Check out UMBC Honors College Faculty Fellow Dr. Susan Hoban, and Honors College students Kabish Shah and Allie O'Malley, featured on UMBC BreakingGround for their work conducting STEM professional development for K-12 teachers and informal educators and training future engineers in Howard and Anne Arundel County.  Together with UMBC’s “NASA’s BEST” team, (BEST stands for “Beginning Engineering, Science, and Technology,”) they helped middle schoolers design and construct small robots to serve as “seeing-eye robots” for NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars.  Read more...

More than 80,000 new voters in Washington, D.C. have registered since 2010, and rapid changes in the city’s demographics are being studied as experts analyze the upcoming Democratic primary in the race for D.C. mayor.

George Derek Musgrove ’97, history, assistant professor of history, was interviewed for a front page story published in The Washington Post on March 9. The article, titled “D.C.’s complexion is changing. Will the next mayor reflect that?“, examines how the upcoming mayoral election could reshape power and politics in the nation’s capital.

“The identity of the city since the ’60s has been ‘Chocolate City,’ ” Musgrove said. “The last thing keeping that identity intact is the mayoralty.” Musgrove, who lives in Washington and is currently writing a book on race and politics in the District, provided insight and historical context on changing political attitudes among residents in the nation’s capital.

“The passing of the civil rights-home rule generation brought us the children of that generation, including [former council members] Kwame Brown, Michael Brown and Tommy Thomas,” Musgrove said, and those sons of prominent civil rights-era political figures in the city, now disgraced former council members, “were miserable — and not just because they were caught stealing, but because they never had a vision for the city.”

In the article, Musgrove also pointed to a younger generation of voters and council members who are focusing more on economic diversity than racial identity. Young voters, too, “have very different notions of politics and race than the older generations did,” Musgrove said. “Young black professionals are willing to give Tommy Wells a fair shake.”

You can read the full article in The Washington Post here.

As Lorrainne Hansberry’s 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, opens with Denzel Washington on Broadway, Honors College Professor Ellen Handler Spitz is being recognized for her book which devotes an entire chapter to exploring the play’s significance.

Excerpt’s from Spitz’s book, Illuminating Childhood, Portraits in Film, Fiction, and Drama, are quoted in a University of Michigan Press blog post about the play. “Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, was both her first and the first by any playwright of color to astonish Broadway,” Spitz writes in the book. “Crossing boundaries of race, ideology, and class, it puts onstage an unforgettable portrayal of parent-child relations, bridging all gaps, and the maturity of Hansberry’s grasp, at the age of twenty-eight, is breathtaking.”

To read the full blog post and for more on Illuminating Childhood, click here.