UMBC English Department faculty member Dr. Jessica Berman has been named the Lipitz Professor of the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences for 2019-2020. This professorship is supported by an endowment created by Roger C. Lipitz and the Lipitz Family Foundation "to recognize and support innovative and distinguished teaching and research in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County."

As the Lipitz Professor, Dr. Berman will work on her current book project, Media Relations: Modernism and Global Radio. In this project, she studies global radio environments and the power of media to create complex transnational and often interlinguistic relationships. A truly global undertaking, Media Relations will connect voices, languages, literatures, and music from India to the Caribbean and from Argentina and Peru to Francophone West Africa. 

Dr. Berman is the author of four books, including Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community and Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism, and twenty-two articles and chapters. She is also editor of the scholarly edition of Purdah and Polygamy by Iqbalunnisa Hussain, one of the first novels in English written by a Muslim woman, and of Wiley-Blackwell’s A Companion to Virginia Woolf.

Congratulations to Dr. Berman for this honor!