Cinder Cooper Barnes has over 20 years higher education teaching experience. She is presently a full-time faculty member in the English department at Montgomery College, where she designs and integrates decolonized curricula and pedagogical strategies into course material and serves as the director of the Global Humanities Institute. As part of her professional responsibilities, she serves as the college’s Fulbright Scholars liaison, writes proposals and grants; introduces and develops various programs promoting internationalization of the curriculum for faculty. Cinder has an interest in Black diaspora studies, protest movements, women’s rights, and international education. A former Senegal faculty development seminar (FDS) participant, she currently co-leads seminars to Senegal with the Council of American Overseas Research Centers and the West African Research Center. Her most recent accomplishment was co-authoring a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to host a Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty entitled “Concepts of Black Diaspora in the United States: Identity and Connections among African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American Communities,” which Montgomery College received, and which she co-directed in the summer of 2022 with Professor Mbye Cham of Howard University. Cinder has been awarded a National Institute of Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD) Excellence Award, an Outstanding Faculty Service Award, and an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellowship for her project, “Juke Joints and Jesus: The Secular and Sacred Nature of Black Joy in the South Carolina Gullah Geechee Corridor,” which traces Gullah Geechee intersecting traditions from West Africa to the present. She is currently on the board of the directors of the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County and is working on her doctorate in Education Policy, Organization and Leadership with a focus on Global Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.