Drs. Loren Henderson and Cedric Herring were invited as a select group of approximately 25 leading scholars and activists from around the world to meet at UN Headquarters, NY, January 2016. The conference/workshop met to analyze the relationship between poverty, inequality, and global conflict and to discuss measures that may be taken to ameliorate violent conflict by reducing poverty and inequality. Dr. Henderson presented “Wealth Inequality in Black and White: Cultural and Structural Sources of the Racial Wealth Divide”

A feature published in the December 2015 edition of Seattle Magazine examines how Seattle’s South Asian population is becoming more visible in the philanthropic community. Amy Bhatt, an assistant professor of gender and women’s studies, researches South Asian migration trends in the tech industry and provided perspective on how the philanthropic community has grown over time.

“There’s a lot of wealth that has accumulated here,” Bhatt said in the article. As a result, the first generation of international tech workers in the Pacific Northwest has helped incubate a number of nonprofits and foundations.

Bhatt also observed in the article that more South Asians are emerging as leaders in the nonprofit sector: “You’re seeing more markers of South Asian leaders in general…in American organizations and institutions,” says Bhatt, citing the local examples of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant and state Senator Pramila Jayapal. Bhatt said that earlier leaders have paved the way for the new generation. “As a result of a multitiered, multigenerational community, you have much richer examples of South Asian leaders in philanthropy.”

Bhatt recently appeared in a PBS documentary about the 1965 Immigration Act and she’s author of Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest. Read more about her work on the gender and women’s studies website.

Read “South Asians are becoming more visible in the philanthropic community” in Seattle Magazine. 

Piotr Gwiazda, an associate professor of English, has been selected for a prestigious list “Best Books of Poetry in English 2015.” The list was compiled by Adam Zdrodowski, a poet and translator who has published three collections of poetry and translated authors such as Gertrude Stein and William S. Burroughs.

The list included six top poetry books published in 2015 from around the world, including Gwiazda’s Aspects of Strangers which received strong praise from Zdrodowski: “At first, the poems may seem simple, and yet it quickly turns out their simplicity is misleading. Simple phrases keep building up, bringing new pieces of information, sometimes corroborating and sometimes undermining what went before; phrases are sometimes repeated in different contexts, adding to the complex picture of contemporary humans struggling with the paradoxes and pleasures of contemporaneity.”

The book is Gwiazda’s third book of poetry. His areas of interest include modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, poetic theory, creative writing, literary translation and translation theory, intertextuality studies, U.S. literature and culture, and world literature. He has received grants and fellowships from the PEN American Center (The PEN/Heim Translation Fund), National Humanities Center (Summer Institute in Literary Studies), Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and UMBC’s Dresher Center for the Humanities. He won the Washington Writers’ Publishing Poetry Contest for Gagarin Street in 2005.

Read more about Gwiazda’s work on the English department website. Read more about the six best books of poetry in 2015.

Black Girls Vote, a nonprofit organization designed to boost voter turnout in Baltimore, was recently featured in the Baltimore Sun. In the article, Kate Drabinski, a lecturer of gender and women’s studies and director of the Women Involved in Learning and Leadership (WILL) program, provided perspective on the organization’s potential far reaching impact heading into the 2016 election season.

The group was founded by a Baltimore resident with the goal of registering people to vote, especially young African-American women, and to use the nonprofit to aid public schools, the job market and access to health care. The organization is made up of 15 core members, and several pop-up events are being planned to help residents register throughout the year.

In the article, Drabinski described how involvement from minority groups in shaping public policy can help change lives.

“There are incredible efforts made to get wealthy white people to vote — whole systems to remind them how important their vote is,” Drabinski said. “You need the same kind of attention to other groups.

“Without participation, the wrong decisions will be made. It’s an old tenet: ‘Nothing about us without us.'”

Drabinski’s research interests include transgender studies, critical pedagogy, public history, and theories of activism. Each year in the spring, Drabinski leads the Elect Her! program, which is a training program that encourages college women to run for student government on their college or university campuses. Read more about Drabinski’s work and research. Read the full article “Black Girls Vote looks to get young women to the polls” in the Baltimore Sun. 

F. Chris Curran, an assistant professor in UMBC’s School of Public Policy, has been named an Emerging Education Policy Scholar for 2015-16 by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. The Emerging Education Policy Scholars (EEPS) program is a select group of promising, new Ph.D. scholars and candidates who present innovative research ideas and demonstrate an enthusiasm for education policy.

As part of the program, Curran will join think-tankers, academics, policymakers, and reformers in Washington, D.C. during the upcoming year to bridge connections with senior education policy experts and K-12 education practitioners. The program is designed to cultivate talent within education research, create opportunities to share research ideas, and enhance understanding of the intersections between policy and practice with education research.

“The primary purpose of my work is to produce high-quality research that contributes to the improvement of educational outcomes for students,” shares Curran. “Being selected as an Emerging Education Policy Scholar is an exciting opportunity to advance this goal as it provides the opportunity to forge relationships with other emerging researchers as well as to build connections with senior policymakers in the field.”

Professor Curran joined the School of Public Policy in August 2015. He has research interests in education policy, early childhood education, school discipline and safety, teacher labor markets, and politics of education. He has recently published a Baltimore Sun op-ed about educational opportunity in Baltimore and a column about teacher overtime policy in Education Week.

Curran is one of just 20 scholars selected for the program nationwide. Read more about this year’s EEPS cohort on theThomas B. Fordham Institute website. Learn more about the specific goals of the program.

Image: Chris Curran presents talk at UMBC about his research. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.