Former professional mountain biker Marla Streb, who earned her M.S. in Marine Estuary Environmental Science from UMBC in 1991, is featured in the Baltimore City Paper’s “bike issue” this week.

To quote the article:

She became a world-class contender in single-track downhill—in which, just as in downhill ski-racing, “you start at the top of a mountain and they time you as you go down, one at a time, a very treacherous course with jumps, and you get to the bottom in about five minutes,” she says. In her 16-year career, she won three national and two world championships, broke 24 bones, and wrote two books about it—a training guide and a memoir, Downhill: The Life Story of a Gravity Goddess.

Since returning recently to Baltimore with her family, Streb says she plans on working with city planners to make biking more accessible to all.

Read the full story in the Baltimore City Paper.

Former professional mountain biker Marla Streb, who earned her M.S. in Marine Estuary Environmental Science from UMBC in 1991, is featured in the Baltimore City Paper’s “bike issue” this week.
To quote the article:

She became a world-class contender in single-track downhill—in which, just as in downhill ski-racing, “you start at the top of a mountain and they time you as you go down, one at a time, a very treacherous course with jumps, and you get to the bottom in about five minutes,” she says. In her 16-year career, she won three national and two world championships, broke 24 bones, and wrote two books about it—a training guide and a memoir, Downhill: The Life Story of a Gravity Goddess.

Since returning recently to Baltimore with her family, Streb says she plans on working with city planners to make biking more accessible to all.
Read the full story in the Baltimore City Paper.

Hands-on History

Marie Spiro had been collecting artifacts to use in her classroom at the University of Maryland, College Park for over 50 years. So when the archaeologist decided that it was time for her collection to find a new home, she looked for a place that would honor her one wish for the objects: that rather than living in cases, the artifacts would be used, handled and studied by students learning about archaeology and the ancient world.

She found such a place in UMBC’s ancient studies department, and the first third of Spiro’s collection arrived in the department—and the classroom—this semester. The collection features Greek, Roman and Byzantine artifacts, and contains mosaics, pottery, figurines and other pieces that date back as far as 15,000 years. The next third of the artifacts will come to campus in early 2012, with the final portion arriving in 2013.

“I’ve always wanted this to be passed on, and I have the opportunity to pass it along to an outstanding department,” Spiro said. “I’m so happy that the collection has found a home. That’s my dream fulfilled.”

The collection also fulfilled a dream for Marilyn Goldberg, chair of ancient studies, who was eager to extend the department’s focus on hands-on learning into the classroom. Although ancient studies undergraduate students participate in internships at places like the Walters Art Museum and digs in locations from Fell’s Point to Transylvania, Goldberg is thrilled that the Spiro collection allows students to physically interact with the artifacts without leaving campus. The collection is ideal for research and teaching because it includes many objects that ancient people used in their everyday lives.

“Students can look at a piece in its entirety, look at the back of it and the profile of it, see how it’s made,” Goldberg said. “You can’t turn a picture over.”

With the financial support of local Greek organizations, including the Baltimore-Piraeus Sister City Committee and the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Associations of Baltimore and Washington, DC, the ancient studies department brought the artifacts to campus this February.

The first students to work with the collection are currently enrolled in the Museum Studies class taught by Esther Read, lecturer in ancient studies. The class is a lecture/lab hybrid, with students spending the first half in discussion about the issues faced by museums and the second half working with the artifacts. Read has worked both in museums and on award-winning archaeology digs.

“I want them to see that these objects are more than just pretty things in cases. Whoever owned that piece originally, it had meaning to them, it had meaning to Marie Spiro when she collected it, it has different meaning now that she’s given it to us, it’ll have a meaning here at the institution and for the student who works with it,” said Read. “You have so many groups and so many relationships with one object. Which story do you present?”

Students will need to keep those issues in mind when Phase II of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building opens: it will include an archaeology lab where students can study the artifacts and space where they can display the exhibits they curate.

“There are so many potential projects,” said Goldberg. “I keep getting ideas about the possibilities for the collection and what we can do with it.”

(4/15/11)

Eduardo Gonzalez ’06, Aaron Merki ’05, and Alicia Wilson ’04, all political science graduates, were named to The Daily Record’s 2011 list of “Twenty in Their 20s” award honorees. Merki was also the recipient of the 2010 UMBC Rising Star Award for young alumni service and is an associate at Venable, LLP. Wilson was the (inaugural) 2009 UMBC Rising Star Award winner and is an associate at Gordon, Feinblatt, Rothman, Hoffberger & Hollander, LLC. Gonzalez writes for the Daily Record’s “Generation J.D.” blog.

Read more about Merki and Wilson on our UMBC Alumni Awards page:

• Aaron Merki ’05
• Alicia Wilson ’04

The Committee to Protect Journalists has issued an alert for UMBC alumnus Matthew VanDyke ’02, political science, who has gone missing in Libya. He is one of 15 journalists currently missing or in government custody in Libya.

Read the full story here and please share.  Keeping Matthew in the public eye is important!

Great Gates

Michael Young ’11, philosophy, was recently awarded the Gates Cambridge scholarship, one of the world’s most selective academic awards. This fall, Young will enroll at the University of Cambridge to pursue his master’s degree in philosophy.

“It’s a great honor and I’m very humbled. I look forward to representing our community,” said Young.

The Gates Cambridge program, which is funded by Bill and Melinda Gates, aims to build a global network of future leaders committed to improving the lives of others. The awards cover the full cost of full-time graduate study and research in any subject available at the University of Cambridge. Other 2011 U.S. scholars include students from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, MIT, the University of Chicago and other universities.

Young, who has also taken a heavy course load in biological sciences while at UMBC, plans to attend medical school after completing his degree at Cambridge. His goal is to work in bioethics, examining the philosophical framework and ethical theory grounding standards of care in medicine and public health.

“I think that the combination of philosophy and medicine can make medicine a more examined practice,” said Young. “It’s not something that people typically think about, because the alliance is not always clear… but the ways in which philosophers think, and the critical tools they use to analyze arguments, are ones that can be applied across the disciplines.”

In addition to his work in philosophy and biological sciences, Young is the founding director of Healing Harmonies, a student-run volunteer organization that organizes performances by student musicians for the elderly and sick, on the editorial board for Bartleby and a fencer on the UMBC fencing team.

“He’s a jack of all trades but he’s also a master of many of them. It’s rare to find that kind of excellence in more than one field,” said Simon Stacey, associate director of the Honors College, who helped Young prepare his application.

In order to be considered for the award, Young had to first gain acceptance to Cambridge. Then, his essay was reviewed by a selection committee and he was interviewed by a panel of scholars.

“The interview turned into a very interesting discussion about the dialogue between the disciplines and the utility of such a dialogue as it pertains to philosophy and medicine,” Young said.

Young is one of 30 2011 U.S. Gates Cambridge Scholars. The scholars were chosen from 800 applicants from 21 states and 30 U.S. colleges and universities. The American scholars will be joined by 60 Gates Scholars from other parts of the world.

UMBC alumni Philip Graff ’08, physics, and Simon Gray ’08, chemical engineering, received Gates Cambridge Scholarships in 2008. Ian Ralby ’02, modern languages and linguistics, M.A. intercultural communication, received the scholarship in 2007 and 2008.

“I think it’s really quite remarkable that a UMBC student, once again, should be among the few chosen,” said Stacey.

(4/8/11)

Marching into the Future

A collaboration between two UMBC faculty members is exploring the potential of a movement known as the “digital humanities” – wherein digital tools are used to explore history and other subjects in all their depth and complexity.

Since 2008, Anne Sarah Rubin, associate professor of history, and Kelley Bell ’05, M.F.A. imaging and digital arts, assistant professor of graphic design, have been putting together Sherman’s March and America: Mapping Memory. The multimedia site launched in July 2010, funded with a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies and support of UMBC’s Imaging Research Center.

Rubin says that the version now online is a work in progress representing about twenty percent of what the creators have in mind. They hope this “proof of concept” will help them to secure the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities when they apply for funding this fall.

The site design is simple and elegant. But closer examination also reveals a sophisticated engagement with issues in historiography (that is, the questions historians ask themselves about the methodology of reconstructing the past).

Visitors to the site are greeted by a map showing the area covered by Sherman’s men as they made their way between Atlanta and Savannah in November and December of 1864. The troops followed two different courses between those points, scorching the earth as they went. At the bottom of the screen is a timeline. Slide the cursor on it and you can trace the progress of each wing of the Union Army. Click on one of the highlighted towns along the way, and there pops up a short video based on events in that area during the campaign.

But the three-minute clips don’t just recite information on the military campaign, as viewed with the benefit of nearly 150 years of hindsight. The stories they tell reflect the variety of groups affected by the march. Yankee soldiers, Confederate citizens, and newly freed slaves, for example, each experienced things from distinct perspectives. And those final weeks of 1864 threw a long shadow, inspiring later generations to create books, films, and tourist attractions. How events were woven into the public memory becomes part of the story. The site looks at General Sherman, of course – but also at Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone With the Wind.

“I like big questions, big issues, ‘going wide’ in looking at history,” says Rubin. “What appealed to me about Sherman’s March as a subject was the possibility of using the map as a way to frame the ‘multipositionality’ of events – how they looked from a variety of perspectives. As a digital history project, this isn’t just a collection of facts about the past. It’s also about narrative, storytelling, and memory.”

“Rather than shy away from conflicting interpretations of the past, as many museums do, the modern approach is to embrace them.” says Rick Shenkman, founder and editor of the digital History News Network. “And this Sherman’s March and America does – using digital tools to map both the events and the nature of historical memory itself.

Read the full story in UMBC Magazine.

(4/8/11)

Political science major David Lesch ’83, a professor of Middle East history at Trinity University, and the author of “The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria,” has published an opinion piece in the New York Times entitled “The Syrian President I Know.”

Read the full piece here.

Engaging Student Voices

Lectures on political cartooning and free speech have taken Kevin “Kal” Kallaugher—UMBC artist-in-residence and editorial cartoonist for The Economist—to dozens of campuses around the world, but none quite like UMBC. In Russia, students broke into spontaneous applause when they learned that freedom of speech protection in the U.S. Constitution enables Kallaugher to satirize political leaders without fear of reprisal. The ability to critically draw your own head of state, he argues, is true evidence of freedom of expression. At UMBC, he works with a team of bright and energized student bloggers who exercise this freedom as journalists on USDemocrazy, a news site for students, by students.

“I tell everyone about USDemocrazy and my experience here at UMBC because it fits right into that picture,” says Kallaugher. “New social media, as we know, has turned out to be an important lever to enabling societies and people to express themselves in ways they have not been able to do until now, and it’s a tool that’s worth harnessing as much as possible.”

USDemocrazy has come a long way since January 2009, when it transitioned from a map-based informational site for young people about the U.S. political system—created through Kallaugher’s leadership—to a UMBC student-authored daily news blog. “Our bloggers are now journalists and I tell them that they are empowered to walk up to anybody to ask a question,” Kallaugher says. “They’re not going to be witnessing history as it unfolds; they’re going to be partaking in history. They are going to frame the important subjects and help educate people about what’s going on.”

To-date the blog has received hundreds of thousands of views from readers in all 50 states and 130 countries, and it continues to grow. This is in large part because Kallaugher sees himself not just as an artist-in-residence, but “also an ambassador for UMBC, reaching parts of the country and the world that for the first time are getting that introduction.”

In addition to international trips—such as a 12-day visit to universities in Jordan and Lebanon and a standing-room-only talk at TEDxWarwick—Kallaugher has spoken at museums, arts events, on public radio and with technology and entertainment firms around the country. He has also begun collaborating with middle and high schools that want to utilize USDemocrazy as a tool to teach students about current events and the importance of being informed, taking advantage of the site’s accessible writing and engaging format.

Beyond their commitment to post two to three times a day, six days a week, 52 weeks a year, USDemocrazy’s student bloggers have branched out to producing original research articles and video content and live-Tweeting, covering the Colbert-Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear and the State of the Union. Senior members now mentor new bloggers on efficiently creating high quality content to meet tight deadlines. “The voice of the blog…sounds like people who are fresh and new to the news,” Kallaugher reflects, “and I think people who are fresh and new to the news themselves respond to that.”

The aims of the blog are indeed similar to Kallaugher’s own goals as editorial cartoonist for The Economist. “My job is not to make people laugh. It’s to make people think,” Kallaugher remarked in the San Francisco Examiner. “You’re trying to further the political discourse using a tool which is accessible to the masses.”

Kallaugher is excited about emerging opportunities to reach new audiences through USDemocrazy as young readers increasingly turn to online news sources. Plus, he says, working with a talented technical crew at UMBC’s Imaging Research Center and energized young writers at a moment of profound media transition is “an irresistible combination.”

Learn about KAL’s early work at UMBC through UMBC Magazine. Students and faculty interested in working with USDemocrazy can email KAL directly.

(4/1/2011)

Baltimore Sun real estate reporter Jamie Smith Hopkins ’98, English, received a Best in Business award today for her 2010 work from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. While a student at UMBC, Hopkins worked for the Retriever Weekly. She graduated as valedictorian of her class.

Read the full story in the Baltimore Sun.