Jody Shipka, assistant professor of English, is the co-editor of a new book. Play! features 63 photographs made with film using 30 toy, lo-fi, and handmade cameras made by 36 photographers in 12 countries on 5 continents.

“Play! is an amazingly diverse collection of photos by very talented photographers. By using toy cameras, the photographers convey the memory and dream of play that lives inside all of us,” said reviewer Mark Olwick of olwickphotography.com.

One hundred percent of the proceeds from sales of Play! will be donated to the Marine Toys for Tots Foundation to benefit children in areas ravaged by tornadoes in 2011, which tied for the second worst year for tornado deaths.

Buy or preview the book here.

The digital humanities is a common subject of discussion in the academic world, and Helen Burgess, assistant professor of English, recently contributed to this conversation by co-authoring an article in the journal “Digital Humanities Quarterly.”

In the article, Burgess and her co-author, Jeanne Hamming of Centenary College of Louisiana, argue that multimedia work places scholars in an extended network that combines minds, bodies, machines, and institutional practices, and lays bare the fiction that scholars are disembodied intellectuals who labor only with the mind.

The article is entitled “New Media in the Humanities: Labor and the Production of Knowledge in Scholarly Multimedia” and was published in the Summer 2011 edition of the journal.

James Smalls, professor of Visual Arts and affiliate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, will be featured on a panel, Gender and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance, at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, on Saturday, December 10 from 2 to 4 p.m.

In connection with works from two exhibitions, Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties and Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, Terry Carbone, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum, will be in conversation with Professor Smalls and with scholar-collector Thomas H. Wirth. This discussion will explore the intersections of race, gender, and queer sexuality within the Harlem Renaissance, taking cues from work by Richard Bruce Nugent, Langston Hughes and Aaron Douglas.

More information is available at www.brooklynmuseum.org/calendar/event/4785.

December 5, 2011 – UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski joined President Barack Obama, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and a select group of higher education leaders at the White House today for a discussion on college affordability and productivity. And later this week, Dr. Hrabowski will be a featured panelist at Governor Martin O’Malley’s 2012 Symposium on Job Creation.

Both events demonstrate that the university’s innovative practices in teaching, research and entrepreneurship are widely respected models for promoting student success and creating a thriving economy.

President Obama has set a goal for the United States to have the highest proportion of college graduates of any country in the world by 2020. The engagement of college leaders in a frank policy discussion today takes that college-completion push to a new level. Dr. Hrabowski participated with a group of leaders that also included University System of Maryland Chancellor William “Brit” Kirwan, the heads of the New York and Texas university systems, and the presidents of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.

UMBC’s graduates are less likely to leave college with debt than their counterparts nationwide, and they are more likely to pursue advanced degrees. More African-American bachelor’s degree recipients go on from UMBC to earn Ph.D.’s in the STEM fields than from any other predominantly white university in the country. And redesigned courses at the university, in chemistry and psychology for example, have increased pass rates, increased average grades and dramatically reduced the number of students needing to repeat courses.

On Friday, President Hrabowski will join the Governor, business leaders and policy makers to discuss higher education partnerships that support innovation, company start-ups and job creation.

To read more about innovation at UMBC, please visit www.umbc.edu/innovate.

UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski joined President Barack Obama, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and a select group of higher education leaders at the White House today for a discussion on college affordability and productivity.

The engagement of college leaders in a frank policy discussion today took President Obama’s college-completion push to a new level. You can read the White House announcement here.

And here’s what the news media is saying:

“President Gathers College Leaders to Discuss Access and Affordability,” The New York Times

“Obama meets with star presidents to talk reform,” The Washington Post

“Hrabowski and Kirwan meet with Obama to discuss price tag for college,” The Baltimore Sun

“Obama Meets With College Leaders as Occupy Protesters Target Student Debt,” Bloomberg

“At White House Meeting on Affordability, a Call for Urgency, Innovation, and Leadership,” The Chronicle of Higher Education

“At the White House Roundtable,” Inside Higher Ed

The Commons SportsZone was packed last month as finalists in UMBC’s 3rd annual Idea Competition — a bi-annual contest of entrepreneurial prowess — made their presentations to a panel of alumni judges and a standing room-only crowd of over 100 members of the UMBC community.

Forty ideas were originally submitted by students, with the top 10 selected for the final round. Winners were chosen by a combination of scores from the voting audience and the judging panel, consisting of three entrepreneurial alums: Greg Cangialosi ’96, English, CEO of Nucleus Ventures, LLC; Delali Dzirasa ’04, computer engineering, President of Fearless Solutions, LLC; and Jeehye Yun ’97, computer science, CEO and President of Secured Sciences Group.

UMBC alumnus and judge Greg Cangialosi was inspired by the innovative ideas from the students. He says, “It is truly inspiring to come back to UMBC as an entrepreneur and to see the amount of energy and the quality of the ideas coming out of the students on campus. The advancements in promoting entrepreneurship at UMBC have been incredible.”

Read more about the competition winners here.

All the winners won cash prizes: 1st place $750, 2nd place $500, 3rd place $250 and Most Creative $250. The Idea Competition was sponsored by the Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship and was part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, a week where universities around the world celebrate entrepreneurship with activities and events for their students, faculty and alumni.

Margie Burns, lecturer part-time in English, will be included in “Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal,” published annually by the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA). Her article, “Comic Resolution, Humorous Loose Ends in Austen’s Novels,” is about Austen’s outrageous comic wrap-ups, endings with a cavalier disregard for painful realism and social awkwardness.

Articles from recent issues of Persuasions are distributed electronically through EBSCO and Thomson Gale.

In his latest Baltimore Sun commentary, “Newt Gingrich Is the GOP’s Only Serious Candidate,” UMBC political science professor Thomas Schaller argues that despite claims of his unelectability, Gingrich stands out as unique in the GOP presidential field. Schaller calls Gingrich “the Republicans’ one-man walking, talking think tank” and argues, “he will be able to conduct a serious debate about America’s future because he’s the only GOP contender who has spent the past three decades actually pondering the problems, large and small, facing the country.” Read the column to learn more about Schaller’s 2010 interview with Gingrich and their conversation on Gingrich’s book “To Save America.”

Jaimes Mayhew ’10, MFA in imaging and digital arts, has received a Fulbright U.S. Student Program scholarship to Iceland, where he will spend the next nine months working on a social practice art project, Autonomous Energy Research Lab.

Mayhew states, “Autonomous Energy Research Lab is an art research project that will investigate the idea of autonomy through conversations, art events, visits from other Baltimore-based artists and any other methods of research that may come about. All of these events will take place involving my research lab, which is a modified bike cart that includes a table, chairs, protection from the rain and is capable of producing and storing energy in a mobile battery. I will be using this lab to research ideas of autonomy, with special interest in Iceland’s use of geothermal power, of preservation of the Icelandic language and culture and, of course, in talking to people about Iceland’s economic collapse and strategies to recovery.”

See more about Mayhew’s work at his website:  www.enginesofthefuture.com

– Originally published on the UMBC Graduate School blog

– Read more about UMBC alumni on Retriever Net

This month’s Urbanite cover story “El Nuevo Baltimore” begins with a compelling premise: “Baltimore’s burgeoning Hispanic community could be a force for broader change—but only if we can make them welcome here.” In the extensive piece, Donald Norris, chair of public policy at UMBC, explains why the economic impact of Latino Baltimore residents has so far been limited, despite robust population growth.

Norris suggests that currently “there is only so much in the form of gentrification that they can do,” given that many Latinos who move to the US are working class and “here for the economic opportunity.” The article notes that Baltimore’s Latino population currently has a median household income of $37,868, versus $54,514 for white residents.