Co-sponsored by the Office of Faculty Affairs and the Graduate School
Supported by the Office of the Provost
In Collaboration with Dresher Center for Humanities, CS3, and CIRCA

What is Write@UMBC?
Write@UMBC is a campus-wide writing initiative designed to help scholars and scholar-practitioners build sustainable writing habits through protected time, light accountability, and community support.

Who can participate?
Faculty, postdocs, graduate students, researchers, and administrators/staff across UMBC.

How it works

• 30 minutes of writing per day for two weeks

• Any scholarly writing or part of the writing process counts

• There will be no need to share your writing content

• Optional community check-ins for light accountability and reflections

When is the challenge?

March 2–15, 2026

How do I participate?

Register for Write@UMBC using this registration form. You must have a NCFDD-account. To activate your free account using your UMBC email here: https://members.ncfdd.org/institutions/umbc 

***Registration Deadline is February 22***

Are you interested in advocacy? If so, come volunteer with us at our annual Take Back the Night!

Take Back the Night was started in October of 1975 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with the main goal to protest against gender based harms and reclaim spaces where survivors felt unsafe. At UMBC, the Women’s, Gender, and Equity Center holds its Take Back the Night annually in April.
This year, it will be held on April 16th from 5-8 on Commons Mainstreet.

As a volunteer, you would assist WGEC staff in executing the event and creating a safe space for survivors of gender-based harm and their allies. Volunteers should be invested in cultivating a survivor-supportive space and be aware of the impact they have.

For more information about volunteer roles and to sign up for volunteer training, please click here.

Wednesday, February 4 | 12:00-1:00pm | Sherman Hall 445
"Multimodal and Monomodal Feedback in Second Language Writing: Issues in Research and Practice"
Ana Oskoz, Ph.D.
Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs & Professor, Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication
Click here for details and to register.

The UMBC Department of Education Research Seminar kicks off the spring semester with a presentation by Dr. Ana Oskoz, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Professor in the Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication.  Dr. Oskoz's presentation focuses on the integration of monomodal and multimodal feedback in three important areas of investigation: (1) how to provide monomodal or multimodal feedback to monomodal and/or multimodal texts either during the writing process or to the final products, (2) how to use different tools and their affordances (e.g., screencast software, ChatGPT) to provide feedback, and (3) whether multimodal feedback influences the nature of learners' revisions.
All members of the department, partners/collaborators, and students/faculty from other departments and institutions are invited to attend.  Lunch will be provided by the department.  Please RSVP as soon as possible.
Save the date for future talks:

Wednesday, March 4 | 12:00-1:00pm | Sherman Hall 445"We Ain't New to this, We True to This": Teaching Democracy and Citizenship: Through Black Educator Oral and Life Histories.Brandon Beck, Assitant Professor, Department of Education

Wednesday, April 1 | 12:00-1:00pm | Sherman Hall 445
"Cultivating a Rightful Presence: Inclusive Early Childhood STEM"
Michele Stites, Associate Professor of Early Education, Department of Education
Jonathan Singer, Professor, Department of Education

Wednesday, May 6 | 12:00-1:00pm | Sherman Hall 445
"A Multilingual Perspective on Literacy: Monolingual Bias in Reading Instruction and the Positioning of Emergent Bilinguals"
Laura Ascienzo-Moreno, Ph.D., Professor, Childhood, Bilingual And Special Education, School of Education, Brooklyn College

March 12, 2026 – 2:00 p.m. ET

Taking Ideas Public: A Scholar's Guide to Trade Publishing

Blair LM Kelley, President and Director, National Humanities Center
Tanya McKinnon, Founder and Principal Agent, McKinnon Literary

Join us for a lively conversation on what is lost and gained when academics write for trade publishers. The webinar will feature literary agent and founder of McKinnon Literary, Tanya McKinnon, who for the last 19 years has helped authors bring their ideas to life and find their audience. Tanya will be in dialogue with NHC President and Director Blair LM Kelley to discuss the writing and publication process, and how authors can make the leap from university presses to trade.

Blair LM Kelley is president and director of the National Humanities Center. An award-winning author, historian, and scholar of the African American experience, her scholarship and social commentary have focused on African American social movements, segregation, and the Black working class. Before joining the NHC, she served as the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and directed the Center for the Study of the American South. Previously, Kelley spent 20 years on the faculty and as an administrator at North Carolina State University, including as associate dean of interdisciplinary affairs and partnerships.

Tanya McKinnon is the founder and principal agent of McKinnon Literary. As a literary agent, she works to amplify progressive voices and help authors sharpen their projects regardless of genre. Having spent time on both sides of the agent-author relationship, she draws on this experience to bring a holistic perspective to the publishing industry and ensures her clients and their projects are handled with utmost care. McKinnon represents serious nonfiction, literary fiction, children's books, and graphic novels. Several of McKinnon's clients include New York Times best-sellers, winners of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the LA Times Book Award, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and many more.

Program Agenda

• [5:30 - 5:55 p.m.] Program Start, Welcome, and Introductions
• [5:55 - 6:10 p.m.] What's On Your Plate?
• [6:10 - 6:20 p.m.] Two Dimensions of Thriving
• [6:20 - 7:15 p.m.] Values Alignment and Well-Being
• [7:15 - 7:30 p.m.] Program Closing

Community Standards

Food Menu

The Dresher Center for the Humanities is continuing our writing group into the Spring 2026 semester on Fridays from 10am to 11:30am online via WebEx.

This writing groups open to faculty, graduate students, and staff working on humanities-related projects.

https://umbc.webex.com/umbc/j.php?MTID=m3e509a76259be1f8e3262d623e29b53d

On Monday, February 2, we will host Dinner with Friends, an engaging, facilitated conversation that will connect you with other members of the UMBC community. 

Our conversations will be focused on two interrelated questions:

1. "How do you live your values in community?"

2. "How do you live a life that sustains you?"

We will explore challenges with thriving, share resources to support thriving, and generate ideas about how we, as a UMBC community, can improve thriving on campus.

This program, as a part of Winter Welcome Retrievers, will take place on February 2, 2026 from 5:30 - 7:30 p.m. in the University Center, UC 312. A catered dinner will be provided.

This program is a collaboration between the Center for Democracy and Civic Life and Student Belonging.

Please RSVP by January 28, 2026 to reserve your seat at this popular dinner program!

The Center for Social Science Scholarship is pleased to continue our workshop series on generative AI, LLMs, and computational social science methods.

This series began with the basics of computing in R and how to use generative AI/LLMs in social science research workflows. Each session will be focused on getting faculty and students comfortable with deploying AI and generative AI models in their research, but with a deeper understanding of the ethical, equity, and environmental consequences of these models.

This series, which is supported through the Elkins Professorship, features several new speakers this spring. 

REGISTER

February 20 | 12-1:30pm | PUP 438 
Social Network Analysis: Building Web-Based Applications for Experiential Learning
Led by:  Dr. Steve McDonald, Professor of Sociology, NC State University

February 27 | 12- 1:30pm | PUP 438
A City in Motion: How Everyday Routines Channel and Control Crime in Baltimore
Led by: Dr. Brian Soller, Associate Professor of Sociology (SAPH), UMBC 

April 10 | 12-1:30pm | PUP 438
Geospatial Analysis: Integrating GIS, R, and GeoAI
Led by: Krishna Mummadi, CS3 Graduate Assistant & GES Graduate Student

April 14 | 2-4pm | Walker Avenue, Suite 130 & Webex (hybrid)
Foundations of Large Language Models
Led by:  Dr. Josephine Namayanja, Executive Director, iHARP, UMBC
Rhoda Nankabirwa, iHARP Research Assistant and PhD Student, UMBC

April 29 | 12-1:30pm | Webex
Evaluating LLMs for Credible and Rigorous Social Science Research
Led by:  Dr. Michael Overton, Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Administration, University of Idaho

May 6 | 12-1:30pm | PUP 438
ML Models for Causal Inference Analysis + HPC Led by:  Dr. Eric Stokan, CS3 Director and Associate Professor of Political Science, UMBC
Roy Prouty, Assistant Director for Research Computing, DoIT; UMBC Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science, CSEE
Sai Vikas Amaraneni, iHARP Research Assistant and UMBC Ph.D. Student

Hosted by the Center for Social Science Scholarship. Cosponsored by the Division of Information Technology, the Center for Scalable Data and Computational Science, and CGC-SCIPE.