As a macro social worker—someone who focuses on large-scale social issues—Evans spent eight years in social service administration and policy roles before entering academia. Since joining UMBC in 2020, the associate professor of social work has noticed that graduate students are choosing careers in clinical social work—assisting families facing food or housing insecurity, mental health counseling, and substance abuse treatment support—over macro social work. Evans serves as a member of the Special Commission to Advance Macro Social Work, which is concerned about the impact of the decrease in macro social workers beyond UMBC.
While contributing research to the textbook Human Rights and Social Justice in a Global Perspective: An Introduction to International Social Work, Evans learned about Australia’s treatment of immigrants and refugees and began researching social work in Australia. In doing so, she met Sarah Wayland, professor of social work at CQUniversity’s School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Sciences, and found that they have developed an internship program that highlights macro social work more intentionally to try and address this gap. This academic year, Evans will study how students in CQUniversity’s social work program understand and develop an interest in macro social work roles, including policy, advocacy, and leadership.
“Students in CQUniversity’s social work program bring diverse lived experiences, similar to those of UMBC students who transfer from community colleges,” says Evans. “CQUniversity also has a deep interest in innovative teaching and targeted efforts to include First Nations students and international students. Through in-depth interviews with these students, we will contribute to scholarship on how lived experience—especially trauma—influences career choices in social work.”
Evans, whose research focuses on immigrant and refugee populations, draws many international and immigrant students to her classes. When she learned that CQU’s Master’s in Social Work program focused on training international students, Evans knew this was the right collaboration.
During the study, she will supervise two social work students from CQUniversity. They will conduct research virtually with two UMBC undergraduate students who will be part of the community advisory board that will guide the project, help with literature reviews, and be co-authors on peer-reviewed articles and/or conference presentations.
“Australia’s accreditation process closely mirrors the United States’, yet CQUniversity implements it differently than UMBC. For instance, they offer more macro-focused courses and a research internship not currently available at UMBC,” says Evans. “This opens valuable opportunities for mutual learning and possible curricular innovation. UMBC’s social work department is beginning a curriculum review, making this an ideal time for collaboration.”
UMBC student and faculty Fulbrights have traveled the world to build research collaborations and develop creative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing issues. Sarah Jewett, a 2024 Fulbright alum to Loughborough University, England, is now at the helm of UMBC’s faculty Fulbright program and will ensure faculty have the support they need as they change the world.
“I have experienced the transformative power of these global opportunities,” says Jewett, director of learning partnerships in research and practice in UMBC’s Honors College. “I look forward to supporting faculty and staff as they explore the full range of Fulbright options.”
The world researches, teaches, and learns at UMBC thanks to international student and scholar visas. With hundreds of international faculty and staff, our international Retriever family thrives because of the community and the infrastructure that supports their journey. Diane Zeenny Ghorayeb ’20, modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication, M.A. ’22, intercultural communication, UMBC’s international scholar senior coordinator, ensures this important and complex process is handled with care, accuracy, and a people-first mindset.
Zeenny Ghorayeb developed that people-first mindset long before she became a Retriever. She was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived in Paris, France, for more than 20 years before moving to the United States in 2006. This sparked a curiosity for world cultures and how people adapt when they move to a new country. It also instilled an understanding of what it takes to create a welcoming and compassionate community, inspiring her to combine her experience as a global citizen with her classroom knowledge to design two trainings: a cross-cultural communication training in 2021 and immigration training in 2024.
“My role and trainings are the first of their kind at UMBC. They align with the university’s investment in a globally engaged campus community by providing resources to support the international Retriever experience, be that as employers, teachers, or classmates,” says Zeenny Ghorayeb. She translates complicated requirements for UMBC-sponsored visa categories into practical guidance to help UMBC remain compliant. “It is rewarding seeing people develop new skills and a deeper understanding while also connecting with me and each other,” says Zeenny Ghorayeb, who has been at UMBC for 10 years. “Some of my friends have gone through the trainings, which has made us even closer.”
Immigration process made clear
With constant regulation changes, Zeenny Ghorayeb has adapted her immigration training and taken it on the road to faculty and leadership meetings. More than 350 people have received the training, creating a more informed university on the complexities of working and studying in the U.S.
The trainings teach faculty and staff responsible for managing international employees and students how to initiate visa applications and maintain compliance with J-1 researcher visas, H-1B employee visas, and, in liaison with UMBC’s outside immigration counsel, the United States permanent residency process. As regulations shifted, Zeenny Ghorayeb added sessions for specialized audiences, including human resources staff, leadership, and 30-minute crash courses for new leaders to help them navigate the latest immigration-related requirements and policy changes.
“In this year’s immigration training day,” said Zeenny Ghorayeb, “the audience expanded to include shared services and financial services because they were interested in all the sessions, especially the human resources/payroll session.”
Once a visa petition has been approved by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the Office of International Students and Scholars (OISS)—the team Zeenny Ghorayeb is a part of—advises UMBC’s international students and scholars on navigating the visa process and maintaining valid immigration status. Immigration advising involves status maintenance, compliance, employment authorization, sponsorship, changing regulations, and individualized case analysis.
However, navigating visa regulations is only one part of welcoming global scholars and students. Faculty, staff, and students must also invest in their interpersonal skills to foster engaging and supportive cross-cultural relationships.
Communicating effectively
Before Zeenny Ghorayeb launched her immigration trainings, she was already a familiar face across campus and the University System of Maryland (USM) as an intercultural communication trainer. The workshops—designed to prepare teams to communicate more effectively across cultural differences—started as a project for one of her master’s classes. It was so well received that she refined it and became a freelance intercultural communications trainer. Since 2021, Zeenny Ghorayeb has partnered with departments across UMBC and throughout USM, equipping them with practical tools and strategies needed to sustain and develop an international workforce and learning environment.
“Cultural differences can create misunderstandings and affect how people interpret each other. When people understand these differences, they become more accepting and better able to work together,” says Zeenny Ghorayeb. “It has been rewarding to see UMBC embrace the processes and interpersonal skills that define a welcoming international R1 institution. What is most important is building collaboration across campus.”
The first Spider-Man movie with Tom Holland as Peter Parker, “Homecoming,” was released almost a decade ago in 2017. Mercedes Burns, associate professor of biological sciences and Spider-Man fan, has been studying arachnids for double that. This summer’s blockbuster, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” shows Peter Parker slowly becoming an actual spider as the result of hormonal imbalances triggered by extreme stress, trauma, and long-term social isolation. He produces organic webbing, his eyes turn pitch-black, his “Spidey senses” are enhanced, and biological web slingers develop in his wrists for close-quarters combat. Burns, who wore her spider taxonomy t-shirt to the movie, will tell us if these upgrades have any scientific merit.
Q: What was your first reaction to the movie, particularly from a scientific perspective?
A: I enjoyed the movie, though I preferred 2021’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” I thought the new movie was a little uneven scientifically. Some things were extremely technical and accurate, while other things were vague. I did some research on the vague hormone discussion, to try to understand why that aspect was much less specific than some of the other science in the movie.
Mercedes Burns wore her spider taxonomy t-shirt to the new Spider-Man movie. (Courtesy of Burns)
There was a piece in the trailer where Bruce Banner, the Hulk—portrayed as a physics professor at the fictional Empire State University—explains the life cycle of the spider that did not make it into the movie. So there was no clear reason for why the changes were happening. It made it seem as though Spider-Man was becoming more spidery simply because he was getting really upset or sad.
Q: Was there anything scientifically inaccurate about Bruce Banner’s explanation of Spider-Man’s DNA changes?
A: There was an extremely complicated discussion of how short non-coding RNAs were being used to limit the Hulk’s and Spider-Man’s powers by binding proteins involved in their abilities. This therapy is based on RNA interference, which was discovered in the late 1990s. It is only very recently that any short-interfering RNA (siRNA) drugs have been FDA-approved, though, such as for certain forms of hemophilia—so this is very recent technology. Overall, I was impressed by how much detail they put into how the DNA limiter worked.
There was one important mistake, though. Professor Banner talked about needing to destroy mRNA before it is transcribed, when the correct terminology is translation. DNA is transcribed into mRNA, and mRNA is then translated into proteins. If they were talking about destroying mRNA before it is used to make a protein, they should have said translated, not transcribed.
Q: What about the explanation about the surge in arachnid hormones?
A: The hormone description was extremely vague compared to the RNA discussion. One arachnid hormone that we know something about is a steroid called ecdysone, which triggers molting and increased body size. Ecdysone opposes the action of juvenile hormone, which has been studied extensively in insects, because it can be used in biological control to prevent insects from maturing.
We know what spiders look like when they are under stress and that some species are very resilient to stress. But we do not know as much about how spiders physiologically deal with stress or whether stress might impact hormone levels, which may be why that aspect of the movie was so vague.
Q: Are these hormones what makes Parker’s new webs stronger?
Mercedes Burns collects silk from a Saint Andrew’s cross spider in Australia. (Photo by Mercedes Burns)
A: Probably not. Spider-Man producing silk from his wrists is weird from a biological perspective. It would make more sense if the silk came from his feet, because spinnerets in spiders develop somewhat like a leg, but humans really do not have an equivalent to the spinnerets.
I know a lot about silks, because one of my research projects is focused on sticky proteins that arthropods, including spiders, produce to capture prey. The proteins that spiders make to produce their webs are a unique class of proteins called spidroins.
Spidroins are made up of proteins that form chains. Spiders make these building blocks, which have to align with each other as they are extruded through the spinnerets. The spinnerets contain many little glands where spiders can press out the particular protein that the silk glands produce.
Hypothetically, if you were trying to control the translation of silk proteins in a spider, one way you could do that would be with siRNAs, which could bind to the mRNA and keep the protein from being made—although this would be extremely difficult to do in practice.
Q: Why would it be so difficult to replicate Spider-Man’s web?
A: The silk Spider-Man produces from his wrists is a really sticky, stretchy mass that is also strong. He uses it to stick to surfaces, swing, wrap enemies so that they are restrained without being harmed, and perform other functions. It would be difficult to replicate this material because of how many functions it has.
In reality, spiders make many kinds of silk: some make more than 10 types. Each type has a particular job, such as for wrapping eggs or producing a covering around the eggs. The silks that are probably most important to Spider-Man are flagelliform silk and aggregate spidroin. Flagelliform silk is really stretchy. In a spider web, it forms the capture spiral, the circular part of an orb-weaver’s web. Aggregate spidroin is the sticky part of the capture spiral.
Q: What was scientifically accurate about the explanation Ned Leeds, Spider-Man’s best friend, gave of the mechanical web shooters?
A: Ned asks Spider-Man what material is in Spider-Man’s web shooters. Ned suggests that if it is a synthetic biomaterial, it is probably a liquid polymer inside the web shooters that becomes a fiber. He also suggests that the shearing forces from pressing the material out of the web shooter cause the liquid to become a polymer.
That was spot on.
Spiders use their silk for many purposes. Left: A nursery web spider in its silk hideaway. Right: A fishing spider carries a silk-wrapped egg sac. (Photos by Mercedes Burns)
Inside the glands, the building blocks for spider silk exist as a liquid called dope. The glands’ pH becomes more acidic, which triggers the protein building blocks to start lining up. The dope is also physically pressed through spigots within the spinnerets, and the mechanical force gets the protein into the appropriate conformation. What comes out is a fiber made of blocks of protein.
The web shooters work in a way that could provide the necessary mechanical force to allow a liquid to become a fiber. Ned’s reasoning about a liquid becoming a polymer and then becoming a fiber was remarkably similar to how these biomaterials are described in the scientific literature.
The mystery is the actual material. They know it would be some sort of molecule that polymerizes—that has units that join together as they leave the device. The specific molecule used by Spider-Man remains fictional and proprietary to the story.
Q: How do Spider-Man’s web shooters relate to the way he uses his powers?
This jumping spider has spun itself a silk hammock in preparation for molting. (Photo by Ryan Bacon, Ph.D. ’26)
A: I am impressed with how Spider-Man learns his own body and his unique way of using his powers in this iteration. His web shooters allow him to work with the police to apprehend criminals without killing them. He can hold people up, restrain them, and throw things in their path. The ingenuity of his use of silk is really cool, because he is using it for good. Spiders are also an example of animals creating structures for good. They live in our houses and feed on pests that we do not like, so they are providing a service for us. In Spider-Man’s case, a human is using similar abilities to protect others.
Q: Is there anything real about the scene where Spider-Man wakes up in a spider cocoon, particularly his black eyes?
A: Yes, there are spiders that produce silk cocoons, such as jumping spiders. When they are getting ready to molt and grow larger, they will often create a little sling or hammock for themselves and surround themselves with silk for protection.
The black eyes, however, are probably a visual effect intended to make Spider-Man look more spider-like. Most spiders probably have poor vision. Their eyes do not have a pupil that focuses in the same way human eyes do.
Q: The trailer hints that Spider-Man is going through the life cycle of a spider. Does this mean Spider-Man will die?
A: I hope not, because for Peter Parker it would be a very short life. There is a lot of variation among spiders. The order of arachnids that includes spiders is vast, with roughly 70,000 species. Some are very long-lived, especially compared to other arthropods like insects and crustaceans. For species that live a long time, such as tarantulas and trapdoor spiders, females typically live longer than males, sometimes up to 30 years.
Jumping spiders like this one lay out a “dragline” of silk as they move about, to catch themselves in case of an unexpected fall. (Photo by Mercedes Burns)
Peter Parker is male, however, and many male spiders have incredibly short lives. In many species, males do not survive a mating encounter. A female may eat a male if she is not reproductively mature or if she is hungry. To the degree that a spider’s life cycle involves periods of seclusion, molting, and getting larger, though, there is some similarity.
Q: Is Spider-Man a jumping spider?
A: Spider-Man seems like a combination of different spiders. The art and emblems on his suit would suggest an orb weaver. Spider-Man does have characteristics that are similar to those of a jumping spider, such as cocooning in response to stress. However, jumping spiders always produce a dragline when they are moving through the environment so they can survive a sudden fall, and Spider-Man fires webs to keep himself from falling. So, Spider-Man’s overall appearance may be more like a garden spider, but some of his capabilities better match a jumping spider.
Q: Why did you like “Spider-Man: No Way Home” better?
A: There was more interaction between Peter and his friends. I really enjoy Zendaya’s version of MJ, Spider-Man’s girlfriend. I also really like Ned as a supporting character. They are extremely intelligent in their own right and are curious about things. I like the depiction of three scientifically curious young people working together.
Some of the other Marvel superheroes have AI, magic, or something else that provides them with insight. Spider-Man has his friends. I like this version of Spider-Man because he gets advice from other superheroes here and there, but he is also figuring things out himself and getting some help from his friends. I think it is cool to have your high school friends as your superhero support group.
Deep in UMBC’s climate-controlled Special Collections are 750,000 prints, negatives, and transparencies from The Baltimore Sun dating from the 1930s through the 1980s.
Before faculty and students can use the collection, archivists must create finding aids. These inventory documents describe a collection—its origins, number of pieces, types of materials, their quality, dates, number of archival boxes, box measurements, and more. It’s a road map guiding users through each piece of a collection.
Reese Finnigan, studying the history of the Soviet Union and learning Russian, developed these archival skills working on The Baltimore Sun collection during her first year in the Master of Arts in Public History program. This year, when looking for summer internship opportunities, Finnigan was excited to find that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Shapell Family Collections, Conservation and Research Center in Bowie, Maryland—a museum she had tried to secure a curatorial or research internship with for years—was seeking an intern with her exact skill set.
“In retrospect, this is the first year that I’ve had the skills and resume needed for this level of archival work,” says Finnigan, grateful that Maryland is home to such a prestigious research center with the largest concentration of Holocaust-related records in the United States, and to learn from archival experts with decades of experience. “The opportunities UMBC has given me to learn Russian, historical research, and archival skills dovetailed very nicely with the center’s Archival Affairs Division internship, which required knowledge of Eastern European history and languages.”
Needle in the digital stack
The finding aids for the Eastern European collection that Finnigan is working on do not always directly correspond to what is in the archive. Some materials are in the wrong order or are missing finding aids. Other times, some things aren’t listed in the original file but are actually in it. Finnigan also has to translate the words on the document, which could be a translation of the original language, depending on where the document was recovered from. It could be Russian, a Slavic language, or any language using the Cyrillic alphabet, which is used for various languages across Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Soviet Republics of Central Asia.
Finnigan showing the documents and photographs she is creating finding aids for.
She spends hours cross-checking inventories, documents, photos, descriptions, and creating new spreadsheets that reflect the latest information. She then hands it off to another archivist to double-check her work. It’s a cycle of verification and refinement to align the finding aids with the accurate collections. The maze of finding aids is the result of different archival processes carried out across borders, countries, and decades. “The researcher should be able to come in and find something quickly without ever having to think too much about it. The easier they can find things, the better,” says Finnigan.
A note from the past
Some mysteries are beyond languages and locations, stumping even a team of experts and bringing them together to do serious detective work. That’s exactly what happened when Finnigan noticed a small symbol on some original photos in a Lithuanian KGB (national security and intelligence agency) collection placed by the original archives. She asked archivists Julie Schweitzer, her boss, and Alla Dvorkin, her direct supervisor, but they hadn’t seen it before either. The mystery quickly spread throughout the building, ensuing a string of emails with experts weighing in, hoping to reveal the meaning of what looked like a small bean. They found that the symbol was a mark used in some European archival systems to note the poor quality of the writing or the photography.
Finnigan showing the mysterious mark she came across in a set of photographs.
“People often imagine archival work as simply preserving historical materials. In reality, a surprising amount of the job involves acting as part historian, part detective, part translator, and occasionally part conspiracy theorist—until someone finds the answer,” Finnigan posted on LinkedIn. “It’s a reminder that expertise is often collective. No single person knew the answer. The solution emerged through conversations, institutional knowledge, and a network of colleagues willing to chase down an obscure question simply because it mattered.”
To preserve and share
In the last few weeks of her internship, Finnigan received additional training from Adam Fielding, a processing archivist who works primarily with personal papers. Fielding, who has been at the center for 11 years, began by showing Finnigan the Rudolph Daniel Sichel papers, an example of what a finished collection can look like once the personal papers have been digitized and preserved in archival boxes.
(Top) Finnigan with Fielding, Dvorkin, and Schweitzer (center), reviewing Rudolph Daniel Sichel‘s military uniform and personal camera. (Bottom) The Sichel collection archival boxes and Sichel’s camera and camera case.
The Sichel papers, donated by Rudolph’s children, consist of seven boxes with documents dating from 1903 to 1978, many of which connect Sichel to Maryland. Sichel was a “Ritchie Boy,” one of thousands of Jewish refugees who immigrated to the U.S., enlisted in the army, and trained at the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie near Cascade, Maryland, a little over an hour north of UMBC.
The additonal training gave Finnigan the techniques to work with non-digital items that require special care, like the folder Fielding tasked her with, full of primarily prewar family photographs related to the Kugelman family from Bedzin, Poland, dating between 1930 – 1942.
While putting these skills to use was exciting, the greater reward was seeing the impact of the team’s work. Finnigan’s interest in archival work is not only about preserving history but also making archives accessible to the public, which are two of the center’s priorities.
“There is no point in preserving all of this history if the public can’t access it. We want to preserve the history and make it easily accessible, whether through exhibitions, digital archives, or physical collections. Good archival work should essentially be invisible,” says Finnigan. This includes special handling and storage methods, like cold storage (35°F to 50°F) and cool storage (55°F to 65°F) to dramatically slow chemical decay, stop pest activity, and extend the lifespan of sensitive artifact and media collections.
“The collections at the Shapell Center are evidence of atrocities, of war crimes, of survival,” says Finnigan. “If the items are damaged, they can’t be replaced, and then that piece of history is lost.”
Learn more about internship opportunities at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s archives.
The Sayyida Zainab shrine, near Damascus, Syria, is capped by a gold leaf dome atop a building wrapped in interlocking glazed tiles. The aquamarine, gold, amethyst, and brown tiles create geographic tapestries of swirls and intricate flower patterns. It’s a beautiful place of splendor inside and out, where thousands of Shi‘i Muslim pilgrims and visitors worldwide gather, pray, and honor the resting place of Zainab bint ‘Ali, Prophet Muhammad’s granddaughter. The shrine’s roofline is decorated with cobalt blue tiles that repeat the phrase, “Peace be upon you, oh mother of sorrows and hardships” in white Arabic calligraphy—a testament to the trials Zainab endured throughout her life.
When Noor Zaidi, assistant professor of history, visited the shrine on pilgrimage with her family more than 20 years ago, she was mesmerized. The shrine then inspired her graduate research, and now Zaidi is a scholar of the Middle East and South Asia specializing in the history of gender and sectarianism.
Her new book, Traces of Zainab: Ritual, Memory, and Place in Shi’a Islam, is a study of the woman who became a symbol of resistance for Shi‘i Muslims worldwide. Now Zaidi is leading an international interfaith team to preserve, restore, and digitize the shrine’s archives. With the support of Father Columba Stewart of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) in Minnesota, the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik in Lebanon, and the Mourtada family from Damascus, who have been the custodians of the shrine for over 800 years, the world will learn about one of the very few shrines to a woman in Islam and the community that has preserved it with love.
“We are delighted to return to Syria in support of this historic project,” says Stewart, executive director and CEO of HMML, at Saint John’s University—one of the world’s leading organizations funding the preservation and digitization of endangered archives to create open access collections. “Partnering with this historic shrine lies at the very heart of HMML’s mission to preserve and share the world’s handwritten past to inspire a deeper understanding of our present and future.”
Zaidi notes that this is not just about preserving. It’s about teaching students what it takes to be historians, stewards of a past with many missing parts, and to be aware that their work cannot happen in isolation. “There is a story to tell in the construction of this work that also tells us about the discipline of history, at this moment in time,” says Zaidi. “It’s a story of how to teach students to be conscientious scholars: to not just look at newspapers and documents but take into account what’s not being told, what history is being erased, and ask whose voices are not being heard.”
Q: Who is Zainab bint ‘Ali?
A: Zainab bint ‘Ali has meant many things to many people: woman, emblem, whisper in the past, shout in the street. Her presence, body, and words have been central to the construction of a distinct Shi‘i Islamic identity, yet large parts of her life were absent from view.
At six, she witnessed her grandfather Muhammad’s death, the singular political and religious leader of the Muslim community. Her father, ‘Ali, became the fourth successor to the Prophet Muhammad in 656 AD. His followers considered him the first Imam, God’s spiritual representative on earth. Before he was killed five years later, he passed on the leadership to his sons.
In Karbala, present-day Iraq, in 680 AD, Husayn ibn ‘Ali, Zainab’s brother, refused allegiance to Caliph Yazīd ibn Mu‘awiyah, viewing his rule as illegitimate. A battle ensued, and Husayn’s 72 male companions were killed along with his eight sons, nephews, and cousins. Husayn was beheaded. Zainab and the other women witnessed the massacre. After she was taken into captivity and paraded unveiled to Damascus, it is said that she delivered sermons recounting the events at Karbala. Zainab became a symbol of resistance—the few against the many.
For Shi‘i Muslims, the battle at Karbala became central to constructing their distinct identity, collective memory, theological frameworks, devotional practice, and traditions of mourning.
Q: In what ways have local and international communities contributed to keeping the shrine alive?
A: The shrine is a transnational space with people, materials, and ideas moving in and out of it. In the 19th and 20th centuries, many Shi‘i shrines in Iran and Iraq began to take on a similar appearance, usually attributed to Iranian patronage. A lot of money was invested in maintaining these shrines. The mausoleum is surrounded by silver and gold grilles with Zainab’s grave beneath. They were replaced over the centuries through donations. One came from Pakistan in the 1950s, while others came from Iraq and Iran. The gold leaf, some of the tile colors, and the carpets have all come from different countries. However, the Mourtada family was very deliberate in the renovations, using local craftsmen and an Arab Damascene style of tilework to keep the local cultural heritage embedded in the shrine.
Top row: Inside Sayyida Zainab shrine. (Images courtesy of Zaidi) Bottom row: Local craftsmen renovating the shrine. Constructing the golden dome. (Images courtesy of Makam Sayyida Zainab)
Long before the politics of the present, the shrine was part of the shared sacred geography of Damascus. Its history is entwined with the devotion of countless people who have passed through it over centuries. Syrians of many different backgrounds—including Muslims, Christians, and Jews—have visited the shrine over the centuries. Queen Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary of Iran gave funding to build an electrical system, and Sunni Muslim Muhammad Ali, the American professional boxer and activist, also visited the shrine and paid tribute. Their visits helped raise awareness and respect and brought support from outside the Shi’i community.
(l) Former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, at the Sayyida Zainab shrine. (r) Boxer Muhammad Ali at the Shrine of Sayyida Zainab (Images courtesy Makam Sayyida Zainab)
While the shrine’s story can be told through violence, conflict, and upheaval, we chose to tell the story that often gets buried. When Zainab was asked what she thought of her dead brother, she said, “I see nothing but beauty.” We see nothing but beauty. This is the story the project chooses to tell.
Q: How did you gain access to the shrine’s archives?
A: When I first visited for research in 2012, there was almost nobody there. The shrine was under constant threat, and the atmosphere was one of uncertainty. During that visit, I met Hani Mohsen Mourtada, the head custodian, former Syrian Minister of Higher Education, and former president of the University of Damascus. I think he was genuinely surprised that someone was willing to come under those conditions. He gave me access to photographs, legal documents, and virtually everything the shrine held in its archives. We built a close relationship. I interviewed him several times as the project developed. I returned to Syria in 2019 and again in 2021, but he was in Beirut. Sadly, he passed away during the COVID-19 pandemic, and I never had the chance to see him again.
As I neared completion of my manuscript, I needed to revisit the archival materials and get legal permission to use them. After Hani Mohsen’s death, custodianship passed to his son, Sayed Mazen Al-Mourtada. I connected with him, and Mazen agreed to give me access. He explained that he had moved the oldest records to Beirut because he feared they might not survive the war. Although there was widespread looting and destruction when he moved the records, Mazen recovered much of what I needed. There are many major Shi‘i shrines around the world, but not all of them make their archives available in this way or welcome the same level of transparency. That made this project especially meaningful because Mozen was willing to do exactly that.
Manuscripts from the Sayyida Zainab shrine. (Images courtesy of Makam Sayyida Zainab)
For historians, the history we write is so often incomplete and shaped by these absences and losses. Rather than presenting itself as complete, the digital archive will clearly identify documents destroyed through conflict and explain how historical archives are often incomplete collections of surviving materials. Understanding this is crucial for students as they embark on research.
Q: How does your personal journey help students understand the academic and personal skills required to be a historian?
A: History as a discipline is changing. We’re reading documents, translating them, and making meaning from them. Our research process is part of that history. While I was writing the book, my colleagues at UMBC told me that I should be in the story. I wasn’t used to that. The book is divided into three parts: Zainab’s shrine, the Bibi Pak Daman shrine in Lahore, Pakistan; and the al-Rashād prison for women in Iraq. In each section, I invite the reader to take a journey with me. I was so much a part of the process that while I was writing the book, I became part of the story. I learned that if I’m interviewing these women, they are not speaking to a wall—they were speaking to me.
Being a historian is a labor of love. You don’t do things this long unless you care and find them interesting. I have been studying the Shrine of Sayyida Zainab for about 15 years. For much of that time, Syria was caught in civil war and proxy war. The shrine was regularly targeted by jihadist groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda, and for more than a decade it was extraordinarily difficult to travel in and out of the country, and then the pandemic happened. Many times, I was told to reframe the book or to change the topic. I didn’t give up.
This archive is my way of contributing something meaningful to the people and place that shaped my research. Although I continue to worry about the shrine’s future, preserving these materials offers hope that, should anything happen to it, its history will not disappear. In that sense, preserving the shrine and its documents is about preserving a piece of our common humanity.
UMBC’s 2026 – 2027 recipients of the prestigious Fulbright U.S. Student Program are joining the ranks of UMBC’s distinguished Fulbright alumni, who have made UMBC a three-time Fulbright Top Producing Institution, a recognition from the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
More than 2,000 Fulbright U.S. Students—recent college graduates, graduate students, and early career professionals—pursue graduate study, conduct research, or teach English in schools abroad each year, earning placements in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East, Latin America, and Europe. This year’s Fulbright Retrievers are launching the international phase of their research. From Baltimore to the Dominican Republic, India, and Mexico, these students are working with and for local communities to support local approaches to ongoing challenges.
The art of collaboration
During her senior year, Marelen AcevedoSoto ’26, visual arts, wowed Retrievers at UMBC’s 2025 Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day with an experiential painting that combined projection, animation, and live performance. Now, she is packing up these skills and taking them to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where she was born. Acevedo Soto earned her associate’s degree from Chavón School of Design. She is returning to work with the students to create a large-scale mural titled “Multidimensional Mural: Augmented Reality for Environmental Change” in Santo Domingo’s Zona Colonial (Colonial Zone), a UNESCO World Heritage site. Using QR codes, passersby will access animations and hear community voices describing how pollution affects daily life. The project will close with a Spanish and English multimedia performance combining projected animations, environmental data, and Dominican music.
Acevedo Soto (on the right) with artists from The Music and Me Foundation and at URCAD 2025. (Images courtesy of Acevedo)
“Many of my strongest ideas came from learning across different fields at UMBC,” says Acevedo Soto. “Music theory helped me think about rhythm and emotion. Storytelling taught me how to create meaningful experiences. Psychology helped me better understand how people think and engage with art. Environmental science deepened my understanding of water and the importance of its conservation, and data analysis gave me the tools to measure the impact of my project.”
Researchers’ responsibility
Vunnathi Ankem ’26, psychology, has had a passion for India for years, specifically how cultural exchange in India was shaped by hundreds of years of discourse, colonization, and history. While researching intimate partner violence (IPV) for her honors thesis, Vunnathi Ankem ’26, psychology, became interested in how South Asian students developed their understandings of IPV. Unexpectedly, most of the students she interviewed were from Telugu-speaking regions, such as Hyderabad in southern India. Intrigued, Ankem is now headed to the Psychology Center at the University of Hyderabad to continue her research. “Psychology, as we know it in the Western world, is only one approach to understanding the mind and the body,” says Ankem. “As psychology students, it is our responsibility to explore worlds and lenses beyond the Eurocentric ones.”
(l-r) Ankem at the 2026 Asian Cultural Celebration and Awards ceremony. Ankem with mentor Christopher Murphy, professor of psychology. (Images courtesy of Ankem)
She will study how systems, class, community, and culture shape experiences of IPV in India and inform more culturally responsive prevention strategies. Ankem will then develop community-based and community-led IPV prevention workshops. “The Fulbright program is giving me the opportunity I have always dreamed about,” says Ankem. “I can’t wait to learn from professionals and clinicians, alongside ancient culture practitioners and experts in India. It will be the experience of a lifetime!”
Humanistic climate futures
After studying climate change and migration on a study abroad trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, Bryan Castro-Velez ’26, geography and environmental studies, knew he was on the right research path—studying humanistic approaches to equitable agroecological systems and land in Indigenous Latin American communities. He says learning directly from indigenous leaders about their farming practices and response to climate change inspired him to apply for the Fulbright García-Robles award for graduate and doctoral research in Mexico. Castro-Velez’s graduate work will focus on agroecology, natural resource management, and rural development in Chiapas, Mexico.
Bryan Castro-Velez at the 2025 Association of American Geographers annual conference in Detroit. (Image courtesy of Castro-Velez)
“I look forward to continuing down this path, encouraging others to do the same, and furthering my education outside the walls of academia,” says Castro-Velez. “My experiences during and outside of UMBC have proven to me that community-based learning systems are fundamental to just climate solutions and humanistic futures.”
As the U.S. Fulbright Program celebrates its 80th anniversary this year, UMBC’s Fulbright program is celebrating by expanding support through the Office of Prestigious Scholarships (OPS) under the leadership of April Householder ’95, director of OPS: “I am looking forward to building on UMBC’s strong legacy as a top producer of Fulbright students,” says Householder, “and expanding student support throughout the processes of exploring, applying, and transitioning abroad.”
Anyone passing by Room 208 of the Sondheim Building this spring might have thought the class was a Latin American music appreciation course. Projected on the screen was a video of the Mexican band Los Ángeles Azules (“The Blue Angels”), featuring Natalia Lafourcade singing “Nunca Es Suficiente” (“It’s Never Enough”).
In Silvia Escanilla Huerta’s history classroom, music is not background noise but a historical text carrying centuries of migration, colonialism, resistance, and cultural exchange. “Nunca Es Suficiente” is a modern Mexican interpretation of Colombian cumbia, a 200-year-old genre of music created with African, Indigenous, and European acoustic instruments. Escanilla Huerta uses material culture—songs, videos, poems, documentaries, art, and student-created work—to awaken students’ senses and engage their interest in the complex history of Latin America.
Escanilla Huerta has found that using material culture helps students connect abstract historical ideas with concrete experiences, inviting students to think critically about how these practices evolved and impact the world today. She guides students as they analyze and compare primary and secondary sources from the past and the present to critique what is missing from historical records. Critical research analysis skills she honed while she was conducting archival research in Spain, Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru on the role indigenous peoples played in the process of independence in what today are Peru and Bolivia.
“I try to entertain and make it fun, not just for them but for me too, because I’ve worked with this material for decades. I want it to come alive for them as it did for me,” says Escanilla Huerta, the first tenure-track faculty member and the first Latina in UMBC’s history department to teach Latin American history. “I dance, I speak in Spanish, and translate Spanish-language texts for the class. We watch videos, listen to music, and connect this media to specific points in history,” Escanilla explains while the students continue to listen to the song, “like today’s topic, the Guatemalan and Cuban revolutions in post-WWII Latin America.”
The art of revolution
As the song “Nunca Es Suficiente” came to an end, Escanilla Huerta lowered the volume and projected “Gloriosa Victoria,” a painting by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera depicting the coup of 1954 as a segue into the Guatemalan revolution of 1944 to 1954 against Jorge Ubico’s dictatorship. The students scan the mural in anticipation of their next point of analysis.
“What do you see?” asks Escanilla Huerta. Students describe the crowded painting filled with Guatemalan and U.S. politicians, military and business leaders, in a tense negotiation while a bishop blesses them. “On the top right-hand corner, I can’t tell whether it’s people at a window with bars or jail,” says one student. Escanilla Huerta confirms that it’s a jail and then draws their attention to specific elements like a man holding a bomb with the face of the U.S. President Eisenhower, surrounded by people who were murdered during the coup.
To further contextualize what Rivera was reacting to, she explains the political tensions of the time. “The revolution succeeded, bringing an elected democratic government for 10 years,” said Escanilla Huerta. “Until opposition from other political parties and U.S.-based corporate interests led the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to topple the government in 1954.” Back and forth, Escanilla Huerta and the students unpack the mural scene, connecting each scene to their readings and to today’s geopolitical wars.
She also urges students to think beyond identifying the iconic representations of abuses of power and to critique the artists themselves, their motives, and their lives. “The painting is a clear denunciation of corruption, but the artist himself has a complex history that, while he defends the people, he is also sexist and abusive. History is complex, and we need to consider all aspects.”
So you want a revolution
Shifting from fine art to pop art, Escanilla Huerta displays a poster of a man’s face wearing a black beret marked with a gold star and military fatigues, set against a vivid red backdrop. “Does anyone know who this is?” Some students nodded, but few knew the history behind the image.
Escanilla Huerta discusses the life of Ché Guevara.
“Like many revered historical figures, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, better known as Ché, is loved by people all over the world, but he is also controversial,” explains Escanilla Huerta. Nearly 60 years after his CIA-assisted execution, Guevara’s likeness remains one of the most recognizable symbols of Latin American revolution, reproduced on T-shirts, hats, and posters worldwide.
Students look at their own t-shirts as Escanilla Huerta encourages the class to connect two points: How merchandising is used to make personal political statements and how popular culture can keep the memory of a movement or a person long after they’re gone through merchandising, literature, and music. “Ché was a Marxist revolutionary who believed armed revolution was the only path to liberation from oppressive local governments and U.S. interventionism,” she says, clicking through historic black-and-white photos of Ché in Cuba.
“He developed his political ideology while he was a medical student during a motorcycle trip across Latin America where he witnessed the oppression of Indigenous and rural communities,” says Escanilla Huerta, emphasizing how college students can create change in a variety of ways while passing out copies of poems, songs, political cartoons, and a 1959 television interview, for students to read, compare, and discuss in groups.
Expanding on the idea of revolution, Escanilla Huerta introduces “Revolution” by the Beatles, released in 1968, 10 months after Ché was executed. “If you haven’t heard of the Beatles before, I’m very glad I’m the one introducing them to you,” she says, smiling and nodding to the beat. “I want you to listen to the lyrics, and then we can contrast Ché’s idea of revolution with the Beatles’ idea of revolution.” The song opens with the lines: You say you want a revolution / Well, you know / We all want to change the world. Hands quickly shoot up as students begin connecting Ché’s call for armed resistance with the Beatles’ more skeptical view of revolution and whether radical change truly transforms who holds power.
What are you willing to fight for
She ends the discussion by asking students to place themselves as active agents in history. “Now, what do you think it takes to become a revolutionary? What do you care about that you would like to change?” asks Escanilla Huerta as she passes out sheets featuring Guevara’s iconic red-and-black image. Faces lower, pencils race across the page, and within minutes, students tape their responses to the back wall for the class to see. Together, they move to the opposite side of the classroom to take in the full wall of ideas.
Students review a poem about Ché Guevara and write their ideas for social change.
“Who wants to share what they want to change in the world? What is worth fighting for?” asks Escanilla Huerta. One student’s hand flies up: “I want independence for Wales,” they say, explaining how Wales is a country conquered by England that remains under British rule. Another wants an end to the war between Israel and Palestine and the corporations profiting from it. Others bring the discussion closer to home, raising concerns about transportation equity in Baltimore, where public transit remains inaccessible in many areas. Standing at the front of the classroom and looking at their collective wall of ideas, students begin to recognize that history is shaped by people who choose to follow ideals—for better or worse, depending on who is telling the story.
We’re still here
“I don’t want the class to become a long list of injustices that have happened on Latin American soil,” says Escanilla Huerta, who was born and raised in Argentina. Just like she uses material culture of decades past, she also brings the present into the classroom to show that Latin American history doesn’t end with massacres—it’s so much more. “Despite all that pain, we have always carried joy, pride, and a fighting spirit. That’s why we also analyze examples of joy like Bad Bunny.”
The Puerto Rican singer-songwriter’s 2026 Super Bowl LX halftime performance was the kind of stadium-scale material culture Escanilla Huerta would love to bring into the classroom. Across the stadium floor were vivid representations of Puerto Rican history: workers in sugar cane fields, people trading gold, and the Puerto Rican independence flag flying high, connecting a painful colonial past with a joyful present through a lively house party scene celebrating Puerto Rican dance traditions, vendors selling local treats, and the flags of every Latin American country flanking both sides of the field.
While it may not be the Super Bowl, this spring in room 208 Sondheim, Escanilla Huerta similarly brought modern Latin American history and contemporary culture into the classroom to remind students, as Bad Bunny said in the final line of his Super Bowl performance, “Seguimos aquí!/We’re still here!”
When Demetrie Garner moved from Maryland’s Eastern Shore to Baltimore, he found a wealth of opportunities in Baltimore, a strong spiritual practice, and a supportive network of friends and family. They became necessary anchors for recovering from opioid dependency and managing the workload of a full-time job while earning a bachelor’s, a master’s, and now a doctorate in public health from UMBC.
“My story has a lot of twists and turns. I came to Baltimore in 2018 for treatment for opioid use disorder after experiencing homelessness, incarceration, hospitalizations, and treatment programs. Recovery was a process of 26 years,” says Garner, who now works in the Baltimore City Mayor’s Office of Overdose Response. “When I came to Baltimore, I had a clean slate. I was able to go through an expungement process of criminal records, which was a list of misdemeanors that happened during my drug and alcohol addiction. My journey to UMBC began as an adult learner, at 40 years old, after a year in recovery.”
Understanding the bigger picture
Garner with his mom, Clara Turner.
The inspiration to pursue a bachelor’s degree came from working as a recovery specialist at Franklin Square Hospital in Baltimore County, where he supported patients who had overdosed or were experiencing substance use disorders, many of whom faced significant social and economic conditions that negatively affected their health. Although he connected patients to treatment and recovery resources, he questioned why so many returned to the emergency department with the same challenges. That curiosity sparked a desire to better understand the systems, policies, and social factors driving addiction and recovery.
“I wanted to understand how healthcare is failing people in recovery,” says Garner. “I decided to go back to school. The logical step was to study public health.” Making the leap from working full-time and being a full-time student without a driver’s license posed many challenges. Thankfully, in addition to his faith, friends, and family, Garner also had a team of mentors at UMBC’s School of Public Policy that continue to support him to make his vision possible.
Garner immersed himself in public health research and learned about comorbidities, where patients are managing multiple health needs like substance dependency and mental health. He found that having multiple health needs with little to no healthcare is also exacerbated by homelessness, lack of transportation, inconsistent healthcare, or an environment not conducive to recovery. The emergency room could treat the symptoms but not the root causes.
“My undergrad journey into public health was transformative because the curriculum I was learning for the core courses in public health also exposed me to psychology and epidemiology,” says Garner. “UMBC helped me understand what was needed for me to actually serve. If I wanted to be of service, then I needed to understand not just what leads people into substance use disorder but also what drives the research.”
No limits in sight
Each learning moment inspired great curiosity. Garner sought faculty for advice and opportunities. A game-changing moment came in a research methods course with Pamela R. Bennett, professor of public policy. Bennett encouraged Garner to think beyond what was stated in the research and analyze what was in between the lines.
“I got a D in one discussion post, so I went to Dr. Bennett’s office hours. She told me to stop synthesizing information and to start thinking critically,” says Garner. “That was a game changer because I translated what she said to me into my work.”
“
UMBC offered me, someone with a lived experience of homelessness and substance use disorder, a door that I would normally not have access to. College is an opportunity to discover who you are and what matters to you. Don’t be afraid to engage with professors, challenge ideas, and use your voice.
Demetrie Garner ’23, public health, and M.P.P ’25
Another game-changing moment came in Lauren Hamilton Edwards‘ class. Hamilton Edwards, associate professor of public policy, told the class at the beginning of the semester that everyone had an A until they didn’t. Garner interpreted that as an incentive to do his best every day. “From the beginning, she gave me the kind of nurturing I needed,” says Garner. “Now, when I have an intern, I make sure that I’m the “Dr. Lauren Hamilton Edwards” to that intern, as she was with me.”
Additional supports like the McNair Scholars Program gave him the foundation and confidence to pursue graduate school, and his first experience presenting his research at UMBC’s Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day was a humbling experience, he says.
Garner with Baltimore City Mayor Brandon Scott.
Garner is thriving thanks to the support of the faculty and staff in the public policy and sociology, anthropology, and public health departments, who recognized his potential.
“Associate Professor Andrea Kalfoglou called me Dr. Garner long before I believed it myself. My faculty advisor, Katie Birger, associate teaching professor, recognized my potential early on and encouraged me to pursue the B.A./M.A. pathway,” says Garner. “Now, with Professor Nancy Miller‘s mentorship, I am on track to finish my coursework by the end of the fall semester and begin my dissertation proposal in the spring of 2027.”
“Don’t be afraid”
As Garner’s expertise in public health and policy grew, so did his career opportunities. Today, he serves as the quality assurance manager for Baltimore City’s Behavioral Health Consent Decree. His work focuses on improving outcomes for people experiencing homelessness, substance use disorders, and behavioral health crises, giving him a unique perspective on how public safety and public health intersect to advance overdose prevention and crisis response.
“I no longer see those 26 years to recovery as a period of failure. They gave me lived experience that I now use to help others entering recovery,” says Garner, who, throughout that time, drew strength from the unwavering faith of his grandmother, Hazel Parker; his sister, Shontell Cooper, and his mother, Clara Turner, who never stopped believing change was possible. He hopes his story inspires others to begin their own path to healing.
“UMBC offered me, someone with a lived experience of homelessness and substance use disorder, a door that I would normally not have access to,” says Garner. “College is an opportunity to discover who you are and what matters to you. Don’t be afraid to engage with professors, challenge ideas, and use your voice.”
In his new book, Empathy Machines: This American Life, Podcasting, and the Public Radio Structure of Feeling, Jason Loviglio, professor of media and communications, critiques and analyzes the making of and the impact of one of his favorite shows on National Public Radio (NPR), “This American Life”—a radio show turned podcast that received the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting. “This American Life,” created and hosted by Baltimore-native Ira Glass, became a listener favorite for its magical way of weaving stories about everyday people into larger human issues, sounding more like a sympathetic, curious neighbor instead of a serious professor. The irony is not lost on Loviglio, who thanked his students in the book for reminding him that accessibility ensures that the public, his students, and their families, not only academic editors, understand the research. He wants this young audience to learn about radio and be inspired to research their own media and communications passions.
“The people I have had the honor of calling my students over the years have done more than anyone else to help me learn how to communicate ideas about communication and media clearly and simply,” writes Loviglio in his acknowledgements. “The MCS undergraduates are among the least pretentious and least entitled people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. Too numerous to name here, I give a collective thanks to you for the lessons of clarity you’ve taught me and for the laughs.”
Long before Loviglio became an author and the co-editor of Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media and of The Routledge Companion to Radio and Podcasting Studies, he was a young kid in love with “weird radio shows,” notes Loviglio. “I remember listening at night to my red transistor radio when I was little, maybe 9 or so. I put it under my pillow so my parents wouldn’t hear it,” says Loviglio. “I mostly listened to weird nationally-syndicated late night public radio shows, like Dr. Demento and local sports talk shows.”
While he doesn’t expect students to fall in love with radio as he did, in his History of Media class, he wants students to understand the power and importance of radio long before stories were mobilized in the palms of our hands 24/7 worldwide. Loviglio encourages students to look beyond Google and instead find people whose lives were shaped by radio.
He wants students to explore what radio meant in everyday life and how it conveyed and reflected emotions such as fear, danger, excitement, and joy—functioning as empathy machines that inspired deeper forms of storytelling and laid the groundwork for public radio and podcasts.
Q: What are empathy machines?
A: I think it’s safe to say that public radio has been explicitly understood as an empathy machine at least since the radio show “This American Life’s” debut in 1996. If we allow for synonyms of empathy, then radio has been understood this way for a lot longer. There’s a longer history regarding various media of communication as uniquely efficient machines for producing empathy. Most famously, of course, is the novel. And before that, oral storytelling. The idea of radio as an empathy machine stems from a specific history referred to as the technological sublime.
The notion that we can invent and communicate our way into equality is central to the way we understand Western history since at least the printing press. The book, particularly the novel, has been hailed for its powers to impart democracy and empathy. This history is opposed by an equally compelling one in which the machine represents the antithesis of democratic values of participation and empathy. A dominant theme in media history is the role of technology as an extension of human values, such that we no longer hear the metaphors in our arguments.
Q: Did you always know you were going to write about “This American Life” instead of general radio?
A: It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I realized the best way to tell the story of public radio and podcasting was through NPR’s “This American Life.” It was first produced in 1996 by WBEZ, Chicago Public Radio, and then picked up nationally by Public Radio International. It became a massive show.
“This American Life” is also one of the first shows to start offering a podcast version, in case you missed an episode. Around 2014, “This American Life” started to shift, where more people were listening to it as a podcast. I wrote to Ira Glass last year, and he still calls it a radio show. That’s still his default understanding of it, even now.
Q: Did you have fun writing this?
A: Yes and no. I had fun thinking about it and fun listening to the shows. This is such a great way to tell stories. But it was hard to write because the shows kept changing. My thoughts kept changing. I began writing the book during President Obama’s administration, when I was thinking positively about American history. Then, Trump won.
I didn’t think that because President Obama was elected, it meant that everything was great and we had cured racism. I thought a particular version of liberalism had won. Definitely very capitalistic, definitely very interested in style, maybe more than substance, but there was a story everyone was telling about the country that was designed to make people feel very comfortable. Not only liberals, but also very privileged people, and not particularly political.
Trump winning the 2016 presidential election was a reminder that there is another story. I knew the other far-right story, but I thought that more people were happy for the positive symbolic victory that President Obama represented in terms of being biracial and being born to an immigrant father. This educated, cosmopolitan elite could also speak across different cultural registers. I thought that’s what I was writing about. Then the Trump administration began, and I felt I had to write about this darker story. That meant I had to think differently about the long, slow death of liberalism. There was something rotten in the creeping neoliberalism of the era that put some of us to sleep, left others out in the cold, and mobilized a politics of racial grievance on the right.
Q: What was the critique?
A: I’m not speaking for everyone, but people like me: privileged, educated, and progressive but kind of complacent. What did we do for the eight years of the Obama administration and the previous two or three decades of creeping neoliberalism? What were we listening to? Public radio. That’s what we were listening to. That’s the soundtrack of the frog and the pot. The pot slowly heats up, the frog is comfortable, and doesn’t realize it’s slowly boiling. I love public radio. I love “This American Life.” I love podcasting, but I also wanted to look critically at the story we were telling about empathy, who is telling the story, and who is the story about?
Important exceptions long persisted at the margins of the public radio industry. “Latino USA” is the longest-running public radio Latino news and cultural program in the United States. It is unique in that it has people of color behind the microphone. It is designed by the people that it speaks to, but most of public radio is not that way. In contrast, “This American Life,” in a way, is the epitome of white liberalism. It’s really beautiful storytelling, but in the service of this kind of sound effect of liberalism and empathy, instead of something a little bit more gritty and radically engaged that maybe we should have been trying to tune into.
“
I use “This American Life,” as a bridge, because of the way that it really epitomizes…radio, as a place for sonic innovation, experimentation, the primacy of the local, the intimacy of the familiar, weakly voice…
Then what happens is it becomes a national phenomenon…turning into inside the beltway, political relevance, and increasing market share…driven by an increasingly robust audience research, which discovers…that the folks who listen to public radio are disproportionately…highly educated, higher earners, and that in order to sustain a system that relies on donations…the programming has to not only appeal to them, but the variation between programs has to be minimal…which is borrowed from commercial radio.
Jason Loviglio
Professor of media and communication studies, on the "Cultural Studies" podcast. https://culturalstudies.podbean.com/e/jason-loviglio-on-radio-and-podcasts/
Q: Did the mindset about who gets to tell the radio story shift during or after the social justice protests of the summer of 2020?
A: Yes. That is when it all falls apart. The whole public radio storytelling format starts to collapse in the late 2010s because most of these shows are run by white producers and white on-air talent who are telling stories about others. All the contradictions just start to crash into each other, and a lot of the shows go off the air. There are all these awkward moments of reckoning. Shows changed. One week, the radio show “Invisibilia,” an NPR podcast about the unseen forces that shape human behavior, like ideas and beliefs, was being produced by all-white women from NPR, The New Yorker, and Slate magazine. Then, in part due to the collapse of the specific logic of empathy that animated the show, there is a switchover to new hosts—two women of color, who cheerfully embraced a more politically engaged set of feelings, like confrontation and discomfort. The show was canceled in 2023, suggesting that the format could not bear certain kinds of changes to its structure of feeling.
The same thing happened with “Reply All,” a popular podcast about the internet and digital culture, created and hosted by Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt, two white men from New York City. They had a massive implosion. Goldman and Vogt were called out for perpetuating plantation culture in the workplace, where leadership and decision-making are dominated by white executives or managers, right in the middle of doing an exposé on Bon Appétit, a high-end food culture magazine, for doing precisely the same thing. “Reply All” was calling out a white-run magazine, and the people who were doing a lot of the grunt work but not getting paid were people of color and young people, who spoke up about the hypocrisy. That show collapsed in a couple of weeks.
It’s really a radical moment because radio shows and podcasts don’t get to tell the same stories without ever changing who gets to tell the stories. You don’t get to pretend you care, but not change. And so things really start to feel the strain by 2020.
Q: Are shows today more liberal or conservative as a result of the shift in 2020?
A: There are many shows today that center on conflict and unhappiness with the status quo—that Trumpism has gone too far. I try to write about how we are in a whiplash between this rhetoric of empathy and the rhetoric of Trumpism, this hostility to the idea of caring for others. I don’t know how many people took the political implications of empathy seriously, but rhetorically, it shaped a good deal of the public radio structure of feeling.
Q: Why did you thank your students in the book?
A: Students are reading less and less, and academics like me want to write clearly, and we usually don’t because we’re not thinking about 17-year-olds. We’re not thinking about the parents of 17-year-olds who might encounter our research in a faculty magazine or a newspaper. We’re thinking about the people who review academic journals or books.
One reason I thanked the students is that in the MCS methods class, students read articles written by MCS faculty. If they’re learning about history, they’re reading something I wrote or something Liz Patton, chair and associate professor of MCS, who writes about media history, identity, and space, wrote. If they’re reading about globalization and representation, they’ll read research byTracy Tinga, associate professor of MCS, who focuses on critical conversations about media, power, development, and digital cultures in African contexts, or research by Fan Yang, professor of MCS, who writes about the intersection of cultural studies, transnational media studies, globalization, postcolonialism/postsocialism, urban communication, and contemporary China. And now, they are reading work on social media and mental health, thanks to our newest colleague, Holly Avella. They’re also reading or viewing the work of Chung-Wei Huang, teaching assistant professor, Kristen Anchor, teaching associate professor, and Donald Snyder, teaching professor of MCS.
Students love reading faculty research, so I want to make sure what I’m writing is accessible to students. It’s a conversation starter when students connect personally with the research.
Q: Do students in your classes listen to the radio?
A:Some do. I think they do so a bit more after they’ve had a class with me. I want to make sure all my classes have opportunities for different kinds of creativity and engagement. In my History of Media class, I have students think about radio and pay attention to what is on the radio by having them interview a grandparent or someone older in their lives about their experiences with the radio. Students create small stories by conducting interviews and editing them into short radio diaries in a style similar to “This American Life.”
A lot of our students are immigrants or international students, and even more are children or grandchildren of immigrants. Radio remains especially important in much of the world, particularly in the Global South and in regions shaped by uneven development. This assignment helps students learn about their grandparents, and for some, it becomes the most meaningful conversation they have ever had with them. I’ve had students come back and tell me, “My grandfather died, and I have this recording of us talking for your assignment. It’s the only thing I have of him.” That’s why I really value this assignment.
Q: Is listening to the radio really a thing of the past?
A: Video games and gaming culture are increasingly central to sound studies because so much of these experiences are built around audio design. Many major games are intentionally structured to sound like radio, as in Grand Theft Auto, which features more than a dozen in-game radio stations with full playlists. In this sense, radio continues to shape not only podcasting but also video games, providing a template for how soundscapes are constructed for audiences. Even though radio may seem obsolete or old-fashioned, it remains one of the dominant frameworks through which people understand and design contemporary sound culture.
Alfred Boakye first began thinking deeply about the care and well-being of elders and their families while caring for his centenarian grandmother, Margaret Nyarko, in his home city of Tema, on the Atlantic coast of South East Ghana. She was in charge of her essential self-care routine—bathing, dressing, eating, toileting, transferring from sitting to standing, and continence—and more complex daily tasks necessary for independent living: medication management, meal preparation, transportation, and shopping. But even with her mobility, his grandmother lacked a social network.
Acting as both a devoted grandchild and a caretaker, Boakye experienced firsthand the complexities of aging. He learned to respect his grandmother’s independence while finding ways to support her where she needed help. Boakye, now a UMBC gerontology Ph.D. student in the social, cultural, and behavioral track, notes that his grandmother’s children didn’t live with her, and her grandchildren didn’t understand her aging process. As her friends and siblings passed away, her social circle shrank. “I asked her what motivated her to stay at church for hours, and she says the church supports her, brings her communion, visits her, and brings her Christmas gifts.”
After earning a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in human resources at the University of Ghana, Boakye wanted to broaden his understanding of aging and caregiving. In 2021, he moved to the United States to pursue a master’s degree in gerontology at Georgia State University (GSU), where he met his mentor and master’s thesis chair, Jennifer Craft Morgan, professor and director of the GSU Gerontology Institute.
Boakye at his GSU master’s graduation. (l-r): Antonius Skipper, assistant professor of gerontology at GSU and Boakye’s master’s thesis committee member; Reverend Kwaku Owusu-Boachie, Boakye’s uncle; Boakye; and Craft Morgan. (Image courtesy of Boakye)
In 2023, the year his grandmother passed away and the year he completed his master’s at GSU, Boakye published his first aging-related article, “Does the Church Care? Assessment of Social Support Strategies on the Health and Wellbeing of Older Adults within the Tema Metropolitan Assembly-Ghana” in the African Journal of Ageing Studies.
Craft Morgan fostered Boakye’s interest in gerontology and encouraged him to continue his work at the doctoral level, leading him to UMBC’s gerontology doctoral program, which is an interdisciplinary program in collaboration with the University of Baltimore. “Professor Craft Morgan has held my hand from the day I started my master’s program and continues to do so today,” says Boakye. “I always feel privileged that I have her in my corner.”
Stigma of male caregivers
Boakye’s studies are also informed by his experience being the primary caregiver to his father. Before moving to the U.S., Boakye did the grocery shopping, cooking, and laundry for Stephen, his 76‑year‑old father. He became aware of the multiple obligations children have when caretaking for themselves, their families, and their parents, as well as the isolation that can happen, especially if you are a male caregiver.
At the time, Boakye saw himself as being a “helpful child,” a term associated with a Ghanaian proverb that states, “If they take care of you to grow your teeth, you take care of them to lose theirs.” The proverb is more than words—it is a way of life in Ghana, which reinforced Boakye’s caregiving role and emphasized what it takes to be a helpful child—one built on responsibility and reciprocity. But it’s easier said than done. “I had to juggle my ‘identity’ as a male caregiver in a historically patriarchal society with my caring masculinity,” says Boakye. “Caregiving is predominantly perceived as ‘women’s work’ in Ghana, and men who take on these roles are often stigmatized and labeled ‘Kojo besia,’ which translates to ‘man woman’. To avoid such labeling, I was hesitant to ask for help, despite the toll caregiving took on my physical and psychological well‑being.”
Boakye presents his research on male caregiving to GSA leadership during their visit to UMBC in spring 2026. (Bradley Ziegler/UMBC)
Boakye presented his research and personal experience to the leadership of the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) during their visit to UMBC this spring. Thanks to the UMB Provost’s Global Scholar Program, Boakye will be traveling to Ghana this summer to engage with male caregivers—to listen to their caregiving experiences, explore what these experiences mean to them, and co‑create resources to support them. He will use this research to finish his master’s thesis in applied sociology—Boakye’s third master’s degree.
Meeting Japan’s centenarians
In 2024, Boakye joined the Global Healthy Aging in Japan study abroad program, organized by Taka Yamashita, professor of sociology, anthropology, and public health and co-director of the gerontology doctoral program. The two-week program leads students through research, community centers, and historic sites in Kanagawa Prefecture, near Tokyo. Japan is known for its cutting-edge research and policy that supports the active lives of the world’s largest aging population and the highest number of centenarians. The students visited multigenerational living communities and centers that merge theoretical research with real-world practice and outcomes.
Boakye (second row, fifth from the left) at a senior center in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. (Image courtesy of TakaYamishita, professor of gerontology and sociology, second row, first on the right)
Boakye was not expecting that at a time when he was missing his grandmother the most, Kanagawa would make him feel like he was home in Tema. It wasn’t only that both Japan and Ghana operate on a similar collective familial care system focused on intergenerational living and inclusion, notes Boakye. It’s also the physical environment. “The buildings are close together, and people put chairs in front of their homes to talk,” says Boakye. “Older adults greet passersby, and people stop to have a conversation with them. They will tell you they are out for a little sun.”
A highlight of the trip for all the students was meeting a supercentenarian. The 110-year-old woman welcomed them and kissed each of them on the cheek. “All the students say that they were blessed to have this welcome and that she could still talk to us,” says Boakye. “It was really emotional for me. I just kept thinking of my grandmother.”
Boakye was also impressed by the Kanagawa ME-BYO approach to aging, which encourages monitoring vital signs using biomedical technologies. ME-BYO focuses on preventing and minimizing illness progression through programs that promote healthy behaviors such as a balanced diet, exercise, and social activities. “My experience in Japan has been one of the best things that has happened in my personal and academic life and in my career,” says Boakye, who wants to find a way to incorporate ME-BYO into his current and future caregiving research and practice. “This trip has equipped me with the cultural competence, literacy, sensitivity, communication, problem-solving, and critical thinking skills needed to have a real-world impact in the field of gerontology.”
Looking Ahead
With five years of longevity research, Boakye now understands that his grandmother’s experience is common for many older adults in Ghana. He discovered in the 2021 Population and Housing Census of Ghana that adults 65 years of age and older make up 4.3 percent of Ghana’s population. However, he explains, the need for person-centred and geriatric care services has not kept up with the demand.
“I feel like I am now clearly connecting the dots between my experiences in Ghana, what I saw in Japan, and what I have learned in class. I am passionate about encouraging more men to engage and support the people they love, but also seek help when they need it,” says Boakye. He plans to finish his doctoral program in fall 2027.
“It has been a pleasure to watch Alfred’s research grow during his time at UMBC,” says Nancy Kusmaul, professor at UMBC’s School of Social Work, his dissertation chair, who Boakye works with as a research assistant. “He is committed to raising the voices of paid and unpaid caregivers who provide vital services to older adults and people with disabilities in the US and abroad. I am confident that he will continue to make significant contributions to the field.”
He knows there is a long road ahead, but he is confident that he is on the right path. “I want to build culturally relevant and gender‑sensitive resources that support male caregivers, not only to improve their health and well‑being but also to amplify their voices when it matters most.” His grandmother, Margaret, continues to inspire Boakye’s work on how caregiving shapes the experiences of both the carer and the care recipient.
Rather than taking her usual route to UMBC at the Universities at Shady Grove for her spring public health class, Magaly Lizama Hernandez ’26, psychology, boarded a plane to Geneva, Switzerland, as part of a 2026 study abroad program. The experience was made possible by the Bernard L. Berkowitz Memorial Award for students dedicated to public service. Lizama Hernandez was the inaugural recipient in 2025.
“The Berkowitz Award helped make my study abroad experience in Switzerland possible. I had the opportunity to explore health and well-being from a global perspective while immersing myself in a new culture,” says Lizama Hernandez, who split her week abroad between Geneva and Zurich. “It was an amazing experience that broadened my understanding of community health and deepened my commitment to helping others through public service.”
Erika Bucciantini, a doctoral student of public policy and the 2026 recipient of the Bernard L. Berkowitz Memorial Award, is also grateful for the award. As a full-time mom and full-time student, time is scarce, and the cost of child care and basic needs adds up quickly.
(left)Stokan presents Bucciantini with the Bernard L. Berkowitz Memorial Award certificate at the 2026 award ceremony. (Amy Wolf/UMBC). (right) Bucciantini with her family. (Cheryll Bankert Ratzsch/UMBC)
“As a parenting student with swiftly growing children, the first thing I did was buy new shoes for my kids. I also treated myself to two books for my research by Alan Mallach—The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America and Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World: Learning to Thrive Without Growth,” says Bucciantini.
Eric Stokan, associate professor of political science and director of UMBC’s Center for Social Science Scholarship (CS3), praised the CS3 advisory board for an outstanding selection of two exceptional students — Magaly and Erika — who, as he noted, “are poised to make a significant and positive impact on the Baltimore community, as envisioned by the founders of the Berkowitz Award.”
“The real gift of this award for me is the opportunity to afford childcare for my youngest over the summer so that I can take an internship to further my skill building,” says Bucciantini, who assists Loren Henderson, director and professor of the School of Public Policy, with data analysis coding, manuscript development, and teaching support for Henderson’s research about the plight of Black farmers in the United States.
(left) Bucciantini (center) with fellow public policy graduate assistants. (right) Bucciantini (first on the left) at the American Sociological Association’s Policy Outreach Program with Loren Henderson (first on the left). (Image courtesy of Bucciantini)
Whether it’s supporting fellow doctoral Retrievers on campus or serving as vice chair for Montgomery County’s Dickerson Area Facilities Implementation Group to help residents stay informed about facility operations, county initiatives, and state services, Bucciantini notes that public service is one of her core values. In her work, which also includes writing for the Food Bank of the Rockies in Colorado and Wyoming, she hopes to bring her commitment to public service and interests in planning policy and racial discrimination together for the greater good.
“
The real gift of this award for me is the opportunity to afford childcare for my youngest over the summer so that I can take an internship to further my skill building.
Originally approached with a quilting mystery that began in 1846, a summer CoLab pulled a group of Retrievers together to examine the evidence. The detective pack expanded their search into robust research and, along the way, discovered how the communal process of sewing storytelling quilts lets these works of art transcend time.
Those in the quilting community know that the charm pack is a pre-cut bundle of fabric squares that can be used to create the patchwork for the top layer of a quilt. This story begins with a team that can be considered a sort of Charm Pack: expert quilters Mimi Dietrich, Monique Crabb, and Christa Gilliam, and researchers Sarah Fouts, Kat Gill, Ben Kayes, and Alyssa Thomas.
Gilliam (center) discusses the measurements of different quilts. Left to right: Dietrich, Gill, Fouts, and Crabb.
The pack first came together to solve a mystery for art collector Henry Stansbury, who bought a quilt at an auction 35 years ago with the words “Elizabeth Stansbury 1846” stitched into it. Last year, Stansbury showed this quilt to Dietrich, along with a second one he bought, stitched with the names Elizabeth and Mary Stansbury. Dietrich ’70, American studies, a member of UMBC’s Founding Four, has written 17 quilting books and has been an active part of the Baltimore quilting community since the 1980s. One look at the quilts and Dietrich could identify the type of fabric, the stitches used, and the style of quilt—a Baltimore Album Quilt. But these details didn’t give any clues about the Stansburys.
Looking closely at the Stansbury Baltimore Album Quilt.
The pair turned to Sarah Fouts, associate professor of American studies and co-director of UMBC’s Orser Center for Public Humanities, for help. Fouts saw this as a great opportunity for a summer CoLab—where students and faculty conduct humanities research with a community partner and create public-facing projects. Enter the Storytelling through Baltimore Album Quilts 2025 CoLab.
Are the Stansbury quilts lost family heirlooms? Who are Elizabeth and Mary Stansbury? Are these two quilts telling the story of unrelated families with only the buyer to tie them together? The quick answer is no. “We never doubted they were related,” says Fouts. “There were just too many Elizabeths and Mary Stansburys that we couldn’t link it to a direct family line.” The longer, more complex answer is that all the threads led to a basement full of treasures and $10,000.
The sandwich
A quilt has three layers: the quilt top, the batting or insulating layer, and the backing or the bottom layer of fabric, formally known as the quilt sandwich. These pieces create the whole, and Fouts needed to find all the pieces of the sandwich, so she sent out a call for student interns to join the quilt-mystery-turned-humanities-research CoLab. Then she gathered a team of quilting experts: Dietrich, Crabb, M.F.A. ’22, and Gilliam, an associate professor of social work at Morgan State University who uses African-print fabrics to create quilts about her lived experience.
The original brochure for quilt makers in 1981. (Image courtesy of Dietrich)
The first to join was Crabb, a Mexican American artist, who began quilting in 2014 and uses plant dyes, photography, thrift fabrics, and various quilting techniques to create quilts that reflect personal histories and feminism. As an adjunct professor at MICA, Crabb teaches 16 fiber-related processes in her Intro to Fiber class. But before the project even began, it took a turn. Crabb liked the idea, but encouraged Fouts and Deitrich to go to the basement of City Hall. Crabb knew that if they thought the Stansbury quilt was a find, the bowels of City Hall would dazzle them. She was right. Hanging in front of them was not one, but several different types of quilts from the Great Baltimore’s Best Quilting Contest of 1981, and they realized one of the participants was standing among them.
The inaugural citywide quilt competition, which Dietrich entered, celebrated Baltimore’s transportation, architecture, industry, people, and plants and animals. “I was surprised to see that the quilts were in the basement,” says Dietrich. Hers is stored at the Maryland Center for Culture and History (MCHC). “I entered the contest because I’ve always lived in Baltimore County.”
Dietrich’s entry for the Great Baltimore’s Best Quilting Contest of 1981. (Image courtesy of the Maryland Center for History and Culture)
This treasure added multiple layers to the Charm Pack’s work. Now, it wasn’t about one quilt story, but many. Quilts made by residents from across Baltimore who, in 1981, chose to bring forth their vision of Baltimore through needle and thread. Who were these craftspeople? What was the history of the contest? And why did the Great Baltimore’s Best Quilting Contest have to live in the past?
“It’s good to learn something else from what you’re trying to find out,” said Dietrich, and with that, students across the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences took up the mantle of citizen investigators. Gill, an American studies and English senior; Kayes, a theatre design and production junior; and Thomas ’25, Asian studies, made the cut. They analyzed historical records, photographs, and documents from the Library of Congress, Maryland State Archives, Maryland Historical Society, and the Maryland Quilt Heritage Project, and quickly solved the first mystery. No records tied Henry Stansbury directly to the quilts. However, the trail did connect the deep red that bordered the quilt and was used throughout the blocks, as well as the indigo used to color bluebirds in mid-flight to Maryland and beyond.
“Wonderful natural dyes have dyed the fabric on this quilt. The red throughout is made from turkey red… matter root that is grown here in America,” said Gill, in a video the lab co-produced with the Baltimore Heritage organization. “We also have this wonderful indigo blue that is very vibrant on the bird, which is from the indigo plant and is also made here in America, but is also imported from Latin and South America as well.”
The quilts the students researched were examples of how one person’s quilt tells more than one story. From the thread and needle chosen to the types of dyes on a cloth, each piece can stand as its own narrative, but once stitched together, a more complex one can emerge. “Quilts became powerful analytical tools, allowing students to interrogate intersections of class, race, gender, and globalization and demonstrating how even the most familiar objects are embedded in complex and often unequal systems,” says Fouts.
The blocks
Blocks are individual units of fabric sewn together with other identical or different blocks to form the main pattern of a quilt top. With the Stansbury mystery partially solved, everyone turned their efforts to studying the technical, communal, and historic aspects of Baltimore Album Quilts, which were named after a book where each page commemorated a friendship, like the adjacent blocks of a quilt.
To learn from the masters behind the craft, Dietrich introduced the students to 20 Baltimore quilt-makers. Kayes interviewed Crabb about the natural dyes and contemporary quilting practices. Thomas interviewed Gilliam about embellishments and Black quilting traditions in Baltimore. Gilliam is a fiber artist and member of the African American Quilters of Baltimore, and a former Maryland Folklife Apprentice of Vera Hall, a prominent Maryland African American master quilter.
Gilliam with the “Golden Time of Day” quilt she quilted, left, and “She Who Wears the Crown,” applique, machine quilted, by Gilliam, right.
With nearly a decade of experience in quilt making, Gilliam once created a quilt titled “She Who Wears A Crown,” to help her students understand the 2019 Crown Act that protects against discrimination based on race-based hairstyles by extending statutory protection to hair texture and protective styles such as braids, locs, twists, and knots in the workplace and public schools.
“What excites me most about my work is the ability to work in community and meet so many young people who are interested in learning about the history of quilting,” says Gilliam. “Quilting allows us to learn and teach the stories that connect us to the past.”
The binding
When all the measuring, cutting, dying, and stitching have told the story, the quilter binds it together by sewing a strip of fabric around the edges to cover the raw edges of the quilt sandwich. It acts as a protective border to prevent fraying and provides a polished look.
After four weeks and 130 hours of research, the CoLab, in partnership with Baltimore Heritage, co-produced five oral histories on Dietrich, Crabb, Gilliam, Stansbury, and Catherine Rogers Arthur, vice president of collections and chief curator of MCHC.
But there was still one more loose thread. Crabb didn’t think the Baltimore Album Quilt story should have ended in 1981. The 1981 competition was hosted by Baltimore City Hall, with a grand prize of $1,500. In 2025, Fouts reached out to City Hall for support to resurrect the competition. The positive response was not only immediate but backed with a $10,000 prize for the contest. Maryland State Art Council had already committed $7,000 to operations.
With the support of Baltimore City’s Mayor’s Office of Arts, Culture, and Entertainment and Maryland State Art Council’s Maryland Folklife Network, the CoLab has renewed the competition, titled “Homage to Baltimore Quilting Competition.” By April 1, 2026, 52 people submitted quilts. After Gilliam, Crabb, and Dietrich judged the final round of quilts, a $5,000 grand prize was presented at the opening exhibition on June 6, 2026, at Current Space.
“Homage to Baltimore Quilting Competition” exhibit at Current Space on June 6, 2026. (Image by Vivian Marie Doering)
The winning quilt does it all: each of the 18 blocks of the hand- and machine-stitched quilt tells the story of Baltimore’s history using a lens from the present. Created by Piecing with Purpose Quilt Collective, “Baltimore Citizens, from Past to Present, on a Zoom Call” unites the city’s legendary movers and shakers in conversation with each other.
First place: “Baltimore Citizens, from Past to Present, on a Zoom Call,” by Piecing with Purpose Quilt Collective. (Image by Vivian Marie Doering) Left to right: Second place, “The Doorway of a Rowhome at Dawn’s Early Light,” by Sharon Coffman. Third place, “All My Dreams Started in East Baltimore,” by Kianga Jinaki. (Images courtesy of Fouts)
Two of the 1981 quilts were also on display at the Current Space exhibition, along with a zine by Abby Wheatley, a junior graphic design major, illustrating the history of the 1981 competition. “It’ll be exciting to see the continuity of themes over the 45 years of the competition,” Fouts says, “and, through the historical side, we can bring to life some of the co-lab’s archival work.” The top three winning quilts in the competition will be displayed in public schools. The Mayor’s Office has committed to continuing the competition in the future.
What began as a 19th-century quilting mystery evolved into a colorful and accessible competition—celebrating a wide range of voices and inviting people to wrap themselves up in Baltimore.
“I was fascinated with the CoLab experience and how the students shared their progress,” says Dietrich. “I love seeing how UMBC has grown. It’s amazing to see it through the eyes of someone who was here when it opened. There are so many different choices for engaged learning.”
