All posts by: UMBC News Staff

Rebecca Boehling, History, Speaks at Leo Baeck Institute

On Tuesday, November 1, Rebecca Boehling spoke at the Leo Baeck Institute about her new book, “Life and Loss in the Shadow of the Holocaust: A Jewish Family’s untold Story.”  Boehling was joined by her co-author, Uta Larkey.

The institute, which is located in New York, is a research library and archive that contains the most significant collection of source material relating to the history of German-speaking Jewry, from its origins to its tragic destruction by the Nazis and continuing to the present day.

Katie Smallwood ’09, American Studies, in Urbanite

Katie Smallwood ’09, American studies, is one of the organizers of a new project entitled “Baltimore: Place to Place.”  Smallwood and her co-organizer,  Katie Shinsato, randomly distributed Baltimore sites among about 25 participants, who shot, framed, and reflected upon their assignments. The results of the project will be on display at the Windup Space through November.

“We wanted to celebrate place and how the space around you can be important to different individuals for various reasons. We wanted people to have to go to places they either knew really well or had never been to before and to have an experience there,” Smallwood said.

The project was covered in an Urbanite story entitled “The Purpose of Place,” which appeared online on November 1.

There is a free opening reception at the Windup Space (12 W. North Avenue) on Friday, November 4, at 7 p.m.

Sonya Caesar, Language, Literacy and Culture on PBS Nightly Business Report

Sonya Caesar, cohort 13, Language, Literacy and Culture, appeared on a PBS Nightly Business Report segment on student debt. Caesar is on staff at the Community College of Baltimore County, where she is spearheading a campus-wide financial literacy campaign. She discusses what students know and don’t know when it comes to taking on student debt – the challenges of managing their money and paying back student loans which are never erased from their records.

The espisode aired on Tuesday, October 25, and can be watched here. The segment on financial literacty begins at about 17:00.

Caesar previously wrote and co-produced a mini documentary, “Beyond the Classroom Walls” for CCBC. The short film is one component of the campus’s financial literacy awareness campaign.

Book by Ellen Handler Spitz, Honors College, Translated to Serbian

A book cover with black and white human silhouette imagery.

“Art and Psyche,” a book by Ellen Handler Spitz, honors college professor of visual arts, has been translated into Serbian.
Through the book, Spitz explores three principal psychoanalytic approaches to art. The first considers the relations between an artist’s life and work; the second focuses on the work of art itself; and the third encompasses the intricate relations between a work of art and its audience or beholders. To illustrate her discussion, Spitz draws on a variety of art forms, including painting, sculpture, literature, music, and dance.
The book was originally published by Yale university Press, and has previously been translated to Italian.

Christopher Corbett, English, in the News

Professor of the Practice of English Christopher Corbett’s latest essay in Style magazine discusses the complications surrounding recent improvements made to his home.

“They say no jobs were added to our economy last summer but that is just simply wrong. Half my neighborhood was under construction. The other half was thinking about it. And I was doing my part, too. I have the canceled checks to prove it,” he concludes.

The essay, “Home Improvements,” is featured in the November 2011 issue of the magazine.

Corbett was also interviewed by the Associated Press about the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental telegraph. The article can be found here.

Jody Shipka, English, in “Master Hands”

Jody Shipka, associate professor of English, is featured in a new work. “Master Hands, A Video Mashup Round Table,” is a unique experiment in digital publishing that is featured in George Mason University’s journal enculturation.

Through the project, scholars created video mashups using the same source footage – a 1936 video entitled Master Hands – and respondents discussed the mashups. Artists had to use footage from Master Hands, could not provide a companion text, had to create a mashup that was no longer than ten minutes and were not permitted to see anyone else’s work until all five were completed. Five respondents will spend the next week discussing the mashups. At the end of the week, the conversation will be closed and the comments will remain as part of this publication.

Robert Provine, Psychology, in the Washington Post

There is a growing body of research indicating that laughter may improve immune function, help lower blood pressure, boost mood and reduce stress and depression, the Washington Post reported on October 24 in a story entitled “Laughing may help ease blood pressure, boost mood and enrich health in other ways.”

Robert Provine, professor of psychology, agrees. He said that laughter might benefit the body because it is “an energetic, stressful activity that stirs up all of our physiological systems… involving strong vocalization, an increase in heart rate and blood pressure and muscle contractions all over the body.”

UMBC’s Ellen Hemmerly Receives Innovator of the Year Award

Ellen Hemmerly, Executive Director at the bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park will receive the 2011 Innovator of the Year Award from The Daily Record on Wednesday, October 26.

Hemmerly, who has been Executive Director at bwtech for more than fifteen years, says that the award is less about her and more about the park’s cybersecurity incubator and the community of cybersecurity companies that have clustered there. The incubator currently has thirteen companies.

While there are about twenty incubators in Maryland, only one other focuses on cybersecurity. The bwtech@UMBC incubator is home to the CyberHive, which Hemmerly says is a unique space dedicated to bringing people in cybersecurity together to network and provides virtual incubator space to companies outside the region.

“I’ve been involved in incubators for twenty years,” says Hemmerly.  “In all my years of working with area incubators, the bwtech@UMBC cyber incubator is the fastest growing and has much potential economic impact.”

That, she says, is due in large part to its relationship to UMBC and to the incubator’s partnerships with both the public and private sectors.*

Public and Private Sector Partners*

  • Baltimore County Economic Development
  • Northrop Grumman
  • Maryland’s Department of Business and Economic Development (DBED)
  • Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO)
  • Venable
  • Whiteford, Taylor, Preston
  • SB & Company LLC

Exhibition Featuring Work by IRC Fellows Opens

A new exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Maryland features work completed by Imaging Research Center (IRC) Fellows in the spring of 2011. “Chosen Food: Cuisine, Culture and American Jewish Identity” examines the diversity of Jewish eating and uncovers the messages in meals.

To make these ideas tangible in an exhibition setting, the IRC Fellows recorded audio and video interviews and produced location documentary works. The IRC Fellows documented food experiences of the farm, home and marketplace, and that content has been interwoven in the exhibition.

The exhibition will open at the Jewish Museum of Maryland on Sunday, October 23, with a reception from 12:30-4 p.m. The opening event will include tastings and samples of Jewish food from around the world.

“Chosen Food,” which runs through September 30, 2012, opens up conversations about the history and experience of being Jewish and American in the 21st century.

The Jewish Museum of Maryland is located at 15 Lloyd Street, Baltimore, MD.

Retriever Learning Center

Retriever Learning Center

This year, the real party is in the library.

On any given day, the Retriever Learning Center is packed. Students puzzle out problems on giant white boards. They snack and study. Or they order up pens, pencils and sticky notes from the academic “vending machine.”

After just a month, the Retriever Learning Center (RLC) feels like it’s always been a part of campus.

It opened in August on the first floor of the Albin O. Kuhn Library. And students, faculty, staff and alumni officially celebrated its opening at a ribbon cutting ceremony on September 19. The space is open 24 hours a day, secured by card entry, and provides students with the opportunity to study and collaborate at any hour – something they have desired for a long time.

“The greatest push has been from the students,” said Larry Wilt, director of the library. “They have advocated so well through shared governance for this project.”

Former SGA president Yasmin Karimian ’11, political science, was integral in making the center a reality. “Dr. Hrabowski spent a lot of time listening to us whine and complain about the need for a 24-hour space, even though I think he was extremely proud that this is what his students wanted.”

Faculty, staff and administrators recognized the need, Karimian said. It took time, however, to find the right space and the money to make it what it is today. It also took collaboration.

“SGA members had been involved in this process for a long time,” said David Hoffman, assistant director of student life for civic agency. “There was a presentation that Dr. Wilt made at an SGA senate meeting about two or three years ago, and people were really excited to see the initial mock-ups and drawings.”

Students backed up their enthusiasm by contributing funding to the project. The SGA contributed $30,000 for a second round of furniture in the RLC.

“A student explained why this is so important,” said President Freeman Hrabowski. “He said, ‘I can really say that the real party at UMBC is in the library.’”

(10/20/11)

 

Christopher Corbett, English, Speaks at National Postal Museum

Professor of the Practice of English Christopher Corbett spoke at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum on Saturday, October 8, at 1 p.m.

Corbett’s talk commemorated the 150th anniversary of the end of the Pony Express. Corbett is the author of “Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth & Lasting Legend of the Pony Express.”

A video of Corbett’s talk can be seen here.

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