Rebecca Boehling, professor of history and director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities, will appear on WYPR’s Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast on Friday, December 16 at approximately 9:15 a.m. The subject of the discussion will be Boehling’s recent book, Life and Loss in the Shadow of the Holocaust.
The broadcast can be heard live here, or after the show here.
Douglas Lamdin, professor of economics, has edited a book entitled, “Consumer Knowledge and Financial Decisions”. More information on the book can be found on the publisher’s website.
Several students have received Huayu Enrichment Scholarships (HES) from the Taiwan Ministry of Education to study Mandarin in Taiwan from June-August, 2012. The students are Niesha Watts ’14, applied linguistics; Amy Fowler ’12, Asian studies and interdisciplinary studies; Vadim Rubin ’10, history, and ’12 Asian studies; and Jillian Long ’13, Chinese.
Initial contact with the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Representatives Office (TECRO) in Washington, D.C., was made by Eugene Schaffer, chair of education. The Asian studies program, including director Constantine Vaporis, organized an information session to inform students about the scholarships and to assist with the application process. Anna Shields, director of the honors college,William Brown, lecturer in Chinese, and Vaporis formed the selection committee.
The scholarships are being supplemented with funding from the offices of the Vice Provost, Academic Affairs, the Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, Antonio Moreira and the Asian Studies Program.
Robert Deluty, associate dean of the graduate school, is published in the Fall 2011 issue of The Faculty Voice.
The paper, which is an independent newspaper published by and for all the faculty of the University System of Maryland, included 20 of Deluty’s poems along with commentary by editor William Hanna.
The English Alumni Association of Ravenshaw University in Cuttack, India, has invited Ellen Handler Spitz, honors college professor of visual arts, to give the first annual alumni lecture on January 8, 2012. Spitz will also give the keynote address at the International Seminar on Children’s Literature and Politics, which will be held at the university January 9-10, 2012.
The Alumni Lecture and the seminar are expected to attract many distinguished alumni, including lawmakers from the Indian Parliament, writers, judges in the Supreme Court of India, the Chief Information Commissioner of India, civil servants, and academics.
In addition to these lectures, Spitz will also meet with Indian school children.
A transgender anti-discrimination bill went before the Maryland General Assembly in the 2011 session, passing in the House of Delegates, but ultimately did not pass. In the 2012 session, which starts in January, advocates are hoping to take legislation through the last hurdle it needs for passage.
Jodi Kelber-Kaye, interim associate director of the Honors College, said transgender anti-discrimination legislation has come up at the state level for many years.
“The problem has consistently been how we define transgender for the purposes of providing protections,” she said. “The concern for me as a gender researcher, on top of someone who’s politically supportive of this stuff, is the need for a space safe for women.”
The story, “Laurel delegate’s fight for transgender anti-discrimination legislation to continue in 2012 session” was published on ExploreHowardCounty.com and appeared on the Baltimore Sun website on December 7.
Piotr Gwiazda, associate professor of English, has had a busy semester; his reviews, poetry and translations have appeared in a variety of outlets.
His reviews have appeared in:
His poems and translations can be found in:
He was also published in two recent poetry anthologies.
Jody Shipka, assistant professor of English, is the co-editor of a new book. Play! features 63 photographs made with film using 30 toy, lo-fi, and handmade cameras made by 36 photographers in 12 countries on 5 continents.
“Play! is an amazingly diverse collection of photos by very talented photographers. By using toy cameras, the photographers convey the memory and dream of play that lives inside all of us,” said reviewer Mark Olwick of olwickphotography.com.
One hundred percent of the proceeds from sales of Play! will be donated to the Marine Toys for Tots Foundation to benefit children in areas ravaged by tornadoes in 2011, which tied for the second worst year for tornado deaths.
Buy or preview the book here.
The digital humanities is a common subject of discussion in the academic world, and Helen Burgess, assistant professor of English, recently contributed to this conversation by co-authoring an article in the journal “Digital Humanities Quarterly.”
In the article, Burgess and her co-author, Jeanne Hamming of Centenary College of Louisiana, argue that multimedia work places scholars in an extended network that combines minds, bodies, machines, and institutional practices, and lays bare the fiction that scholars are disembodied intellectuals who labor only with the mind.
The article is entitled “New Media in the Humanities: Labor and the Production of Knowledge in Scholarly Multimedia” and was published in the Summer 2011 edition of the journal.
UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski joined President Barack Obama, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and a select group of higher education leaders at the White House today for a discussion on college affordability and productivity.
The engagement of college leaders in a frank policy discussion today took President Obama’s college-completion push to a new level. You can read the White House announcement here.
And here’s what the news media is saying:
“President Gathers College Leaders to Discuss Access and Affordability,” The New York Times
“Obama meets with star presidents to talk reform,” The Washington Post
“Hrabowski and Kirwan meet with Obama to discuss price tag for college,” The Baltimore Sun
“Obama Meets With College Leaders as Occupy Protesters Target Student Debt,” Bloomberg
“At White House Meeting on Affordability, a Call for Urgency, Innovation, and Leadership,” The Chronicle of Higher Education
“At the White House Roundtable,” Inside Higher Ed
Margie Burns, lecturer part-time in English, will be included in “Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal,” published annually by the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA). Her article, “Comic Resolution, Humorous Loose Ends in Austen’s Novels,” is about Austen’s outrageous comic wrap-ups, endings with a cavalier disregard for painful realism and social awkwardness.
Articles from recent issues of Persuasions are distributed electronically through EBSCO and Thomson Gale.
Sara Poggio, associate professor of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication (MLLI), is included in the new book “Migraciones Internacionales Contemporáneas: Estudios para el Debate,” which was edited by Cynthia Pizarro. Poggio’s chapter, ““Evaluando Los Costos Y Beneficios De La Experiencia Transnacional: Madres Centro-Americanas En El Estado De Maryland,” explores the transnational experience of Central American mothers in Maryland.
Nicoleta Bazgan, assistant professor of MLLI, published an article in the journal “Contemporary French Civilization” Her article is entitled “From Bardot to Binoche: the Pygmalion Myth and Artistic Collaboration.”