All posts by: UMBC News Staff

Jodi Kelber-Kaye, Honors College, in the News

Jodi Kelber-Kaye, associate director of the honors college, has appeared in several recent news articles discussing marriage equality and the African-American vote. Kelber-Kaye researches and teaches about historic and current struggles for LGBT equality with a focus on analyzing strategies employed by activist groups.

A December 7 story in the Afro-American entitled “Different Factors Within African American Communities Shaped Votes on Question 6” featured Kelber-Kaye’s perspective on the disconnect between how African American Marylanders were expected to vote on Question 6 and how they actually voted.  “This election dispels this myth that the African-American population is against same-sex marriage. There has not been a shift in the community, but just how we understand the issue” she said.

The Washington Times also ran a story on the same topic featuring Kelber-Kaye entitled “Blacks’ support a surprise on same-sex marriage” on December 9. The story, which is a shorter version of the one that ran in the Afro-American, was produced by the Capitol News Service.

The story also ran on Monday, December 10, on the Laurel Patch website under the headline “Different Factors Within African American Communities Shaped Votes on Question 6.”

CADVC Awarded Andy Warhol Grant for Upcoming Project

The Andy Warhol Foundation for The Visual Arts has awarded the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture $50,000 for the upcoming project, Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki & Trevor Paglen.

The project, headed by Visiting Curator to the CADVC, Niels Van Tomme, is a traveling exhibition and publication project which explores the unique roles Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen play as meticulous observers of the global military industrial complex. Investigating forms of military surveillance, espionage, war-making, and weaponry, Farocki and Paglen each examine the deceptive and clandestine ways in which military projects have deeply transformed, and politicized, our relationship to images and the realities they seem to represent. The exhibition initiates critical questions about the crucial part images play in revealing essential but largely concealed governmental information, and places the oeuvres of Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen within the broader cultural and historical developments of the media they are creatively working with, namely photography, film, and new media.

Visibility Machines is scheduled to be presented next fall, mid-October through December, 2013.

Tom Mandato Named Assistant Director of Athletics for Operations

Tom Mandato has been named Assistant Director of Athletics for Operations at UMBC, Director of Athletics Dr. Charles Brown announced in early December, 2012.

Mandato’s duties will include the maintenance of all athletic facilities, including the Retriever Activities Center and Arena, the UMBC Stadium Complex, the UMBC Aquatic Complex, the tennis courts, and practice and recreation fields. He will coordinate the scheduling of these facilities, supervise event operations, equipment room and athletic grounds staff, building security, and will serve as the department liaison to UMBC Facilities Management and the campus scheduling office.

The Philadelphia, Pa. native has spent the last eight years at Towson University, working in facility and event management. In June 2011, he was named Director of Facilities & Event Management for the Tigers’ 19-sport program. Mandato served as the event manager for football, men’s basketball, men’s lacrosse, track & field and gymnastics competitions. He was responsible for the entire athletic facilities budget, facility scheduling for all varsity sports, and played a major role in recent facility enhancement projects, including the new Tiger Arena.

John Rennie Short Video Interview on “Korea: A Cartographic History”

Korea: A Cartographic History“Korean cartography is very distinctive in having this combination of rivers and mountain shown so that the landscape looks as if it’s alive,” says Professor John Rennie Short, public policy, in a new video interview about his latest book.

Korea: A Cartographic History explores 600 years of Korean maps, made by both Koreans and non-Koreans, and serves as a captivating introduction to Korea for English speakers. Thanks to a grant from the Korea Foundation to the University of Chicago Press, the maps are printed in full color, showcasing them both as historical documents and works of art.

In the new video interview about Korea, John Rennie Short describes two cartographic controversies involving the complex relationship between Korea and Japan. He also reflects on the interdisciplinary approach that has defined his highly productive career.

Amy Bhatt, Gender and Women’s Studies, Publishes New Book

Amy Bhatt, assistant professor of gender and women’s studies, is the co-author of Roots and Reflections: South Asians Map the Pacific Northwest, which will be released by the University of Washington Press early next year.

The book examines the experiences of early South Asians who settled on the Pacific coast in the early 1890s through the 1990s. Though the east coast of the U.S. has some of the largest South Asian populations in the country today, these early settlers shed light on the development of South Asian communities across the U.S. and are an important location in understanding contemporary immigration patterns. Roots and Reflections highlights the gender, race, and class aspects of this immigration and settlement.

For an overview of the book, see the book trailer below.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHjtOvH0YdU&w=420&h=315]

Robert Provine, Psychology, in the News

Research by Robert Provine, professor of psychology, has recently been cited in a variety of news outlets.

On December 1, the Wall Street Journal published a story on “The Unsolved Mystery of Why You Just Yawned” in which they delve into research performed for Provine’s latest book, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping and Beyond.

“So what is known about yawning? Dr. Provine—who is a champion of what he calls ‘sidewalk neuroscience,’ experiments anybody can do at home without special equipment—has spent years teasing out the details of yawning, as recounted in his recent book ‘Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping and Beyond.’ By asking people to pinch their noses or grit their teeth while yawning he found that ‘the motor program…will not run to completion’ unless you can inhale through your mouth and gape your jaw wide,” the author wrote.

Provine’s research was also part of a November 23 Forbes story on “The Black Friday Experiment: Mind Control and Mass Hysteria Gone Viral.” ”Humans are social animals and like all social animals have fantastic mechanisms for synching up behavior. If I start yawning, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll start yawning. If I start puking, you’ll most likely yak along. Most of the time, as Dr. Robert Provine explains in [his book] Laughter, this is a good thing,” the author writes, but then goes on to explain that these same mechanisms can cause us to “go from mimetic transmission to mass hysteria in lickety-split.”

Provine was also quoted in a November 26 CTV story entitled “Why Hiccup? Basis of Biological Oddity Is Unclear.” “Hiccupping has no obvious function. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have one. But it hasn’t been discovered,” says Provine in the story.

Roy T. Meyers, Political Science, in the Gazette

Roy Meyers

Political science professor Roy T. Meyers was quoted in a Gazette article about Governor Martin O’ Malley’s third attempt to pass an offshore wind farm funding bill. Gov. O’Malley has encouraged President Obama to look at his proposal as a model for how Maryland produces clean energy, and Meyers believes that this proposal fits well with Obama’s focus on alternative energy sources in his second term.

According to Meyers, “Success this time around with the bill would put O’Malley squarely in the center of the Democratic Party’s potential 2016 candidates.” Meyers goes on to say that failure to pass the offshore wind farm bill will not hurt O’Malley’s potential presidential campaign due to previous success with high profile issues such as in-state tuition for undocumented students and legalization of same-sex marriage.

Robert Rubinstein, Sociology/Anthropology, in the Baltimore Sun

In a new Baltimore Sun article on managing grief during the holidays, Professor Robert Rubinstein, sociology and anthropology, offers advice for mourning families on how to make it through the season. “It’s a very difficult time,” he recognizes, before continuing, “That’s not to say people can’t have great holidays.”

Rubinstein’s research focuses on older adults’ experiences of  loss and grief. He offers his impression that, “People do tend to take care of each other,” around the holidays, as they share memories of deceased loved ones, such as favorite traditions or recipes. Rubinstein notes that often younger generations worry more about the grief of a widowed parent instead of their own. He recommends that those in mourning take opportunities to speak about the deceased, suggesting, “A public expression of grief and feelings about it is a good thing.”

Kate Brown, History, in Aeon

The online journal Aeon has published an excerpt from associate professor of history Kate Brown’s forthcoming book Plutopia, which is due out in 2013.

“For the past seven years, I have spent a great deal of time in the radiated traces of the world’s first plutonium plants — the Hanford factory in eastern Washington State and the Mayak plant in the southern Russian Urals. As countries from the Middle East to the Baltics gear up for a new generation of nuclear power reactors, it is worth taking another look at how scientists laid claim to the ‘truth’ to dismiss the testimony of local farmers such as Tom Bailie, and how farmers fought back to cast doubt on the experts,” writes Brown.

Plutopia is about two communities—Richland, Washington and its Soviet parallel, Cheliabinsk-40—created to house operators of the world’s first two plutonium plants. It is the first to narrate in tandem the plutonium disasters in the US and USSR, and Brown argues that it no longer makes sense to tell the two histories separately. She shows that plutonium was a collaborative, transnational project that bound together the lives of working people across the cold war divide.

The excerpt, “A People’s Truth,” appeared online on December 3 and can be read here.

Soccer’s Liam Paddock Becomes 5th Retriever Ever Named First Team Academic All-American

UMBC fullback Liam Paddock has been selected to the 2012 Capital One Academic All-America® Division I Men’s Soccer First Team, as selected by the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA).   Paddock becomes the first men’s soccer player at UMBC to receive the nation’s top academic honor. He is the fifth student-athlete in school history to earn first team honors and the 20th Retriever overall to be cited by CoSIDA since 1977.

A senior with a 3.92 G.P.A. as a psychology and sociology major, Paddock was the 2012 ECAC Division I Scholar-Athlete of the Year. A team captain at UMBC, he was named 2012 America East Defender of the Year and was a repeat selection to the America East all-conference first team. The Worcestershire, England native scored a career-high three goals this season while leading the Retrievers to the America East championship and an 11-4-7 record.   UMBC reached the NCAA Championship in 2010 and 2012 with Paddock as a fixture at center back in the lineup. He started all 72 games that he dressed for in his four-year tenure in Baltimore.

“It’s remarkable how well Liam has done both on the field and in the classroom,” head coach Pete Caringi, Jr. said. “On the field, he was the leader and he helped us to get to three America East finals and compete in two NCAA tournaments. Off the field, he set the standard for our academic success. This culminates a tremendous career at UMBC and I couldn’t be more proud of what he’s done. Liam is a great player, but more importantly, he is a great person, and he has been an ambassador for our program.”

The Capital One Academic All-America® Men’s Soccer Division I first team had an average G.P.A. of 3.94.   UMBC tennis standouts Oscar Lopez (1999) and Lana Khvalina (2003, 2004), cross country/track’s Jen Ecker (2001) and swimming’s Keilan Freeman (2011) are UMBC’s other first team honorees.   Recent UMBC Athletics’ Hall of Fame inductee and soccer standout Ted Lawler earned Academic All-District II honors in 1999.

To be eligible for Academic All-America® consideration, a student-athlete must be a varsity starter or key reserve, maintain a cumulative G.P.A. of 3.30 on a scale of 4.00, have reached sophomore athletic and academic standings at his/her current institution and be nominated by his/her sports information director.

Since the program’s inception in 1952, CoSIDA has bestowed Academic All-America honors on more than 16,000 student-athletes in Divisions I, II, III and NAIA, covering all NCAA championship sports.   For more information about the Academic All-America® Teams program, please visit www.cosida.com.

Caringi Nominated For Soccer News Net College Boot Award

UMBC junior forward Pete Caringi III is among a group of thirty-four of the nation’s top men’s college soccer players who have been named finalists for the 2012 Soccer News Net College Boot award, recognizing the men’s college player of the year.

The editors of each of the sites in the Soccer News Net network nominated up to five local players for the award, each of which will be eligible for the regional player of the year award. The nominations included athletes playing at colleges within each site’s coverage area, as well as athletes from the area playing collegiately elsewhere in the country. Nine additional at-large selections rounded out the nominations.

Fans from across the country can be able to vote for the top collegiate player. Voting will continue until December 22, and will be conducted on DC Soccer News (www.dcsoccernews.com) which will officially launch later this year, but is conducting voting as an introduction to the site.

Online fan voting will account for 40% of the total toward the award. The remaining 60% of the vote will be cast by the Soccer News Net editorial staff.

The winner of the popular vote will receive the Soccer News Net Supporter’s Choice Award.

Caringi had a brilliant 2012 campaign, scoring 14 goals and amassing 32 total points for the America East Conference champion Retrievers (11-4-7), who reached the second round of the NCAA Men’s Soccer Championship. Entering the tournament, Caringi was eighth in the nation in goals scored.
The son of head coach Pete Caringi, Jr. was named America East Striker of the Year and was selected to the America East First Team. He was a two-time America East Player of the Week, an ECAC Division I Offensive Player of the Week and a multiple honoree on “Teams of the Week” for Soccer America and College Soccer News.

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