Azmat Naseem, Environmental Engineering PhD student with Dr. Ghosh, was awarded the best poster presentation for COEIT and Sahar Souizi, Chemical and Biochemical Engineering Ph.D. student with Dr. Blaney, won the runner-up award for the 3 Minute Thesis competition (3MT). Congratulations!

GEARS GSA proudly hosted the 2025 Research Symposium and Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, celebrating the innovation, passion, and dedication of our student researchers across disciplines.

Research Symposium Winners
Each awarded $500 for excellence in research:

• Best of CAHSS: Diane Placide

• Best of CNMS: Lekan Ajiboye

• Best of COEIT: Azmat Naseem

• People's Choice Award: Navya Sree Manikonda

3MT Competition Winners

• Winner: Prajna Bhandary ($500)

• Runner-Up: Sahar Souizi ($250)

• People's Choice Award: Seraj Mostafa ($250)

Congratulations to all participants for showcasing the power of research and storytelling. Your work continues to inspire and elevate the UMBC community.

See you all next year!

To access all pictures of the events, go to the following links:

Research Symposium Pictures

3MT Pictures

Original Post: https://my3.my.umbc.edu/groups/gsa/posts/149026

Written by Margie Burns, assistant teaching professor of English, UMBC

Most readers hear “pride and prejudice” and immediately think of Jane Austen’s most famous novel, that salty-sweet confection of romance and irony with a fairy-tale ending.

Few people, however, know the history of the phrase “pride and prejudice,” which I explore in my new book, “Jane Austen, Abolitionist: The Loaded History of the Phrase ‘Pride and Prejudice.’”

Like most Austen fans and scholars, I had read and loved her novels for years without learning much about the history of the title, which Austen chose after scrapping the original one, “First Impressions.”

By the 20th century, “pride and prejudice” became solely associated with Austen’s 1813 novel.

The phrase, which has religious origins, appeared in hundreds of works before Austen was born. From Britain it traveled to America, and from religious tomes it expanded to secular works. It even became a hallmark of abolitionist writing.

Fighting words for religious factions

While 2025 marks Austen’s 250th birthday, the phrase “pride and prejudice” first appeared more than 400 years ago, in religious writings by English Protestants. As the daughter, sister, cousin and granddaughter of Church of England ministers, Austen was certainly aware of the tradition.

If ministers wanted to reproach their parishioners or their opponents, they attributed criticism of their sermons to “pride and prejudice” – as coming from people too arrogant and narrow-minded to entertain their words in good faith.

While the usage began in the Church of England, other denominations, even radical ones, soon adopted it: “Pride and prejudice” appears in the writings of Nonconformists, Anabaptists, Quakers, Dissenters and other representatives of “Schism, Faction and Sedition,” as one anonymous writer called them.

One early takeaway is that, amid fervent religious conflicts, various denominations similarly used “pride and prejudice” as a criticism.

The unnamed minister himself complained that, owing to “the Pride and Prejudice of mens Spirits, the prevailing Interests of some Factions and Parties, the greatest part of the Nation are miserably wanting in their Duty.”

At the same time, the phrase could be invoked to support religious toleration and in pleas for inclusiveness.

“When all Pride and Prejudice, all Interests and Designs, being submitted to the Honour of God, and the Discharge of our Duty,” an anonymous clergyman wrote in 1734, “the Holy Scriptures shall again triumph over the vain Traditions of Men; and Religion no longer take its Denomination from little Sects and Factions.”

From politics to prose

In the 18th century, advances in publishing led to an explosion of secular writing. For the first time, regular people could buy books about history, politics and philosophy. These popular texts spread the phrase “pride and prejudice” to even more distant shores.

One fan was American founding father Thomas Paine.

In his 47-page pamphlet “Common Sense,” Paine argued that kings could not be trusted to protect democracy: “laying aside all national pride and prejudice in favour of modes and forms, the plain truth is, that it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government[,] that the crown is not as repressive in England as in Turkey.”

Others included Daniel Defoe, author of “Robinson Crusoe.” In his 1708 essay “Review of the State of the British Nation,” Defoe satirically exhorted the public to vote Tory rather than electing men of sense, to “dispell the Poisons” that “Sloth, Envy, Pride and Prejudice may have contracted, and bring the Blood of the Party into a true circulation.”

After the philosophers, the historians and the political commentators came the novelists. And among the novelists, female writers were especially important. My annotated list in “Jane Austen, Abolitionist” includes more than a dozen female writers using the phrase between 1758 and 1812, the year Austen finished revising “Pride and Prejudice.”

Among them was Frances Burney. Scholars have often attributed Austen’s famous title to Burney, who used the phrase “pride and prejudice” in her novel “Cecilia.”

But Burney was not alone. Female novelists who used the expression before Austen included Charlotte Lennox, sisters Harriet and Sophia Lee, Charlotte Turner Smith, Mrs. Colpoys, Anne Seymour Damer and mother and daughter Susannah and Elizabeth Gunning, who jointly authored their novel “The Heir Apparent.”

An abolitionist rallying cry

As the critique embodied in the phrase progressed beyond religious and partisan conflict, it became increasingly used in the context of ethics and social reform.

My most striking discovery in this research is the long-standing association of the phrase “pride and prejudice” with abolitionism, the movement to eradicate enslavement and the slave trade.

The leaders of transnational antislavery organizations used it at their conventions and in the books and periodicals they published. In 1843, 30 years after the publication of Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” British Quaker Thomas Clarkson wrote to the General Antislavery Convention, which was meeting in London.

He exhorted the faithful to repudiate slavery “at once and forever” if there were any among them “whose eyes may be so far blinded, or their consciences so far seared by interest or ignorance, pride or prejudice, as still to sanction or uphold this unjust and sinful system.”

He even used the phrase twice. Acknowledging that some violent abolitionists had aroused reaction, he warned his audience that “this state of feeling arises as much from pride and prejudice on the one hand, as from indiscretion or impropriety on the other.”

At the funeral for abolitionist John Brown, the minister prayed over his body, “Oh, God, cause the oppressed to go free; break any yoke, and prostrate the pride and prejudice that dare to lift themselves up.”

Use of the phrase did not end with Emancipation or the end of the U.S. Civil War.

In fact, it was one of Frederick Douglass’ favorite phrases. On Oct. 22, 1883, in his “Address at Lincoln Hall,” Douglass excoriated the Supreme Court’s decision rendering the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional.

As was typical of Douglass, the speech ranged beyond racial inequities: “Color prejudice is not the only prejudice against which a Republic like ours should guard. The spirit of caste is malignant and dangerous everywhere. There is the prejudice of the rich against the poor, the pride and prejudice of the idle dandy against the hard-handed workingman.”

Austen’s independent women

Early on in “Pride and Prejudice,” the conceited Caroline Bingley snipes that Elizabeth Bennet shows “an abominable sort of conceited independence.” Later, the snobbish Lady Catherine accuses Bennet of being “headstrong.” But near the ending, Mr. Darcy tells Bennet that he loves her for “the liveliness” of her “mind.”

In this respect, Bennet reflects a quality that all of Austen’s heroines possess. While they try to adhere to standards of courtesy and respect, none are guilty of saying only what the leading man wants to hear.

Given that Austen chose her title to honor the phrase and its history, it is ironic that her own fame ended up drowning out the abolitionist associations of “pride and prejudice” after the Civil War.

If there is any work of fiction that successfully makes self-sufficiency, independent thinking and open-mindedness look good – and makes sycophants, rigidity and hysterical devotion to rank and status look bad – it is “Pride and Prejudice.”

Yet the lasting popularity of Austen’s novel demonstrates that the ethics contained in the phrase continue to resonate today, even if its context has been lost.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article and see more than 250 UMBC articles available in The Conversation.

Kyle Casamento

Kat Gill

REMINDER! - Join us today at 4pm in the Commons, Room 331. 

The definition of good leadership is broad, and often is in the eyes of the beholder. However, successful leadership in Higher Ed is inherently informed by academic disciplines. Social scientists, who are dedicated to the study of human society and social relationships, are especially well-positioned to investigate the characteristics of successful leadership.

However, as busy academics, we don’t always pause to consider what inspired us to pursue our fields or how the traits that helped us succeed in our scholarship might inform our perspective on leadership.

The Breaking the M.O.L.D. initiative fosters this type of reflection. The program aims to provide its faculty participants with leadership skills informed by the arts, humanities and social sciences - helping them expand their leadership potential and discover new professional opportunities.

 In Why We Learn, Lead & Succeed? we will explore what motivates us in our fields, how our academic interests may inform our leadership considerations, and even more importantly how, as educators, we can use our knowledge to guide and inform people around us in these challenging times.

Dr. Tatiana Mann

Breaking the M.O.L.D. Project Manager
D.M.A. in Piano Performance

Dr. Tatiana Mann is a passionate advocate and leader in music and the arts. A classical pianist and professor of piano, Dr. Mann has performed and taught throughout the US and in Europe. As an arts administrator with more than 20 years of experience, she enjoys bringing abstract ideas into tangible reality.  Dr. Mann was the founding executive director of the Wildwood Academy for Music and the Arts (WAMA) in Little Rock, AR – a summer program that provides arts and music instruction, with a focus on children with limited opportunities. In 2021 she founded a registered chapter of American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and advocated for freedom of speech on behalf of her colleagues in TX.  As a recording artist, Tatiana can be heard on Finding Home, released on SONY Classical Korea, as well as American Jazz Nocturne, on the Naxos Label.  Dr. Mann holds graduate degrees in piano performance from the University of MN (DMA), London’s Royal Academy of Music (PGDip) and Manhattan School of Music (MM).

Breaking the M.O.L.D. is a leadership development program that aims to help the faculty consider administration from the arts and humanities perspective.  As humanists, we tend to ask questions, including what motivates us to do what we do in our disciplines - beyond the initial curiosity or professional interests. In “Why We Learn, Lead & Succeed”we will examine the larger motivating principles behind our work. By asking “What do we do?”, “How do we do it?” and therefore “Why do we do it?”, we will explore the reasons we engage in our fields of study.  As a professional musician who grew up in contrasting socio-political environments, I will share how my upbringing, and journey as a professional musician inform my work as an administrator and inspire my leadership.

Dr. Carolyn Forestiere

Professor of Political Science

Dr. Forestiere is a  Professor of Political Science, having been at UMBC since 2004. Her research focuses on comparative politics (European and Italian Politics in particular), undergraduate research pedagogy, and more recently, the political implications of the growing decline of religiosity in industrialized democracies. Recently, she has published the second edition of her 2021 textbook, Beginning Research in Political Science. As a professor, Dr. Forestiere works intensely with undergraduate research and international education. For her, teaching and student-oriented university service are closely intertwined. On the student research side, she has developed an undergraduate research conference in Political Science (the 14th conference will be on April 9, 2025) and she has served as UMBC’s Undergraduate Research Award Faculty Chair since 2018. On the international education side, to date, Dr. Forestiere has led four study abroad programs, the last one being to Rome in January 2025. Having first participated in the MOLD program as a participant, she transitioned to become a leader in residence and now serves as the program’s co-PI.

According to Dr. Forestiere, discerning ‘Why We Learn, Lead & Succeed?' doesn’t have to be hard. It requires that you define your core values and look for the opportunities that help you achieve what you want for yourself and the people around you.

Dr. Forestiere believes that the motivation for leadership should prioritize building others in one’s sphere. ‘Why We Learn, Lead & Succeed?’ involves a process of discovery regarding what motivates individuals at key moments in time to find agency in making a positive difference where they can. Strong teachers who are accustomed to respond to ongoing challenges, for example the AI revolution, are uniquely positioned to transfer their skills into leadership.

Dr. Felipe Filomeno

Associate Professor of Political Science
Director of Global Studies Program

He is a higher education leader experienced in academic affairs, global education, campus-community engagement, deliberative dialogue, and research capacity development. His research investigates immigrant integration, intergroup relations, Latin America, and the Latin American diaspora in the United States. He is the author of four books, most recently Christian Cosmopolitanism: Faith Communities Talk Immigration, published by Temple University Press in 2024.

Dr. Filomeno's talk will explore how key social science practices—social critique, reflexivity, and the scientific study of social behavior—uniquely equip social scientists for leadership roles. Their ability to analyze and question social norms and structures fosters transformative leadership that challenges the status quo in higher education. By promoting critical self-reflection in both students and themselves, social scientists identify strengths, areas for growth, and the broader social impact of their work. Their expertise in group dynamics, power relations, and communication further enhances their capacity to navigate and influence institutional environments effectively.

Hosted by the Breaking the M.O.L.D. Program.  Moderated by Dr. Eric Stokan, Director of the Center for Social Science Scholarship, a cosponsor. 

CS3 sponsored events are open for full participation by all individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or any other protected category under applicable federal law, state law, and the University’s nondiscrimination policy.

Hello MTC! Here are some updates on elections, future events, and Small Fall as we approach the end of the semester

EXECUTIVE BOARD ELECTIONS

Want to run for the 2025-26 E-Board? Fill out this Interest Form by Friday at 12pm! Candidates will have the opportunity to read their speech in-person during the Friday GBM! (12pm ILSB 237).

SMALL FALL DIRECTOR APPLICATION:

Small Fall is a student directed show with 2-10 cast members. To apply to be a director for our 2025 production, you must apply with a show already in mind and present information on it. You will then be interviewed by the new board!

Apply Here!

Deadline: May 3rd 11:59pm

PROM!!!

This year’s Prom Theme is Renaissance Faire! Come dressed in your best medieval outfit! We will have catering, music, and a raffle prize! Please RSVP here so we know how much food to get! (And ask someone out if you're feeling crazy!)

When: Sunday 4/27 6-10pm

Where: Apartment Community Center (ACC) Gold Room

SHOWCASE THEMES

It's time to start thinking about showcase themes! Bring your suggestions to the 4/25 GBM!