All posts by: UMBC News Staff

Manil Suri, professor of mathematics, will serve on two panels at the Centre Pompidou library in Paris as part of an event with Indian authors. Suri’s most recent book is “The Age of Shiva.” Suri also teaches in the Asian studies program.

Manil Suri, professor of mathematics, reflects on returning to Mumbai, the Indian city of a million incarnations, in the July 17 issue of Newsweek magazine. Suri also teaches in the Asian studies program.

In his piece, he compared Mumbai to a Hindu goddess. “In some ways, Mumbai is called upon to be even more subsuming than other goddesses. Her population is enormously diverse and regularly at odds on the basis of religion, language, ethnicity, and a host of other schisms. Her visibility attracts benign and malignant elements from inside and outside the country. These factors can result in heinous acts of terror. Yet somehow, Mumbai always manages to recover, no matter how grievous her wounds,” he writes.

The full piece can be read here.

Rachel Robinson ’12, applied linguistics, and Germán Westphal, professor of modern language and linguistics, will present a paper they co-authored at the International Congress of the Chilean Linguistics Society, which will be held in Valparaíso, Chile, November 9-11, 2010

The paper is titled “Introducción a un Modelo Teórico de Adquisición de Segundas Lenguas” (Introduction to a Theoretical Model of Second Language Acquisition), and it develops a theoretical approach to second language acquisition. Westphal has been working with this topic in the context of current linguistic research, and the paper includes a discussion of the neurological correlates that Robinson has identified as empirical evidence in favor of such approach.

Robinson’s initial work on the topic was completed as a term paper for LING 470, Language and Cognition, which was taught by Westphal in the spring of 2011. She revised, expanded and refined her LING 470 work over the summer for presentation at the international conference. Upon her return from Chile, Robinson will present a summary of her findings in the Language Acquisition section of LING 190, a course also taught by Westphal.

Robinson is currently researching child language acquisition pertaining to comprehension of syntactic structures that are not overtly realized in her two-year old son’s utterances, but fully understood by him. After graduation from UMBC, Robinson intends to pursue graduate work in neuroscience.

In a new guest column on Sabato’s Crystal ball, Thomas Schaller, professor of political science, discusses President Obama’s campaign message a year from now at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte in a new guest column on Sabato’s Crystal Ball. “However good the field of potential Republican challengers may or may not be… winning reelection will not be easy,” argues Schaller. He suggests, “in order to win President Obama is going to have to go negative.” As for his campaign message, Schaller predicts, “Obama is most likely to frame his election as an appeal for four more years because the problems he inherited simply take more than four years to fix. He’ll have to make the case…that not only could things have been worse these past four years but that with another four he can actually make them significantly better.”

Ka-che Yip, professor of history, has been awarded a grant by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. Beginning January 2012, Yip will be the co-investigator of the project, “A History of Diseases and Epidemics in Hong Kong, 1841-2003.” The grant will last for three years and is for HK $480,048 or about U.S. $62,000.

The grant builds upon another completed project, “A History of Public Health in Hong Kong,” which was funded by the same agency several years ago. Yip was also a co-investigator of that project.

Constantine Vaporis, professor of history and director of Asian studies, has been asked to serve as a consultant on an exhibition on Japan at the National Geographic Museum in DC. The exhibit will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Japanese donation of cherry trees to the U.S., which will take place in 2012.

UMBC congratulates sociology professor Leslie Morgan on being named the Lipitz Professor of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences for academic year 2011-12. In endowing this professorship, Roger C. Lipitz and the Lipitz Family Foundation sought “to recognize and support innovative and distinguished teaching and research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences” at UMBC.

Dean John Jeffries writes, “Professor Morgan has achieved an extraordinary record as a scholar, teacher and citizen of the university since joining the UMBC faculty in 1979.” One of the nation’s foremost scholars of aging, Morgan is author, co-author or editor of six books, 33 peer-reviewed articles and 16 book chapters. She has won substantial research support from the National Institute on Aging as well as numerous national teaching awards. Among her many roles at UMBC, Morgan is co-director of the UMB/UMBC Ph.D. program in gerontology, which she helped create.

For additional details on this honor and Professor Morgan, see the full press release.