutz has captivated audiences across North America, Asia and Europe. His diverse collaborations cut across musical styles and have ranged from cellist Yo-Yo Ma to jazz great Ornette Coleman. Kutz is active as a teacher, a chamber musician, an orchestral musician and a concerto soloist. Kutz joined the UMD School of Music in 2015, where he performs as a member of the Left Bank Quartet. Previously, he was a professor at Luther College, where he served on the faculty from 2002–2015, and prior to that, Kutz was the cellist of the Chester String Quartet for four years. 

Faedra Carpenter, Professor, School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. Faedra Chatard Carpenter is a recipient of the American Theatre and Drama Society’s Betty Jean Jones Award for Outstanding Teacher of American Theatre and Drama (2019), was also honored with the Anne Warren Leadership Award (2018) from the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, and the University of Maryland’s Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year Award (2016). Dr. Carpenter is a theatre and performance studies scholar, professional dramaturg, and cultural critic. Her research, writing, public speaking, and creative activities are grounded in her advocacy for diversity, inclusion, and cultural fluency within a wide range of institutional spheres.

Crystal Davis, Associate Professor, School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. Crystal U. Davis is a dancer, movement analyst, and critical race theorist whose work has been renowned by an eclectic community of adjudicators and audiences from Donald McKayle to the royal family of Jodhpur, India.  As a performer her work spans an array of genres from modern dance companies including Notes in Motion to East Indian dance companies including Nayikas Dance Theater Company to her own postmodern choreography at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival and Dance New Amsterdam.

Marsha Rozenblit, Professor, Department of History. A social and cultural historian of the Jews of Central Europe, Marsha Rozenblit has published The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity ( SUNY Press,1984), which also appeared in a German translation (1989). This book used quantified methods to explore the impact of immigration, social mobility, residential concentration, education, and intermarriage and conversion on the integration of Viennese Jews into Austro-German society. She has also written Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I (Oxford University Press, 2001), which explores how the Jews, a group profoundly loyal to the multinational monarchy, coped with the collapse of that supranational state and the creation of nation-states. 

Bernard Cooperman, Associate Professor, Department of History. Bernard Cooperman has edited two volumes of essays, co-authored a book on the Ghetto of Venice, translated and contributed an afterword to Jacob Katz' Tradition and Crisis, and written two books which will be published soon. In addition, he has written some eleven articles. He has organized numerous professional conferences and consults frequently with museums and libraries for exhibits in his field. He has been a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, has been a Lilly Fellow (1994-95), and has served as Director of the Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies 1991-1997.

Kendra Portier, Assistant Professor, School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. Kendra Portier is a dance artist, recognized for her contributions to the dance field as a choreographer, improviser, performer, and educator. With a reputation for rigorous creative inquiry and poeticism, Portier’s work lives in embodied research, honed through choreographic processes that shape thought, emotion, and color into felt physical action. Her teaching methodology and style, distinguished by her sense of transformation and vibrance, have garnered a substantial following, leading to engagements with prestigious dance programs, festivals, and over thirty educational commissions.

Hayim Lapin, Professor, Department of History. Hayim Lapin is the author of Early Rabbinic Civil Law and the Social History of Roman Galilee (1995) and Economy, Geography, and Provincial History in Later Roman Palestine (2001), and is at work on a history of the early rabbinic movement. He is the editor of Religious and Ethnic Communities in Later Roman Palestine (1998), and co-editor of Jews, Antiquity and the 19th-Century Imagination (with Dale B. Martin) and a volume in progress on the Middle East in the Byzantine Early Islamic Transition (with Kenneth Holum). 

Mauro Resmini, Associate Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Mauro Resmini is associate professor of Cinema & Media Studies and Italian, where he also serves as core faculty in Comparative Literature. He is the author of Italian Political Cinema: Figures of the Long '68 (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and has published essays on Italian and European cinema and media, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and the relationship between cinema and politics.