Dave Marcotte, UMBC public policy professor and graduate program director, will present the inaugural lecture in this semester’s Research Seminar Seminar Series in Public Policy and Economics this Friday, February 10, at noon in PUP 438.

Marcotte’s talk is titled “Public Higher Education Tuition and Enrollment.” His writing on higher education, school closings and test scores has appeared in both academic journals and popular press, such as  the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Sun, Education Week and Inside Higher Education.

Additional series speakers this semester include Tara Watson, Williams College (3/9), Tom Vicino, Northeastern University (3/30); Jim Bessen, Boston University (4/6); and Randall Reback, Barnard College (4/27). For details, see the social sciences event calendar on myUMBC.

fueledbyramen:

Gym Class Heroes: VH1 Pepsi Super Bowl Fan Jam

Watch Gym Class Heroes perform ‘Ass Back Home’ with Neon Hitch and ‘Stereo Hearts’ with Adam Levine at the VH1 Pepsi Super Bowl Fan Jam in Indianapolis last week!

;)

Ellen Handler Spitz, honors college professor of visual arts, recently visited India, where her activities included reading books to children at the SAI International School.  Her visit was covered in the Telegraph newspaper.

“Imagination is a conscious activity that requires a great amount of focus and concentration. Storytelling can create a number of scenarios and possibilities. It can make the impossible possible. For example, our storybooks have animals talking, people talking, things vanishing and so on. But my aim was not to teach children to live in a fantasyland. I told them about humanitarian values, something that can help them become better individuals,” Spitz told the newspaper.

The story, “Of Math and Games,” appeared in the newspaper on January 13.

Spitz’s visit was also described in a release by the school, which said that “her wonderful presentation and storytelling was very impressive.”  The full release can be read here.

English Chair Jessica Berman’s newest book, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism, is now available from Columbia University Press.

In this book, Berman demonstrates how modernist narrative connects ethical attitudes and responsibilities to the active creation of political relationships and the way we imagine justice. She challenges divisions between “modernist” and “committed” writing, arguing that a continuum of political engagement undergirds modernisms worldwide and that it is strengthened rather than hindered by formal experimentation.