On November 28, Jessica Berman, professor of English, gave a talk to Georgetown University’s Modernities Working Group. Her talk was entitled “Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Transgender?”

Berman co-edits, with Paul Saint-Amour, the Modernist Latitudes Series at Columbia University Press, and serves on the boards of the American Comparative Literature Association and the Modernist Studies Association. Her most recent book is Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism.

In the latest post on Governing magazine’s blog “Better Faster Cheaper,” John M. Kamensky, senior fellow with the IBM Center for the Business of Government, reports on compelling new findings from a study by UMBC’s Eric Zeemering, assistant professor of public policy, and co-researcher Daryl Delabbi.

Zeemering and Delabbi have found that more than half of county officials across the country are either participating in or delivering shared services or are in active discussions to do so. Why counties? Kemensky writes, “Typically, small local governments jealously guard their independence. County government is a natural place to turn to coordinate or deliver common services, whether they are police investigative services, road paving or group-purchasing contracts.” To learn more, read “The Accelerating Movement to Share Services” or see the full study, “A County Manager’s Guide to Shared Services in Local Government” (pdf).

Jessica Berman, professor of English, will spend the spring semester as a fellow at the Institute of Arts and Humanities (IAH) and a visiting Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The fellowship is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Berman’s fellowship is in conjunction with a yearlong celebration of the 100th anniversary of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which has been organized by the IAH and Carolina Performing Arts. During her fellowship, Berman will teach a course on “Modernism, Media and Performance” and conduct research on her most recent book project, “Media Migrations: Modernism, Exile and Twentieth-Century Media.”

Jodi Kelber-Kaye, associate director of the honors college, has appeared in several recent news articles discussing marriage equality and the African-American vote. Kelber-Kaye researches and teaches about historic and current struggles for LGBT equality with a focus on analyzing strategies employed by activist groups.

A December 7 story in the Afro-American entitled “Different Factors Within African American Communities Shaped Votes on Question 6” featured Kelber-Kaye’s perspective on the disconnect between how African American Marylanders were expected to vote on Question 6 and how they actually voted.  “This election dispels this myth that the African-American population is against same-sex marriage. There has not been a shift in the community, but just how we understand the issue” she said.

The Washington Times also ran a story on the same topic featuring Kelber-Kaye entitled “Blacks’ support a surprise on same-sex marriage” on December 9. The story, which is a shorter version of the one that ran in the Afro-American, was produced by the Capitol News Service.

The story also ran on Monday, December 10, on the Laurel Patch website under the headline “Different Factors Within African American Communities Shaped Votes on Question 6.”

The Andy Warhol Foundation for The Visual Arts has awarded the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture $50,000 for the upcoming project, Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki & Trevor Paglen.

The project, headed by Visiting Curator to the CADVC, Niels Van Tomme, is a traveling exhibition and publication project which explores the unique roles Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen play as meticulous observers of the global military industrial complex. Investigating forms of military surveillance, espionage, war-making, and weaponry, Farocki and Paglen each examine the deceptive and clandestine ways in which military projects have deeply transformed, and politicized, our relationship to images and the realities they seem to represent. The exhibition initiates critical questions about the crucial part images play in revealing essential but largely concealed governmental information, and places the oeuvres of Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen within the broader cultural and historical developments of the media they are creatively working with, namely photography, film, and new media.

Visibility Machines is scheduled to be presented next fall, mid-October through Decemeber, 2013.

Tom Mandato has been named Assistant Director of Athletics for Operations at UMBC, Director of Athletics Dr. Charles Brown announced in early December, 2012.

Mandato’s duties will include the maintenance of all athletic facilities, including the Retriever Activities Center and Arena, the UMBC Stadium Complex, the UMBC Aquatic Complex, the tennis courts, and practice and recreation fields. He will coordinate the scheduling of these facilities, supervise event operations, equipment room and athletic grounds staff, building security, and will serve as the department liaison to UMBC Facilities Management and the campus scheduling office.

The Philadelphia, Pa. native has spent the last eight years at Towson University, working in facility and event management. In June 2011, he was named Director of Facilities & Event Management for the Tigers’ 19-sport program. Mandato served as the event manager for football, men’s basketball, men’s lacrosse, track & field and gymnastics competitions. He was responsible for the entire athletic facilities budget, facility scheduling for all varsity sports, and played a major role in recent facility enhancement projects, including the new Tiger Arena.

Kristin Waters, Assistant Registrar, was a presenter at the 82nd Annual Conference & Meeting for MSACROA held in Hershey, PA in late November. Waters presented on “Campus Scheduling: Creating Strategies on Building Collaboration.”

“Korean cartography is very distinctive in having this combination of rivers and mountain shown so that the landscape looks as if it’s alive,” says Professor John Rennie Short, public policy, in a new video interview about his latest book.

Korea: A Cartographic History explores 600 years of Korean maps, made by both Koreans and non-Koreans, and serves as a captivating introduction to Korea for English speakers. Thanks to a grant from the Korea Foundation to the University of Chicago Press, the maps are printed in full color, showcasing them both as historical documents and works of art.

In the new video interview about Korea, John Rennie Short describes two cartographic controversies involving the complex relationship between Korea and Japan. He also reflects on the interdisciplinary approach that has defined his highly productive career.

Amy Bhatt, assistant professor of gender and women’s studies, is the co-author of Roots and Reflections: South Asians Map the Pacific Northwest, which will be released by the University of Washington Press early next year.

The book examines the experiences of early South Asians who settled on the Pacific coast in the early 1890s through the 1990s. Though the east coast of the U.S. has some of the largest South Asian populations in the country today, these early settlers shed light on the development of South Asian communities across the U.S. and are an important location in understanding contemporary immigration patterns. Roots and Reflections highlights the gender, race, and class aspects of this immigration and settlement.

For an overview of the book, see the book trailer below.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHjtOvH0YdU&w=420&h=315]

Research by Robert Provine, professor of psychology, has recently been cited in a variety of news outlets.

On December 1, the Wall Street Journal published a story on “The Unsolved Mystery of Why You Just Yawned” in which they delve into research performed for Provine’s latest book, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping and Beyond.

“So what is known about yawning? Dr. Provine—who is a champion of what he calls ‘sidewalk neuroscience,’ experiments anybody can do at home without special equipment—has spent years teasing out the details of yawning, as recounted in his recent book ‘Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping and Beyond.’ By asking people to pinch their noses or grit their teeth while yawning he found that ‘the motor program…will not run to completion’ unless you can inhale through your mouth and gape your jaw wide,” the author wrote.

Provine’s research was also part of a November 23 Forbes story on “The Black Friday Experiment: Mind Control and Mass Hysteria Gone Viral.” ”Humans are social animals and like all social animals have fantastic mechanisms for synching up behavior. If I start yawning, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll start yawning. If I start puking, you’ll most likely yak along. Most of the time, as Dr. Robert Provine explains in [his book] Laughter, this is a good thing,” the author writes, but then goes on to explain that these same mechanisms can cause us to “go from mimetic transmission to mass hysteria in lickety-split.”

Provine was also quoted in a November 26 CTV story entitled “Why Hiccup? Basis of Biological Oddity Is Unclear.” “Hiccupping has no obvious function. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have one. But it hasn’t been discovered,” says Provine in the story.