All posts by: UMBC News Staff

Manil Suri, Mathematics, on the Marc Steiner Show

Manil Suri, professor of mathematics, was a guest on the Marc Steiner show on March 14 to discuss his new book “The City of Devi.”

Steiner asked Suri how he reconciles his background in mathematics with the spiritual themes that run through his books, which feature Hindu deities.

“There’s a lot of contrast. On the one hand, I’m very enamored by these ideas from spirituality and almost mysticism,” “But on the other hand, the logical part of me says, ‘hey, wait a minute, that’s not really what’s happening.’”

The full segment can be heard here.

Wax Figure of Freeman Hrabowski to Be Unveiled

On Saturday, April 20, the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum will unveil a wax figure of Freeman Hrabowski during a ceremony at Morgan State University.  The figure is part of a salute to educators, and Hrabowski’s likeness will be joined by figures of Mary Jane McLeod Bethune, the founder of Bethune-Cookman University and the National Council of Negro Women; Benjamin Mays, the former president of Morehouse College; and Benjamin Quarles, the former chair of the history department at Morgan State University.

For more information about the event, including information on ordering tickets click here.

UMBC English in the Chronicle of Higher Education

The UMBC English department’s composition course redesign was recently profiled by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“In an age when many educators are promoting active learning by “flipping” classrooms, instructors here are rotating them instead. In a novel twist, they are providing composition instruction in three distinct venues.

Previously the classes, of 24 students each, met twice a week in a classroom for 75-minute sessions. The instruction was lecture-based, with time allotted for small-group activities.

Now each section, of two dozen students, meets as a group only once a week. On the other day of class, a dozen students gather in the university’s new writing lab, where they work on short assignments or revisions, guided by a trained undergraduate writing tutor. Meanwhile, the other 12 meet four at a time with their instructor. The schedule rotates so all students have a regular small-group meeting every other week,” the Chronicle reports.

The full story can be read here.

Robert Provine, Psychology, in New Scientist

Robert Provine, professor of psychology, is a contributor to the recent “Body Issue” of New Scientist magazine.

Provine’s piece, “It’s Only Natural,” discusses the curious behaviors of our bodies. “It’s your body, and you like to think you’ve got it under control. But underneath the calm exterior lurk unruly instincts and urges that are struggling to escape, putting you at risk of embarrassment or ridicule. These disreputable behaviours – the likes of the fart, hiccup, itch and yawn – are familiar to us all, yet they are also decidedly curious. Although they have been the source of folklore and puzzlement since antiquity, they have largely been overlooked by scientists. After all, where is the scientific grandeur in such ignoble acts? I take a different view. Where others see forbidden areas, I find unexplored territory and new frontiers of research. So I have made a point of studying our curious behaviours. What I have found sheds new light on our body, our mind and our evolution as a social animal,” Provine begins, before discussing yawning, itching, hiccupping, vomiting, tickling, and farting.

The magazine was published on March 16.

Christopher Corbett, English, in the Washington Post

Christopher Corbett, professor of the practice of English, recently reviewed a new book about Davy Crockett for the Washington Post. In “Born on a Mountaintop,” author Bob Thompson visits sites associated with Crockett to discover the man behind the legend.

Corbett, who is the author of “Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express” and “The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West,” used his own knowledge of the West’s legends to evaluate the book.

“[Thompson’s] book also shows a fine appreciation of the truth, half-truth and no truth at all that connoisseurs of the West understand and accept. Crockett’s story is part of that world. A hell of a lot of it might not be true,” Corbett writes. “I stopped worrying about what was true on Page 13, and it made for a more pleasant read, too.”

The full review, “‘Born on a Mountaintop: On the Road with Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier’ by Bob Thompson,” appeared on March 22.

Amy Bhatt, Gender and Women’s Studies, on “International Examiner”

Amy Bhatt, assistant professor of gender and women’s studies, was recently interviewed by the “International Examiner” about her new book, “Roots & Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest.”

The book traces the regional history of the South Asian community in the Northwest from the early 1900s to today. It also offers a crucial voice and perspective that’s been missing from the story of Asian migration to the greater Seattle area.

“One of the reasons this book is important is that it offers individuals who are actually part of the community the opportunity to write their own histories,” explains Bhatt. “They haven’t been able to do so in the past.”

The full story, “‘Roots & Reflections’ Adds Voices of South Asian Settlers to History of the Pacific Northwest,” appeared online on March 6.

Ryan Bloom, English, Awarded Fellowship

Ryan Bloom ’03, visual and performing arts, and English lecturer, was recently awarded a fellowship at Yaddo, an artists’ community in Saratoga Springs, New York. Yaddo’s mission is to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment.

Bloom is an internationally-recognized translator of Albert Camus. He has written for The New Yorker, The Arabesques Review, The Baltimore Sun, The Current, Horizon Magazine, The Orlando Sentinel, and other publications

Manil Suri, Mathematics, on “The Daily Beast”

Manil Suri was deep into writing his latest novel, “The City of Devi,” when he realized something alarming: the novel was impossible to finish. The mathematics professor even used a mathematical construct, a possibility tree, to arrive at his conclusion.  He described the process of creating this mathematical “proof” in an essay for “The Daily Beast.”

Of course, Suri did eventually finish the novel, which was published earlier this year. Despite the fact that he disproved his own proof, Suri feels that his mathematical conclusion was a worthwhile endeavor, because it allowed him to reach the insights he needed about the story.

“My possibility tree still communicated something essential: a warning that the story could not be satisfactorily completed under the conditions I was imposing. I had been too beholden to literary orthodoxy, too insistent that the narrative obey the strictures of reality. It was time to loosen these constraints, let the plot freely borrow from whatever genre it pleased: adventure, Bollywood, fantasy,” he writes.

The full piece, “A Mathematically Impossible Novel: Manil Suri Explains ‘The City of Devi’” appeared online on March 15.

UMBC: World Leaders

World Leaders

UMBC is connecting students around the globe through a new online community leadership class for teenage English language learners administered by UMBC Training Centers.

The idea for the course was sparked when Joan Kang Shin ‘08 Ph.D., language, literacy and culture (LLC), and assistant professor of education, was contacted by the U.S. Consulate General in Brazil. Shin trains teachers for the U.S. State Department’s English Access Microscholarship Program, which provides English education to talented teens from economically disadvantaged areas, and Brazil’s English Language Officer was looking for a way to continue these students’ education once they graduated.

“They go through this really great program and improve their English, and then they’re like ‘ok now what?’” said Shin. The English Language Officer was hoping that the answer might be a program that would prepare these students, already given an advantage through their English education, to be leaders in their communities.

Shin contacted her former LLC classmate and UMBC Colleague Joby Taylor ’05 Ph.D., and director of the Shriver Peaceworker Fellows program, about developing an online course.

Taylor immediately saw the potential, and set to work adapting community engagement content from the Peaceworker program into an online course that teaches leadership while supporting students’ still-developing English skills. The resulting class, the Access Alumni Community Leadership Challenge, leads students through a variety of self-reflection, community understanding and leadership exercises, culminating in a proposal for a project in students’ own communities.

“We end at the proposal stage because we don’t pretend to know how to implement these, but we wanted the students to have a concrete takeaway and to put their ideas in a form that would be as easy to present or implement as possible,” Taylor said.

The class was a success in Brazil, which offered it twice, and news of it spread to other countries. This semester several Central American nations have partnered to offer the course to their Access alumni, and a class is being planned for students in Yemen.

“I wanted to build this in a way that it can go anywhere in the world with very modest adjustments,” said Taylor. A Peaceworker Fellow is currently serving as the teaching assistant for the class, and Taylor said that, with Fellows as teachers, UMBC could potentially offer classes in several countries simultaneously.

Now that the class is off the ground, Shin and Taylor are eager to find ways to enhance it. One is through a new partnership with Arundel High School’s global studies program. UMBC has partnered students at Arundel High with students enrolled in the Access class, and the pairs will complete parallel activities and hold biweekly conversations.

Taylor hopes that these conversation partners can be just the first step of a lasting partnership with Arundel. “If there’s a way for the Arundel students to be registered in the class and co-participating, we’d love it,” he said.

The class is also serving as a research opportunity for Heidi Faust ’15 Ph.D., LLC, the class’s English language instructor. She realized that the pre- and post-course conversations in which she evaluates students’ English proficiency were also great opportunities to gather data for her research on how educational institutions can mediate the impact of their power status and cultural background.

“We don’t want to come into the course and say we’re going to tell you how to make your communities better,” she said. “Our hope is that it’s not this top down, unidirectional flow of information. We want them to come back to us and say, ‘this is how we think we can change our communities.’”

Finally, UMBC is bringing this online class into the offline world by inviting participants to campus. Students from Arundel High school will visit later this month, and this summer, Brazillian students will come to campus for an experience that will include activities with the American high school students, a trip to Washington D.C. and a homestay.

“We’re creating our own intercultural camp experience for them,” Taylor said.

(3/8/13)

Robert Provine, Psychology, on Midday with Dan Rodricks

On Tuesday, March 12, Robert Provine, professor of psychology, talked to WYPR’s “Midday with Dan Rodricks” about his new book, “Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccuping, and Beyond.”

Rodricks asked Provine why he chose to research mundane – and even occasionally embarrassing – behaviors such as yawning, belching and farting.

“It’s fun to do, and it’s something that can get junior science students involved right away. It also has a lot of rewards for the serious scientist, which is what got me interested in it in the first place,” he said. “By looking at elemental behaviors, such as the instincts of yawning, laughing, coughing, sneezing, belching, and so on, this provides us with a molecular approach to human behavior. The opportunity to look at these exciting and important acts is only available because we’ve overlooked them. I believe that they will lead to important insights.”

The full interview can be heard here.

Collage of For All the World to Hear in Afro-American

FATWTH in Afro-American 28 Feb 2013

Last week, The Afro-American created and published a full-color collage featuring scenes from the CADVC’s outreach project, For All the World to Hear: Stories from the Struggle for Civil Rights, in it’s print and digital editions. The photos were taken during its final performance, February 23, at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Main Branch.

Click the image to view a larger version of the collage, or see the image at Afro.com.

Recognition, Regulation and Research of Headwater Streams in the Contemporary Landscape

The Department of Geography and Environmental Systems presents our next seminar of the 2012-2013 academic year, The Recognition, Regulation and Research of Headwater Streams in the Contemporary Landscape. The seminar will be presented by Dr. Sean M.C. Smith, University of Maine at Orono, School of Earth and Climate Sciences and Bryand Global Sciences Center. The seminar is next Wednesday, March 13, at noon in Sondheim 001.

For more information, click here or contact Andrew Miller at miller@umbc.edu.

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