Curated News
By: NewsRamp Editorial Staff
December 30, 2025
Montgomery College Professor Wins Smithsonian Fellowship for Ethics Project
TLDR
- Montgomery College's fellowship gives Bridget Lowrie exclusive access to Smithsonian resources, enhancing her curriculum and providing students with unique career advantages in criminal justice.
- The MC-Smithsonian Faculty Fellowship connects Montgomery College classrooms with Smithsonian collections through seminars, virtual exhibitions, and projects that integrate museum artifacts into coursework.
- This fellowship uses museum artifacts to help students explore civil disobedience and ethics, fostering critical thinking about justice and leadership for a better society.
- Bridget Lowrie's fellowship project examines civil disobedience through Smithsonian artifacts, including partnerships with African American and American Indian museums for unique historical perspectives.
Impact - Why it Matters
This fellowship represents a significant advancement in experiential education, demonstrating how museum resources can transform traditional classroom learning into dynamic, real-world applications. For students, particularly those in community colleges who may have limited access to such prestigious institutions, this partnership provides unprecedented opportunities to engage with primary sources and expert curators. The focus on civil disobedience, leadership, and ethics addresses critical contemporary issues in criminal justice and social movements, preparing students to navigate complex moral questions in their future careers. By connecting historical artifacts to modern challenges, this initiative helps bridge the gap between academic theory and practical application, fostering more engaged and informed citizens who can contribute meaningfully to discussions about justice, equity, and social change.
Summary
Montgomery College criminal justice professor Bridget Lowrie has been selected for the prestigious 2026 MC-Smithsonian Faculty Fellowship, a yearlong academic partnership that connects college classrooms with Smithsonian collections, scholars, and digital resources. The fellowship, housed in the College's Paul Peck Humanities Institute, represents a unique collaboration between the Smithsonian and a community college, having involved 256 faculty members and over 26,000 students since its inception in 1998. Lowrie, who serves as program coordinator for criminal justice at the Rockville and Takoma Park/Silver Spring campuses, will focus on the fellowship's 2026 theme: "Fostering a Culture of Critical and Ethical Learning to Shape Future Leaders."
Lowrie plans to develop an innovative project exploring civil disobedience, leadership, and ethics through museum artifacts that connect to contemporary criminology questions. Her proposal includes potential partnerships with the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian, along with virtual artifact collections that help students examine the intersections of disability, protest, and justice. As an attorney and professor with nearly a decade of legal practice experience, Lowrie emphasizes that working with Smithsonian collections will provide students with concrete objects, stories, and images to ground their conversations about power, fairness, and accountability, moving beyond abstract theories.
The interdisciplinary fellowship offers faculty from all three Montgomery College campuses opportunities to participate in seminars with Smithsonian curators and educators, explore on-site and virtual exhibitions, and design projects that embed museum resources into their courses. Lowrie's students will begin engaging with the fellowship project in fall 2026 through class visits, virtual collections, and research assignments focused on leadership, ethics, and civic engagement. This initiative continues to demonstrate how the MC-Smithsonian Faculty Fellowship bridges academic learning with real-world applications, preparing students to become thoughtful leaders in a rapidly changing world.
Source Statement
This curated news summary relied on content disributed by 24-7 Press Release. Read the original source here, Montgomery College Professor Wins Smithsonian Fellowship for Ethics Project
