UMBC’s Tyson King-Meadows, associate professor of political science and incoming chair of Africana studies, has been elected to the WYPR Board of Directors for a three-year term (July 1, 2013–June 30, 2016).

For the past year, King-Meadows has participated in the prestigious American Political Science Association (APSA) Congressional Fellowship Program, with his experience on Capitol Hill complementing his teaching and research on the U.S. Congress.

King-Meadows is the author of When the Letter Betrays the Spirit: Voting Rights Enforcement and African American Participation from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama (Lexington Books, 2011). He is currently writing a book on post-Reconstruction Era efforts by Congress to curtail deceptive election practices and to standardize election procedures.

On May 24th, WEAA’s Marc Steiner Show featured guest Jeffrey Davis, associate professor and chair of political science at UMBC, to discuss the recent guilty verdict for former Guatemalan dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt, its overturning, and possible implications for the U.S. Davis appeared alongside Anita Isaacs, associate professor of political science at Haverford College.

Contextualizing the court cased, Davis told listeners, “This is a trial based on a genocide that took place during Guatemala’s 30-year civil war. During that war more than 200,000 people were killed. 40,000 or more were disappeared. That’s around 3% of their population. To give you an idea, that’s about 8 million Americans if you put it in our terms.”

Davis is the author of Justice Across Borders: The Struggle for Human Rights in U.S. Courts (2008) and the forthcoming Seeking Human Rights in Latin America: Truth, Extra-Territorial Courts and the Process of Justice (Cambridge Univ. Press, Nov. 2013).

New Media Studio and Maryland Traditions’ “Mill Stories” Project in Dundalk Eagle.

On May 23, Kimberly Moffitt, assistant professor of American Studies, was a guest on the Marc Steiner Show for a segment entitled “Is President Obama’s Message To Black America Different From The Rest Of America?,” in which Moffitt and her fellow guests analyzed President Obama’s messages to Black America, looking at his recent commencement speeches.  Moffitt was joined by Kai Wright, editorial director of Colorlines.com and Keith Snipes, an actor and writer.

“I think as a politician, he’s fairly consistent with providing us middle-class rhetoric,” said Moffitt. “But I think the difference with what we see happening at HBCUs [historically black colleges and universities] in terms of the speeches there, is that in some ways, the Obamas feel like they’re with family and that they can have certain familial conversations that they probably would have in smaller settings, but they’re forgetting that they’re in a very public space.”

The full segment can be heard here.

Psychology professor Robert Provine’s latest book, “Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping and Beyond,” was recently reviewed in the American Journal of Human Biology.

“Provine brings together ethology, neurophysiology as well as psychology to describe the secrets of our daily behaviors in detail,” writes the reviewer. “Aimed at a wide readership, Provine’s book consists of 13 chapters written with humor… using only minimal resources, available to anyone, he is studying behaviors that raise serious questions.”

The full review can be read here.

This week the OpenGov Foundation and MarylandReporter.com led a focus group to examine transparency in Maryland politics and government. Conversation centered on the Maryland General Assembly website, redesigned in December 2012. The groups also asked for feedback on the website from external experts, including UMBC political science professor Roy T. Meyers.

Meyers told MarylandReporter.com that he was glad the new site moves away from the previous subscription model, which charged a fee to access the most current legislative information. However, he critiqued “delays in [posting] voting records on second and especially third reading.” The article suggests this problem is in part due to a policy that gives senators and delegates until the end of the business day to record or change their electronic votes in the case of a mistake or malfunction, delaying final tallies.

UMBC’s Physics Department recently honored one of its founding faculty members with the seventh annual Joseph Mulligan Memorial Lecture, which focuses on a topic related to the history of physics.

This year’s lecture — which is presented by the winner of the Joseph F. Mulligan Award and is based on a gift by Eleanor Mulligan in memory of her husband — was given by student Diana Marcu, who spoke on the topic “Neutrinos: History and their Role in Astrophysics.”

> > VIDEO: View the full lecture here.

Dr. Mulligan joined the newly-founded UMBC in 1968. He served as the UMBC Dean for Graduate Studies and Research from 1968 to 1982, and as acting Chair of the UMBC Physics Dept from 1987-1988. In 1989 he was made Professor Emeritus of Physics at UMBC. His personal interest in the history of physics is what inspired the lecture that memorializes him today.

He stated: “For many years I have had an interest in the history of physics and the history of ideas, and during my teaching career read many biographies of physicists and occasional articles and book reviews in Isis. I used some of this material in my physics lectures, and found that liberal arts students are anxious to know more about the lives of famous physicists, and respond with interest and enthusiasm when such topics are introduced into physics classes.”

> > Read more about Dr. Mulligan, his life, and work here.

As our newest cohort of alumni looks ahead to the future, let’s also take a moment to reflect on Commencements of the past. We hope you’ll enjoy this slideshow of UMBC Commencements through the years! Special thanks to UMBC Digital Collections for keeping our great university’s history so neatly organized for all to use.

Please share your Commencement memories with us here or on Twitter using #UMBCgrad! We’d also love to add in Commencement photos from missing years; email them to retrievernet@umbc.edu, and we’ll add them to the slideshow!

It’s that time of year again…congratulations to the nearly 1,700 undergraduate and graduate students who are officially becoming UMBC alumni this week!

A few Commencement-related items for all our newly-minted grads:

• Visit our New Grads Page to find out all about the perks of being a UMBC alum and to update your info so you can stay in touch with your friends at UMBC!
• Check out the Class of 2013 Page to read about some really cool students!
• And, be sure to share your Commencement experience with the community by tagging posts and tweets with #UMBCgrad

We wish you the most sincere congratulations — and a good dose of well-deserved rest! And we hope to see you around campus soon!

“The lesson we’ve learned over these last 10, 15 years is no matter how good your [crisis management] plan is, it’s always going to fall short,” says Sunil Dasgupta in today’s Gazette.

Dasgupta, director of UMBC’s political science program at the Universities at Shady Grove (USG) and non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, is co-teaching a crisis management class at USG. The point of the course, he explains, is not to prepare for specific disasters, but to get students thinking about how to build resilience and make decisions in catastrophic situations that they cannot fully plan for or predict. Although many students in the course have not yet selected majors, Dasgupta says he hopes some of them will explore careers in crisis management.