On March 9, NPR’s On Point delved into the science of laughter. Robert Provine, professor of psychology, was on hand to discuss the topic.

“Laughter is so powerful that Plato and Aristotle spent a lot of time thinking and writing about laughter because they feared its power,” he said.

Audio of the segment is available here.

Susan McCully, senior lecturer in the Department of Theatre and artistic director of the Grrl Parts theatre festival, was interviewed by Tom Hall on WYPR’s Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast. The interview, which aired on Tuesday, March 6, focused on the Grrl Parts performances at UMBC March 7 through 11 and at CENTERSTAGE in downtown Baltimore on March 17.

An audio file of the interview is available on WYPR’s website here.

Maurice Berger, research professor at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, will have a short film, Threshold, featured in the Whitney Biennial in New York. The film was commissioned as part of an artwork entitled BLEED by Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran that will transform the entire fourth floor of the Whitney into a performance/video exhibition space. Threshold focuses on the crossing of thresholds—walking through doors, entering trains, cars, and buses, moving across stages, approaching podiums, and even the imagined passage from Earth to heaven—that have defined the voice, place, and aspirations of a people during the historic struggle for civil rights.

The Biennial exhibition, which examines the current state of contemporary art in America, opened on March 1 and continues on display through May 27. The BLEED installation featuring Professor Berger’s film will run from May 9 through 13. The Whitney Museum of American Art is located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York. For directions and other visiting click here.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQdbE4zgqNA&w=560&h=315]

Lindsey Loeper ’04 acknowledges the futility of trying to keep pace with the hands of the watch and the rapidly turning pages of the calendar. No matter how quickly she and other members of the Special Collections team archive the stacks of UMBC documents they receive every day, there are always more coming. History never stops happening at a university that’s still building its story.

Read more at umbc.edu/magazine.

Meghan Alokonis ’12, dance, was interning under Waugh Chapel Elementary School’s physical education teacher, Karen Webster, when she decided to share a secret: her background was in dance, not traditional physical education.

Instead of being disappointed, Webster saw an opportunity.

Webster and Alokonis worked to integrate dance into physical education classes. Students in all grades got lessons from Alokonis in hip-hop, jazz, tap and ballet, and she worked with Webster and other teachers to tie in lessons on music, history, geometry and even weather.

Then on Feb. 15, six girls danced with Alokonis and the UMBC dance team during halftime of a basketball game.

Odenton’s Patch.com site told the story of the class in a story entitled “‘Dancing Fools’ at Waugh Chapel Elementary,” which ran on March 7.

Tim Sparklin, Compliance Officer  from the Office of Research Protections and Compliance has been elected President-elect of the Northeast section of the Society of Research Administrators (SRA).

On Saturday, March 24, Constantine Vaporis, professor of history and director of the Asian Studies program, will lead a workshop for the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA) at the University of Pittsburgh, aNCTA National Coordinating Site. The workshop will be entitled “Japan and its World: Late Edo Period and Today.”

The workshop will focus on the changes occurring in the late Edo period (mid-19th Century) especially the “opening” of Japan, and how this information relates to understanding Japan’s role in the world today.

Vaporis’ presentation will deal with four distinct topics:

• Challenges from Within
• Danger from Without
• Seeking Out the World
• Postwar Japan and Asia

More information about the workshop can be found here.

Vaporis works regularly with NCTA teachers in the Baltimore area.  Funded by the Freeman Foundation and launched in 1998, NCTA is a nationwide initiative to encourage and facilitate teaching and learning about East Asia in the K-12 curriculum.

Rebecca Boehling, professor of history and director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities, delivered the 8th Annual Richard Yashek Lecture at Albright College in Reading, PA on Thursday, March 1st. More information about the talk can be found here. She and co-author Uta Larkey also spoke about their book, Life and Loss in the Shadow of the Holocaust, at the Myerberg Senior Center in Pikesville, Maryland on March 4.

On Friday, March 9, Dan Ritschel, associate professor of history, and one of his Ph.D. students in the history public policy track, Rod McCaslin, will be on a panel together at the Huntington Library in California. The panel is part of the annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies.

McCaslin will read a paper based on his dissertation research: “The Mysterious Traveler: Finding Edmund Spencer and his influence on Victorian policy-making.” Ritschel will give a paper entitled “The Missing Link: Proto-Keynesian Ideas within the Labour Party in the 1920s.”

More information about the conference can be found here.

Anne Rubin, associate professor of history, has been elected president of the Society of Civil War Historians for 2012-2014. 

The Society of Civil War Historians is committed to promoting both scholarship and fellowship among historians, graduate students and professionals who interpret history in museums, national parks, archives and other public facilities.The SCWH seeks to promote the study of the Civil War era and to bring greater coherence to the field by encouraging the integration of social, military, political, and other forms of history.

The Society publishes a quarterly newsletter, sponsors a biennial conference in even-numbered years (the 2012 conference is in Lexington, Kentucky), and awards the annual Tom Watson Brown Book Prize for the best book on the Civil War era at a banquet held during the Southern Historical Association conference.

Rubin is the author of A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868, and, with Edward Ayers, the CD-ROM The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in The American Civil War Part I: The Eve of War, which won, among others, the E-Lincoln prize. She has authored articles and chapters in numerous Civil War books, magazines, and encyclopedias.

Rubin is now developing Sherman’s March and America, an interactive project that tells the story of the march through maps, photos, videos and voices, and writing a related book called Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and America, which will be published by UNC Press.

A video of Rubin discussing the first casualties of the Civil War can be seen here.