All posts by: UMBC News Staff

Jody Shipka, assistant professor of English, is the co-editor of a new book. Play! features 63 photographs made with film using 30 toy, lo-fi, and handmade cameras made by 36 photographers in 12 countries on 5 continents.

“Play! is an amazingly diverse collection of photos by very talented photographers. By using toy cameras, the photographers convey the memory and dream of play that lives inside all of us,” said reviewer Mark Olwick of olwickphotography.com.

One hundred percent of the proceeds from sales of Play! will be donated to the Marine Toys for Tots Foundation to benefit children in areas ravaged by tornadoes in 2011, which tied for the second worst year for tornado deaths.

Buy or preview the book here.

The digital humanities is a common subject of discussion in the academic world, and Helen Burgess, assistant professor of English, recently contributed to this conversation by co-authoring an article in the journal “Digital Humanities Quarterly.”

In the article, Burgess and her co-author, Jeanne Hamming of Centenary College of Louisiana, argue that multimedia work places scholars in an extended network that combines minds, bodies, machines, and institutional practices, and lays bare the fiction that scholars are disembodied intellectuals who labor only with the mind.

The article is entitled “New Media in the Humanities: Labor and the Production of Knowledge in Scholarly Multimedia” and was published in the Summer 2011 edition of the journal.

UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski joined President Barack Obama, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and a select group of higher education leaders at the White House today for a discussion on college affordability and productivity.

The engagement of college leaders in a frank policy discussion today took President Obama’s college-completion push to a new level. You can read the White House announcement here.

And here’s what the news media is saying:

“President Gathers College Leaders to Discuss Access and Affordability,” The New York Times

“Obama meets with star presidents to talk reform,” The Washington Post

“Hrabowski and Kirwan meet with Obama to discuss price tag for college,” The Baltimore Sun

“Obama Meets With College Leaders as Occupy Protesters Target Student Debt,” Bloomberg

“At White House Meeting on Affordability, a Call for Urgency, Innovation, and Leadership,” The Chronicle of Higher Education

“At the White House Roundtable,” Inside Higher Ed

Margie Burns, lecturer part-time in English, will be included in “Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal,” published annually by the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA). Her article, “Comic Resolution, Humorous Loose Ends in Austen’s Novels,” is about Austen’s outrageous comic wrap-ups, endings with a cavalier disregard for painful realism and social awkwardness.

Articles from recent issues of Persuasions are distributed electronically through EBSCO and Thomson Gale.

Sara Poggio, associate professor of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication (MLLI), is included in the new book “Migraciones Internacionales Contemporáneas: Estudios para el Debate,” which was edited by Cynthia Pizarro.  Poggio’s chapter, ““Evaluando Los Costos Y Beneficios De La  Experiencia Transnacional: Madres Centro-Americanas En El Estado De Maryland,” explores the transnational experience of Central American mothers in Maryland.

Nicoleta Bazgan, assistant professor of MLLI, published an article in the journal “Contemporary French Civilization” Her article is entitled “From Bardot to Binoche: the Pygmalion Myth and Artistic Collaboration.”

The largest class is the history of the UMBC Athletic Hall of Fame will be inducted on Saturday, February 4, 2012.

The honorees are Charles Brown (Director of Athletics, 1989-current), Jen Dragoni (women’s lacrosse, 2000-04), Brad Green (swimming and diving, 2000-04), Adam Grossman (track and field, 2002-06), Ted Lawler (men’s soccer, 1994-98), Brendan Mundorf (men’s lacrosse, 2002-06), Josef Novotny (men’s tennis, 2001-04), Keith Puryear (head tennis coach, 1990-2008) and Drew Westervelt (men’s lacrosse, 2003-07).

There are now 121 members of the UMBC Athletic Hall of Fame, which was instituted in the 1970s. In 1990, Dr. Brown created The Annual Hall of Fame Dinner and Induction Ceremony. This event now occurs every other year. Candidates are nominated throughout the two-year period and are selected for induction by a committee of current Hall of Fame members based on their excellence in competition at UMBC and subsequent graduation from the university.

Read the press release here.

Seniors in need often receive excessive donations near the holidays. Julie Rosenthal, program management specialist for Asian studies, makes sure that they are fed the rest of the year, too.

Rosenthal runs a nonprofit program called “Food on the 15th.” The project has delivered 9,500 bags of groceries to hundreds of low-income seniors over the past six years, and is designed to introduce children of affluence to people who are struggling.

“I thought my kids were way too focused on themselves. There was dance and drama and all that, but it was all about them,” said Rosenthal. She needed something that would make her kids understand how privileged they were compared with others around them, so she organized parents, teachers and children to bag and deliver groceries to low income seniors. The key to the approach is for the kids to do more than fill a bin with canned peas and boxes of cereal. By handing the food to people in need, they get a more intimate look at what people who struggle might look like.

The story, “Food program puts kids face-to-face with the needy, not just at the holidays” was published in the Washington Post on November 21.

Our everyday lives are increasingly affected by events and issues beyond our nation’s borders, and many colleges are responding by creating specific programs that address the need to understand different cultures, reports the Baltimore Sun in an education supplement story entitled “Learning through Language.”

One program that the Sun highlights is UMBC’s new Asian studies program, the first such program at a public institution in Maryland. “Asia cannot be ignored, and our students need to be prepared for a world in which Asia plays a major role,” said Constantine Vaporis, director of the program.

The story appeared in the Sun’s education supplement on November 20. A pdf of the full story can be seen here.