Announcing the latest grants from the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation

We are proud to announce the projects awarded grants in the fall 2015 round of the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation competition. We are truly inspired by the creative ideas we hear each day and are delighted to be able to support more of them through this fund.

IMPLEMENTATION AND RESEARCH GRANTS

Designing and Developing Effective Mobile Applications – A team led by Viviana Cordova, Assistant Professor of Visual Arts, and Nilanjan Banerjee, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, will create a new interdisciplinary project that teaches both designers and developers the life cycle and project management of mobile application development. Working with professional clients, visual arts and computer science students will use teamwork to tackle real-world projects with deadlines, milestones, and budget constraints. Throughout the semester, students from the Advanced Interface Design and Mobile Programming classes will collaborate to apply their design and programming experience to develop smartphone applications for clients.

Proposals for the next round of Innovation Fund grants are due by October 14, 2016. Please considersubmitting an application.

This post originally appeared here. 

Rebecca Boehling and Kate Brown have won a coveted semester-long fellowship from The American Academy in Berlin. Boehling and Brown, both professors in UMBC’s history department, are two of just 23 scholars selected nationwide to receive Berlin Prize Fellowships, which are awarded annually to scholars, writers, composers, and artists from the United States who represent the “highest standards of excellence in their fields.”

During the fall 2016 semester, Rebecca Boehling will use the fellowship in Berlin to make a comparative assessment of how the United States, Great Britain, and France approached the process of undoing Nazi influences in post-World War II German society. She will examine the divergent theories behind denazification and how they were implemented. From 2013-2015, Boehling was director of the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany.

In spring 2017, Kate Brown will continue her research project by writing a history of human survival in the territories surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. She is conducting a large-scale, archival-based history of Chernobyl to explore how citizens negotiated daily life with exposures to radioactive isotopes. Last month, Brown received a prestigious research fellowship from theCarnegie Corporation of New York.

“We look forward to welcoming another group of outstanding fellows to the Academy. By working with their peers and partner institutions in Berlin and presenting their projects to the public, they will actively contribute to the exchange of ideas,” said Academy president Gerhard Casper in a news release announcing the 2016-17 awards.

The fellows were chosen by an independent selection committee and they are encouraged to work with individuals and institutions in The American Academy in Berlin’s established network to forge connections and lasting partnerships.

This is the first time that UMBC professors have received the prestigious fellowship. Read more about Rebecca Boehlingand Kate Brown on the history department website. For more information about The American Academy in Berlin, visit the Academy’s website.

This story originally published on UMBC News.

SUMMER 2016

ANTH 211: CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

GEP "Culture" OR "Social Science" (3 credits)

Anthropology is both a theoretical and applied field involving the study of humanity in its socio-cultural dimensions. The goal of this course is to provide a broad perspective of human life through cross-cultural comparisons of topics such as language, race and ethnicity, economics, gender, politics, ritual, art, and religion. Students will learn how anthropological theories and methods developed over time, research skills, and how to present ideas effectively as a speaker and writer in a social science format. 

The course introduces students to the concepts, approaches, and skills of a particular discipline - Cultural Anthropology concerned with intercultural studies. The class will examine various anthropological approaches to understanding human behavior, and highlights insights to other cultures as well to our own culture.