Here we are at last, ready or not: a UMBC community nearly 51 years in the making. There is excitement in the air, and also dust and noise. The newest members of our community are arriving on a campus that is visibly incomplete, with heavy equipment literally reshaping the terrain. How fitting! Let the activity and broken ground serve as symbolic invitations to join in the collaborative work of building our lives, community, and world. We are not the first generation of students, faculty, and staff to gather here, but only now are all of us here, and this is our time to build.

Building together has always been at the core of UMBC’s identity. When the very first students arrived at UMBC in fall 1966, they encountered a campus short on conveniences and traditions: muddy paths connecting buildings without names. The students in that founding class worked and sometimes struggled together to create the template for campus life as we know it today. Many also responded to the profound questions and challenges facing America in the late 1960s, participating actively in efforts to promote peace, justice, and inclusion. As the first students at the first Maryland university established after the end of legal segregation, their very presence together signified the hope that diversity could be a source of great strength. In the program for the first UMBC commencement exercises in 1970, graduating senior Diane Juknelis captured the student body’s grit and social engagement: “The present class of graduates is the first in a long line of innovators who are not to be considered products of UMBC, but rather constant producers of all that gives it character and quality.”

The tradition of UMBC students taking ownership of their experiences, working collaboratively across differences, and being “constant producers” is alive and well. The campus is full of living monuments to students’ role as co-creators of this place. We also have a culture in which students, faculty and staff with different backgrounds and strengths can collaborate on shared projects. Together we’re taking action in the world, not just studying it from a distance. The “grit” we celebrate at UMBC is in part the determination to apply our talents and passions to making people’s lives better, and to persist together even when we disagree, and even in hard times.

If you’re a new student inspired to start making your own contributions, where do you start? Try joining one of these MyUMBC groups and participating in events, programs, and initiatives you’ll learn about through them:

• BreakingGround (campus-wide civic engagement initiative)
• Co-Create UMBC (our blog for the UMBC community)
• Community Engagement Network (opportunities for campus and civic engagement)
• Mosaic Center and Interfaith Center (resources for inclusion and social justice)
• Race, Equity, Inclusion & Justice (UMBC programs and people addressing social injustice, inequality, and race relations)
• Shriver Center (service and learning beyond the classroom)
• Women’s Center (resources and programs supporting gender equity from an intersectional feminist perspective)

Also, be sure to visit Involvement Fest on Wednesday, September 6th (noon - 3:00 p.m., Erickson Field) to find student organizations interested in helping you explore.

Finally: Be curious, kind, open-minded, and real. Learn from and about the people all around you. And begin truly to own and believe in the idea that you are a co-creator of this place. You matter a great deal, and we have work to do together.

Off-Campus Student Services is currently seeking applicants for a full-time Graduate Assistant (Programming Assistant) for the 2017-2018 academic year. A full job description and application details are attached. 

**Applicants must demonstrate a strong background in event planning and coordination, public speaking skills, and assessment.  

Date and Location: August 25, 2017 at 1:00 p.m. 

LLC Conference Room, Sherman Hall, Room 422

Title: Jib-booms, Barrels, and Dead-Eyes: Singing Sex in Sea Chanteys 

The sailing ship, during the Great Age of Sail (roughly 1500-1860), was a floating, largely homosocial space that housed what historian Marcus Rediker calls a “motley crew” of sailing men. Within the cramped structure of the wooden sailing vessel, men were together for often long stretches of time at sea and, in order to create and maintain a shipboard culture, the sailing men employed many strategies to reinforce solidarity, inculcate new crew-members, and delineate themselves within the lonely, dangerous, and sometimes deadly maritime world. One of the chief modes of creating solidarity and identity was through the singing of sea chanteys (shipboard work songs) while seamen were employed in their various shipboard tasks. What complicates this mode of collective bonding and what serves as the chief object of interrogation in this project is the fact that a vast majority of the narratives in sea chanteys were sexual in nature and in their deployment created an erotically charged work space. 

This project views a collection of unexpurgated sea chanteys, located in the once believed “lost” manuscript compiled by bawdy folklore collector Gershon Legman and sea chantey collector Stan Hugill, and investigates the songs as cultural products of the sea. Specifically, through the close analysis of the songs, this project uncovers how chanteys function both internally (within the narratives themselves) and also externally (as they are applied and employed in the work of the ship). Through a unique theoretical lens, formed through the intersection of the work of Michel Foucault and Sarah Ahmed, against the backdrop of Dorothy Smith’s theory of texts as agents of organization and re-embodied through Roland Barthes “Grain of the Voice,” this project is concerned with the way in which sailing men not only create a sense of identity and self-hood, but also how they bind together to create a unique sailing identity through the sea chanteys that helped structure and spur on their work. By the end, the project highlights how the sexual and erotic narratives of sea chanteys function with and deploy discipline, punishment, and orientation, in the service of structuring, forming, and policing identities and relationships within the constrained world of the sailing ship. Ultimately, I argue that the chanteys orient the sailing men to their work, to each other, and to a unique relationship with sex and erotic release. Within the project I contend that the intimate narratives of the sea chanteys mitigated and articulated the desire to be a part of the brotherhood of the forecastle, were a conduit through which the maritime bond was formed, and were a way through which the men experimented with taboo narratives. 

To this point, very few projects look directly into collected sea chanteys in order to mine them for both their symbolic as well as historical possibilities and I seek to rectify the gap in current discussions of the genre. The confined, homosocial space of the ship, combined with the communal bonding through song, and the sexualized subject matter inherent in most of the chanteys creates an analytical space that raises new opportunities for discussion concerning the early modern maritime relationship with the subject of sex. This uniquely interdisciplinary project calls on many different disciplines in order to contextualize as well as interrogate this literature of the sea so as to ultimately venture the argument that sea chanteys are valuable cultural remnants of the Age of Sail, worthy of further scholarly inquiry. 

Dissertation Committee: 

Amy Froide, Chair

Laura Rosenthal, Co-Chair 

Marjoleine Kars

Christine Mallinson

Kate Drabinski 

The public is welcome to observe.