The PROMISE Dissertation House is committed to helping students to finish their dissertations.  Therefore, we invite all students who have participated in a past Dissertation House or one of the “How to Complete Your Thesis or Dissertation” to participate in the Summer Dissertation House weekend rooms. You may come to work on proposals, dissertations, grant applications, teaching portfolios, or any writing project that will move you closer to graduation.

Time and Location: 8:30 AM – 7:00 PM, nearly every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday during the summer; Math/Psychology Building, Room 103, UMBC Campus.

Parking: Parking on UMBC’s campus requires a permit Monday 7:00 AM through Friday 3:30 PM. Parking in open spaces and lots without gates will be free on weekends, starting on Fridays at 3:30 PM, and ending Mondays at 7:00 AM. Visitor parking is available in metered lots. Meters are enforced year round Monday-Friday from 7:30 am – 9:00 pm. Meter fees are $.25 for each 15 minutes, quarters only, maximum time of 5 hours.

JUNE 

June 1, 2, 3;  June 8, 9, 10;  June 15, 16, 17;  June 22, 23, 24;  June 29, 30, & July 1

JULY

Jul 20, 21, 22; July 27, 28, 29

AUGUST

August 3, 4, 5; August 10, 11, 12, August 24, 25, 26

Friday August 17 – Dissertation House at the PROMISE Summer Success Institute with Dr. Wendy Carter-Veale (Application Required)

Weekend requirement: Post your goals  to the blog daily. The “Winter Challenge 2012″ blog will be used until June 30. The “Summer Challenge 2012″ blog will begin on July 1. 

Students from all campuses (UMBC, UMB, UMCP, UMES, Morgan, GW, CMU, UPitt, etc.) who have participated in a DH activity or workshop in the past are invited to utilize this room for the summer. We will have short motivational sessions with PhD alumni or coaches on select Fridays.

The PROMISE Dissertation House is committed to helping students to finish their dissertations.  Therefore, we invite all students who have participated in a past Dissertation House or one of the “How to Complete Your Thesis or Dissertation” to participate in the Summer Dissertation House weekend rooms. You may come to work on proposals, dissertations, grant applications, teaching portfolios, or any writing project that will move you closer to graduation.

Time and Location: 8:30 AM – 7:00 PM, nearly every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday during the summer; Math/Psychology Building, Room 103, UMBC Campus.

Parking: Parking on UMBC’s campus requires a permit Monday 7:00 AM through Friday 3:30 PM. Parking in open spaces and lots without gates will be free on weekends, starting on Fridays at 3:30 PM, and ending Mondays at 7:00 AM. Visitor parking is available in metered lots. Meters are enforced year round Monday-Friday from 7:30 am – 9:00 pm. Meter fees are $.25 for each 15 minutes, quarters only, maximum time of 5 hours.

JUNE 

June 1, 2, 3;  June 8, 9, 10;  June 15, 16, 17;  June 22, 23, 24;  June 29, 30, & July 1

JULY

Jul 20, 21, 22; July 27, 28, 29

AUGUST

August 3, 4, 5; August 10, 11, 12, August 24, 25, 26

Friday August 17 – Dissertation House at the PROMISE Summer Success Institute with Dr. Wendy Carter-Veale (Application Required)

Weekend requirement: Post your goals  to the blog daily. The “Winter Challenge 2012″ blog will be used until June 30. The “Summer Challenge 2012″ blog will begin on July 1. 

Students from all campuses (UMBC, UMB, UMCP, UMES, Morgan, GW, CMU, UPitt, etc.) who have participated in a DH activity or workshop in the past are invited to utilize this room for the summer. We will have short motivational sessions with PhD alumni or coaches on select Fridays.

The Department of History is pleased to announce the addition of alumnus George Derek Musgrove to its faculty, beginning this fall.

Musgrove attended UMBC from 1993-1997, obtaining a B.A. in history. He then proceeded to obtain the 2003-2004 Anne E. Plato predoctoral fellowship at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, the 2007-2008 postdoctoral fellowship in the Center for African American Urban Studies and the Economy at Carnegie Mellon University, and his Ph.D. in U.S. History at New York University in 2005. He is the author of Rumor, Repression, and Racial Politics: How Harassment of Black Elected Officials Shaped Post-Civil Rights America (University of George Press, 2012), and most recently was an assistant professor at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC).

“We are very excited to have… Musgrove joining our faculty because he is an especially promising historian of post-1945 US history, whose work combines political history, African-American history, the history of race relations, and urban history,” said Marjoleine Kars, chair of history.

Musgrove is equally excited at the opportunity to teach at his alma mater. “UMBC has a rich academic community,” he said.  “I hope both to contribute to and benefit from that community.  And in doing so, I hope to provide the same great learning experience that my professors gave me.”

Courses to be taught by the incoming professor include “American History: 1877-Present” (HIST102), and “The United States Since 1945″ (HIST347).

More on Musgrove and his work can be found on his website.

Originally posted in UMBC Insights.

Rebecca Boehling, professor of history and director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities, has been named the next Director of the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, Germany. The ITS serves victims of Nazi persecutions and their families by documenting their fate through the archives it manages.

Boehling was appointed unanimously by the eleven-member state International Commission, which supervises the work of the ITS, at its annual meeting in Paris last week. She will take a leave of absence from UMBC and begin her directorship on January 1, 2013.

Boehling is an expert in the history of the Holocaust, World War II and the early postwar period in Germany. She served for several years on the Historical Advisory Panel to the U.S. Government’s Interagency Working Group for the Implementation of the 1998 Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Federal Disclosure Act, tasked to declassify material related to WWII war crimes.

“The treasure trove of documents in the ITS archives reveals new insights into the experience and the perspectives of the victims of Nazi persecution. It is very compelling material that we want to make more accessible for research and educational purposes by means of digitization and archival description,” she said. Boehling said that she hopes to develop internships and research opportunities for UMBC students, especially with the displaced persons files, which are mostly in English.

Read more about Boehling’s appointment here.

In his May 29 column for The Baltimore Sun entitled “Markets are less competitive than you think”, UMBC political science professor Tom Schaller answered critics of his previous column, which pondered as to why so many tolerate the inefficiencies of market-oriented entities as compared to governmental ones.

Tackling in particular the assertion that consumers have the choice of taking their business elsewhere in the private sector in contrast to dealing with the supposed monopoly of governments, Schaller noted that things are not so simple when taking into account the forms of competition within government at the state and local levels. He also wrote of the various “oligopolies” within the IT, banking, airline, and entertainment/media industries, and closed with a challenge:

“Should they wish to practice what they preach about the magical powers of pluralistic market competition, here’s a challenge: Go a month — heck, go a week — without shopping at a big-box retailer, eating at a national restaurant chain, flying on a major commercial airline, or watching or listening to any movie, cable network program, radio station, magazine or newspaper owned by Disney, Viacom or Time-Warner.”

The Department of English is pleased to announce that Deborah Rudacille, will join the department as a visiting professor of the practice this fall.

A 1998 science writing graduate of Johns Hopkins University’s Writing Seminars program, Rudacille has been published in various local and national magazines, as well as authoring three books: The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The War Between Animal Research and Animal Protection (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism and Transgender Rights (Pantheon, 2005), and most recently Roots of Steel: Boom and Bust in an American Mill Town  (Pantheon, 2010), a work of history whose subject matter remains prescient given the recent events concerning RG Steel’s declining fortunes in Sparrows Point.

According to Christopher Corbett, actong chair of English, Rudacille will teach four courses at UMBC next year. Her fall courses will be “Reporting the Local” (ENGL384), which will cover forms of community journalism in the digital age, and “Diagnosing Gender” (ENGL317/GWST390), a combined section course with gender and women’s studies which will “weave together the history of scientific and medical attempts to define gender with the lived experience of transgendered and intersexed individuals.” In the spring, she will teach an introductory science writing course and a reading course called “The Physician as Writer.”

Rudacille expressed her pleasure with joining the university, saying, “I’m very excited about my courses and eager to get started teaching this fall. I’ve heard great things about UMBC students from instructors who have taught at the school–that they are smart, motivated and hard-working. Engaging with such a high caliber of students is what I am most looking forward to at UMBC.”

More of Rudacille’s previous work can be found at her website.