UMBC News Staff featured Humanities Scholar Tess McRae on May 12 2022. Read the entire article here.

"The lesson I have learned from STRiVE and from the Center for Democracy and Civic Life's work, and from all of the people I've met at UMBC who have held up undistorted mirrors for me, is that I am worthy as my authentic self. That has radically altered everything I thought I knew about myself and the world, and has profoundly deepened my sense of community, connection, and purpose. And that clarity and sense of belonging are indescribably empowering and healing, even in moments of doubt."

Former Humanities Scholar, Anjali DasSarma graduated from UMBC in 2021 with a bachelor's degree in Media and Communication Studies with a minor in Journalism and is now pursuing her Master's in American Studies at Brown University. She will be graduating from Brown University in May 2022 and will be attending the University of Pennsylvania to pursue her PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication in the Fall of 2022. She eventually wants to teach in higher education and has a passion for teaching and loves to talk with people.

Kristen Anchor, a lecturer with the MCS department, had the opportunity to talk with her about her experience at UMBC and the MCS program. Her experience was a positive one, and she highlighted the course content and the professors especially. She says that one of the best parts of UMBC for her were the MCS professors. 

"They're amazing. I think they were the best part of my time at UMBC as a whole."

She found the faculty to be extremely helpful as they taught her in classes as well as with finding internship opportunities. Anjali was able to find an on-campus internship with the help of Dr. Snyder. This internship was with the Division of Professional Studies where she was able to gain experience in digital marketing. She was the Editor-in-Chief for the Retriever and interned at the Baltimore Sun, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Newseum, UMBC Magazine, and Atwater's. She mentioned that she appreciated the flexibility of MCS and that she was able to earn credit through her internships. Additionally, the MCS coursework and material gave her a good foundation as she approached these different internships. Anjali says, "MCS helped me think critically about the work that I was doing which led me to want to do that on a professional level."

In addition to the hands-on experience and practice she obtained through her internship and media classes, she also learned a lot about the theory and history of communication. 

"MCS really helped me develop this really strong theoretical understanding of media, which helped me a lot especially given that I'm now doing academia, and having that theoretical basis is really fundamental. And also just learning good pedagogy from these professors; the way that they teach, the way they engage with students, it is really student focused, and I appreciated that a lot when I was there." 

The research she is conducting now at Brown University is on the topic "examining self-emancipatory advertisements related to Indigenous peoples and colonial era newspapers." According to Anjali, "I wanted to spend a lot of time understanding historic violences and historic silences and erasures and obstruction of journalism disturbing communities. I do that because I do believe that journalism is really valuable, but I think that historically and in contemporary America it's really failing marginalized communities. It was really those internship experiences that made me want to research. So I did my capstone project with Professor Yang, and I did that on connecting slavery studies and self-emancipatory advertisements in newspapers to contemporary challenges. And then when I got to Brown, now I work with a history professor looking at indigenous enslavement and how the newspaper industry contributed to the brokering of the slave trade. So it's really intense stuff, but I feel as though it's really important for communication historians... to be understanding history in order to move forward in repertory spaces." 

She feels that although institutional injustices were being recognized and acknowledged, there still wasn't anymore that was being done and it "wasn't really going anywhere, [and] that a lot of people were doing very surface level work, and I wanted to kind of dig deeper."

Since graduating, Anjali has had many opportunities to grow and deepen her knowledge and go deeper into her research. She's been able to work on different research projects such as the one mentioned previously as well as another where she is exploring the topic of historical, institutional apologies in Baltimore specifically. She is also a teaching assistant and had the opportunity to teach a class for the first time which was a new and exciting experience that she was able to have recently. 

"I've grown a lot as a researcher and as a thinker and as an academic. I've struggled with the questions of being an ethical academic, like looking at relationships between an institution that I'm at and the community that surrounds it... I do think I've grown quite a lot... I keep thinking 'how has it only been a year?' But I feel very grateful to UMBC for giving me a platform to grow and to succeed, and again, that flexibility to have been able to have all those experiences."

Madeline Arbutus | To You, From Me | Margaret Re | Visual Art

Nayimb Joyner | "Tied" Writing Skills in Honors English 9 Students | Dr. Cheryl North | Education

Gina Kahn | Implications and Development of Konglish in South Korean Culture | Kyung-Eun Yoon | MLLI 

Matthew Kelbaugh | Coverage of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and the 2008 Russo-Georgian War in Russia and Ukrainian Print Media | Vira Zhdanovych | History/Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication

Avnee Sharma | COVID-19's Effect on Elementary School Teaching | Dr. Bambi Chapin and Dr. Sarah Fouts | Anthropology

Alexa Smith | Little Mountain Town: A Small Community's Struggle with Its Difficult History | Dr. Denise Meringolo | History

Nailah-Bena is in UMBC Segment 13 - Learning to Lead

Le funiculaire connecting upper and lower Pau along le Boulevard des Pyrénées

Kristin Bechtel humanities scholar class of 2022 is an MLLI major on the French track with a minor in Korean. She is currently studying at The University of Pau.

The University of Pau consists of several colleges, polytechnic institutes, and professional institutes and has 8,440 enrolled students at the Pau campus. USAC classes and offices are located on the main campus, situated in the northern part of the city about a mile and a half from the center of town. 

Tess McRae, Humanities Scholar 2022 grad has been appointed co-chair of the University System of Maryland (USM) Student Civic Leaders Committee (SCLC) for the spring 2022 semester. In her role as co-chair, McRae will help to plan and facilitate convenings of the committee and identify civic engagement and education priorities for USM. She has served on the committee as a representative for UMBC since it was established. The other co-chair is Delanie Blubaugh, a student at Frostburg State University. Dr. Nancy Shapiro, USM’s Assistant Vice Chancellor for Education and Outreach, and Dr. Joann Boughman, USM’s Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic and Student Affairs, convene the committee and support its work.

The SCLC was established in 2020 in response to the Board of Regents’ acknowledgement of the continuing importance of civic education and civic engagement to the mission of the University System of Maryland. Student leaders from USM institutions and USM System Office staff members comprise the SCLC’s membership. The SCLC supports civic engagement and education efforts within and between USM universities.

McRae serves as senior intern for civic design and engagement in the Center for Democracy and Civic Life.

Read the article in the Baltimore Sun, about how the students are working to fill a gap in history with the Highlandtown Immigration and Food Project. Through archival research and panel discussions with nonprofit groups’ leaders and business owners, the students created a timeline of Latino politics, history and food culture in Southeast Baltimore neighborhood from the 1980s to the 1990s.

This work is the result of their freshman seminar class: Food, People, and Place in the Americas.