Angel Chinn ’08, dance, was featured in The Gazette this month when her newly formed dance company, NonaLee Dance Theatre, was slated to perform an adventurous, site-specific program at Joe’s Movement Emporium in Mount Rainier. In the article, Chinn speaks about her switch from competitive running and studying education, to pursuing a degree in dance at UMBC.

Read the full story here.

Chinn created the NonaLee Dance Theatre in 2011 with the intention of giving dancers with diverse backgrounds the “opportunity to perform and grow artistically.” The dance troupe has evolved since its induction, but always aims to bring its own identity to the world of modern dance. This most recent performance was a “fresh take on modern dance and something people haven’t seen yet. It has a modern feel, it also has a hip hop feel, it has a funk feel,” she told The Gazette. NonaLee blurred “the line between audience and performer” by leaving the stage and performing in close proximity to the viewers in the museum lobby in a piece called “The Living Art Museum.”

Angel Chinn will return to UMBC to perform in the 2013 Baltimore Dance Project February 7-9. Read the entire article, including Associate Professor of Dance, Doug Hamby’s comments on Chinn’s dance at Gazette.net.

This article first appeared on UMBC Insights.

Rebecca Boehling, professor of history and director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities, appeared in the international publication “Spiegel,” in a feature article about the International Tracing Service. Boehling was named as the new Director of the ITS in May 2012 and will begin her service on January 1, 2013.

The article, which can be found here, tells the story of Nazi Germany survivors who desire to be reunited with their families. ITS reunites 30 to 50 families per year and is the world’s largest archive of Holocaust documents.

Angel Chinn, Dance ’08, was featured in The Gazette this month when the newly formed dance company, NonaLee Dance Theatre, was slated to perform an adventurous, site-specific program at Joe’s Movement Emporium in Mount Rainier. In the article, Angel Chinn speaks about her switch from competitive running and studying education, to pursuing a degree in dance at UMBC with an honesty and openness that is mirrored in her performance which featured movements about life questions, faith and hope.

The NonaLee Dance Theatre, created and directed by Angel Chinn was developed in 2011, with the intention of striving to give dancers with diverse backgrounds the “opportunity to perform and grow artistically.” The dance troupe has evolved since its induction, but always aims to bring its own identity to the world of modern dance. This most recent performance was a “fresh take on modern dance and something people haven’t seen yet. It has a modern feel, it also has a hip hop feel, it has a funk feel.” NonaLee blurred “the line between audience and performer” by leaving the stage and performing in close proximity to the viewers in the museum lobby in a piece called “The Living Art Museum”.

Angel Chinn will return to UMBC to perform in the 2013 Baltimore Dance Project February 7-9. Read the entire article, including Associate Professor of Dance, Doug Hamby’s comments on Chinn’s dance at Gazette.net.

What’s Baltimore buzzing about? A fascinating community project from UMBC’s Departments of American Studies and Visual Arts.

Students from the multidisciplinary BreakingGround course “Mapping Baybrook” have been working toward a special community event all semester, producing oral history recordings, a walking tour brochure and other work to highlight the area’s history and culture. The community celebration, highlighted on the Baltimore Magazine blog “The Chatter,” will take place this Saturday, December 1, 1:00-5:00 p.m. at the Polish Home Hall, 4416 Fairhaven Avenue in Curtis Bay. The event will also launch the new Mapping Baybrook website, designed in collaboration with UMBC’s Imaging Research Center. Learn more about the event and the students involved.

Many thousands have have traveled to the Qatari capital of Doha for the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP 18) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). For a primer on the alphabet soup of acronyms used during negotiations this article is helpful.

Scheduled to run until Dec. 7th, COP18 is intended to work towards a legally binding agreement on climate change. A large number of people affiliated with colleges and universities across the world are participating in the conference.

The Kyoto protocol is the major agreement currently at stake and which is set to expire this year. As many readers are aware, Kyoto ignited much activity in climate action planning in higher ed, even though the US was not a participating country in the agreement. Initiatives such as the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) are examples of ways in which colleges an universities have responded.
In his Wonkblog at the Washington Post, writer Brad Plummer uses three charts to illustrate what Kyoto has and has not achieved, and what a second phase of Kyoto must achieve if the world is going to avert an increase in temperature of 3-4 degrees Celsius (a threshold that the World Bank and other organizations have suggested would be dangerous to cross).

A second phase of Kyoto would only be a temporary fix however. Many are holding out hope that a commitment to signing a new treaty will happen by 2015 to take effect by 2020 (if not sooner as some are arguing for).

The common complaint that the United States is holding back progress by not being an active participant is again a refrain being heard. Yet, some are optimistic that the recent memory and destruction brought by Hurricane Sandy will propel the US to actively engage.

As has been the case in other conferences, higher education faculty, researchers and students are playing an important role by presenting on some cutting edge research related to climate change.

Recent research highlights are below:

• "Thawing of Permafrost Expected to Cause Significant Additional Global Warming, Not yet Accounted for in Climate Predictions"

• "Incorporating Blue Carbon as a Mitigation Action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change"

• "Estimating Global “Blue Carbon” Emissions from Conversion and Degradation of Vegetated Coastal Ecosystems" (related article, Why negotiators at Doha should care about the world’s forgotten mangroves)

• "Sea levels are rising 60 per cent faster than the United Nations originally predicted"

• "Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011" (key finding: The rate of sea-level rise of the past few decades, is greater than projected by the IPCC models. This suggests that IPCC sea-level projections for the future may also be biased low.)