The Dresher Center invites applications for new Faculty Working Groups in the Humanities. Faculty Working Groups are collaborative, interdisciplinary communities of scholars working on humanities projects, research concerns, or matters of public interest. The Dresher Center provides support for the formation and first-year activities of these groups in an effort to promote intellectual exchange and support research activities in the humanities among scholars across campus. Working groups meet regularly and may also use their funds to travel to sites or archives, host speakers, explore technologies, create new resources or materials, or other similar activities.

Faculty Working Groups can apply for up to $1,000 in annual support ($500 per semester) for their first-year activities. Priority will be given to groups with at least one member from a humanities department.

Deadlines for best consideration are November 1, 2015 for groups beginning in spring 2016 and April 1, 2016 for groups beginning in fall 2016. 

To download an application and to find out about current Faculty Working Groups, visit: http://dreshercenter.umbc.edu/scholarly-resources/faculty-working-groups-in-the-humanities/ 

Contact for questions: Jessica Berman (jberman@umbc.edu), Director, or Rachel Brubaker (rbruba1@umbc.edu), Assistant Director

For this episode of BMoreArt Conversations Gary Kachadourian is interviewed by Jack Livingston. Gary is an IMDA MFA Program alumnus - a visual artist and curator born in 1957 in Baltimore, Maryland. 

He makes pencil drawings of everyday places and objects – like giant dumpsters, chain link fences, and the interior of his own bathroom. Gary’s drawings are designed to be photo-copied and enlarged to the actual size of his subjects. These giant Xeroxes are exhibited, and also distributed as printed booklets, prints, posters, or 3D objects.

15th Annual Imagining America Conference

America Will Be! 
The Art and Power of "Weaving Our We"

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER
Department of Communication
Tenure-track Assistant or Associate Professor: Communicating and Organizing

In a recent article posted on Antenna‘s website, Rebecca Adelman, an associate professor of media and communication studies, examined public reaction to the images of Aylan Kurdi.

“I am not suggesting that the story the photographs tell isn’t wrenching (it is); but the difficulty of the image is the very thing that makes spectatorship of it easy. Certainly, spectators far removed from the Kurdi family’s suffering might genuinely experience the photos as painful. But the experience of feeling bad about the photos is accompanied by a range of sentimental rewards that ameliorate this discomfort. In part, the hyper-visibility of Aylan Kurdi is a function of the vacuous efficacy of social media, but the clicktivism it inspired is more a symptom than a cause,” she wrote.

Also in the article, Adelman discussed other images related to the civil war in Syria and how they can present different interpretation from spectators, including the U.S. government, such as viewing images of the Assad regime’s chemical weapons attacks against Syrian civilians.

“Seeking to galvanize popular and legislative support for his plan to intervene militarily in Syria, President Obama implored Americans to view the images  and the Senate Intelligence Committee compiled 13 of the most explicit  for review by its members and, presumably, the public. These images failed to persuade lawmakers or their constituents that the situation warranted U.S. involvement. Of course, there were many reasons for this reluctance and we cannot know if different pictures would have garnered different results, but it remains significant that these photos never achieved the iconic status that Aylan Kurdi’s already have.”

Read “Feeling Good about Feeling Bad about Aylan Kurdi” in Antenna.

Susan McCully, Theatre, was highlighted in a September 19 article, “Women’s Voices Theater Festival aims to level the playing field,” by Tim Smith of The Baltimore Sun. Her play Kerrmoor will be premiered at the multi-city festival, running from October 29 through November 15, and will be directed by Eve Muson (Theatre) and acted by Katie Hileman (’12, Theatre). “I just decided to be brave and write about Appalachia, where I come from,” McCully explained to Smith. “It’s a place full of amazing, noble people who are all about sacrifice, and at the same time are insular and xenophobic. It’s a dangerous mix. [Kerrmoor] is an Appalachian Greek tragedy. I like to think that if William Faulkner came back as a middle-aged white lesbian who transplanted to Baltimore, he would have written this play.”

Read the article here, and read more about Kerrmoor and the festival here.

Douglas Lamdin, Economics, had his recent study featured on the website of the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII). The article, “New Evidence on Whether Gold Mining Stocks are More Like Gold or Like Stocks” was co-authored with Mark Johnson of Loyola University, Maryland, and is forthcoming in the journal Alternative Investment Analyst Review.

The study examined the role of gold and gold mining stocks in diversified portfolios. Lamdin and Johnson found that neither gold nor gold mining stocks are a hedge against declines in the stock market. Both gold and gold mining stocks, however, do provide diversification benefits, with gold the preferred diversifying asset.