A film by Bill Shewbridge and Michelle Stefano has been selected to be screened at several prestigious film festivals in May and June. Produced by Shewbridge, professor of the practice of media and communication studies, and Stefano, visiting assistant professor of American studies, Mill Stories: Remembering Sparrows Point Steel Mill  is a documentary based on the stories gathered through the “Mill Stories” project. The project seeks to document the sociocultural impacts of industrial decline and help amplify the voices of those affected by it in the Baltimore region.

The documentary has been selected to screen at three upcoming film festivals: the 14thRoyal Anthropological Institute International Festival of Ethnographic Film (Bristol, UK, June 16-19, 2015), the 12th International Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) Film Program (Zagreb, Croatia, June 22-24, 2015), and the Workers Unite! Film Festival in New York City (May 19, 2015). For more information on the “Mill Stories” project, click here.

English Writer in Residence Lia Purpura is scheduled to present readings from her new book It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts on Friday, April 10 at 8 p.m. The reading will be part of an event with the Poulenc Trio, a Baltimore-based wind trio that has been presenting virtuosic performances for over a decade.

Purpura, whose work frequently appears in New Yorker magazine, will pair excerpts from her forthcoming book with a new arrangement for the Trio of Alfred Schnittke’s Suite in the Old Style. For more information on the event, click here.

Felipe Filomeno, an assistant professor of political science, has been awarded the Early Career Prize of the Economics & Politics Section of the Latin American Studies Association. The award comes in recognition of his article “Patterns of Rule-Making and Intellectual Property Regimes: Lessons from South American Soybean Agriculture”, published in the Journal of Comparative Politics in 2014. Below is a summary of Filomeno’s article:

Around 1980, states and corporations from core countries led by the U.S. government started to demand from other countries reforms that increased the scope and strength of private intellectual property rights. The resulting global upward ratchet of intellectual property protection has not developed uniformly across time and space. This study presents a theory of cross-national variation in intellectual property regimes based on a comparative-historical analysis of the making of intellectual property rules in South American soybean agriculture (Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay). It concludes that a corporatist pattern of rule-making is conducive to a weak intellectual property regime (Argentina), whereas pluralism (Brazil) and state capture and abstention (Paraguay) are more conducive to strong intellectual property regimes.

• the 14th Royal Anthropological Institute International Festival of Ethnographic Film (Bristol, UK, June 16-19, 2015)
• the 12th International Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) Film Program (Zagreb, Croatia, June 22-24, 2015)
• the Workers Unite! Film Festival in New York City (May 19, 2015)