Ellen Handler Spitz, honors college professor of visual arts, will visit Belgrade, Serbia over spring break to give a talk on her book “Art and Psyche.” The book was recently translated to Serbian.
While in Belgrade, Spitz will talk with faculty members at the University of Belgrade and give a lecture at Kolarac. She will also visit the city of Novi Sad.
In Science Studio:
“Carbohydrates – Keith & Russ talk to C. Allen Bush, Professor of Biochemistry, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Bush studies carbohydrates, and in this program he’ll explain how carbohydrates are crucial in cell interaction, and how they can be helpful in developing polysaccharide vaccines for bacterial diseases.”
On March 9, NPR’s On Point delved into the science of laughter. Robert Provine, professor of psychology, was on hand to discuss the topic.
“Laughter is so powerful that Plato and Aristotle spent a lot of time thinking and writing about laughter because they feared its power,” he said.
Audio of the segment is available here.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQdbE4zgqNA&w=560&h=315]
Lindsey Loeper ’04 acknowledges the futility of trying to keep pace with the hands of the watch and the rapidly turning pages of the calendar. No matter how quickly she and other members of the Special Collections team archive the stacks of UMBC documents they receive every day, there are always more coming. History never stops happening at a university that’s still building its story.
Read more at umbc.edu/magazine.
Meghan Alokonis ’12, dance, was interning under Waugh Chapel Elementary School’s physical education teacher, Karen Webster, when she decided to share a secret: her background was in dance, not traditional physical education.
Instead of being disappointed, Webster saw an opportunity.
Webster and Alokonis worked to integrate dance into physical education classes. Students in all grades got lessons from Alokonis in hip-hop, jazz, tap and ballet, and she worked with Webster and other teachers to tie in lessons on music, history, geometry and even weather.
Then on Feb. 15, six girls danced with Alokonis and the UMBC dance team during halftime of a basketball game.
Odenton’s Patch.com site told the story of the class in a story entitled “‘Dancing Fools’ at Waugh Chapel Elementary,” which ran on March 7.
Tim Sparklin, Compliance Officer from the Office of Research Protections and Compliance has been elected President-elect of the Northeast section of the Society of Research Administrators (SRA).
On Saturday, March 24, Constantine Vaporis, professor of history and director of the Asian Studies program, will lead a workshop for the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA) at the University of Pittsburgh, a NCTA National Coordinating Site. The workshop will be entitled “Japan and its World: Late Edo Period and Today.”
The workshop will focus on the changes occurring in the late Edo period (mid-19th Century) especially the “opening” of Japan, and how this information relates to understanding Japan’s role in the world today.
Vaporis’ presentation will deal with four distinct topics:
More information about the workshop can be found here.
Vaporis works regularly with NCTA teachers in the Baltimore area. Funded by the Freeman Foundation and launched in 1998, NCTA is a nationwide initiative to encourage and facilitate teaching and learning about East Asia in the K-12 curriculum.
Rebecca Boehling, professor of history and director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities, delivered the 8th Annual Richard Yashek Lecture at Albright College in Reading, PA on Thursday, March 1st. More information about the talk can be found here. She and co-author Uta Larkey also spoke about their book, Life and Loss in the Shadow of the Holocaust, at the Myerberg Senior Center in Pikesville, Maryland on March 4.On Friday, March 9, Dan Ritschel, associate professor of history, and one of his Ph.D. students in the history public policy track, Rod McCaslin, will be on a panel together at the Huntington Library in California. The panel is part of the annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies.
McCaslin will read a paper based on his dissertation research: “The Mysterious Traveler: Finding Edmund Spencer and his influence on Victorian policy-making.” Ritschel will give a paper entitled “The Missing Link: Proto-Keynesian Ideas within the Labour Party in the 1920s.”
More information about the conference can be found here.
Anne Rubin, associate professor of history, has been elected president of the Society of Civil War Historians for 2012-2014.
The Society of Civil War Historians is committed to promoting both scholarship and fellowship among historians, graduate students and professionals who interpret history in museums, national parks, archives and other public facilities.The SCWH seeks to promote the study of the Civil War era and to bring greater coherence to the field by encouraging the integration of social, military, political, and other forms of history.
The Society publishes a quarterly newsletter, sponsors a biennial conference in even-numbered years (the 2012 conference is in Lexington, Kentucky), and awards the annual Tom Watson Brown Book Prize for the best book on the Civil War era at a banquet held during the Southern Historical Association conference.
Rubin is the author of A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868, and, with Edward Ayers, the CD-ROM The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in The American Civil War Part I: The Eve of War, which won, among others, the E-Lincoln prize. She has authored articles and chapters in numerous Civil War books, magazines, and encyclopedias.
Rubin is now developing Sherman’s March and America, an interactive project that tells the story of the march through maps, photos, videos and voices, and writing a related book called Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and America, which will be published by UNC Press.
A video of Rubin discussing the first casualties of the Civil War can be seen here.
Alan Kreizenbeck, chair of theater, has been selected by the Japan Studies Association to be a participant in the 2012 Freeman Summer Institute on Japan. The Institute will operate at Hawaii Tokai International College in Honolulu from Sunday, May 20 thru Friday, June 8, 2012.
The workshop aims to provide knowledge about Japan that faculty can use for curriculum development at their home institution. Kreizenbeck will be developing a course that focuses on various forms of Japanese theatre such as Noh, Kabuki, Kyogen and Bunraku. Most expenses are covered by the Freeman Institute, and additional fees are covered by the Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and the Asian Studies Program.
The rat notices a new person in the room. Rosie Mills notices the rat nervously noticing, and pulls him from his cage, patting him gently on the head. She whispers to him: “I know who is a grump.”
Mills has cared for and monitored the rats used in UMBC’s psychology research for more than 25 years, and has never changed her perfume so as not to scare the skittish creatures. “They’re used to their people. Did you know rats scare easier than birds, even?”
Read more at umbc.edu/magazine.