Our English students have accomplished a lot this year! Here are a few highlights:

Desiree Sterling, 2021-2022 Fellow of Pennsylvania State University's Cooper-Du Bois Mentoring Program

"This highly selective program offers a supportive cohort for historically excluded scholars to explore paths to doctoral studies in English and African American/Diaspora Studies. As a part of this year's cohort, I had the privilege of interacting with Penn State's faculty. This accomplishment perfectly aligns with my intellectual aspirations as a current student in UMBC's Text, Technologies, and Literature M.A. program and has enriched my research prospects and academic interests. Moreover, joining this network of seasoned scholars and budding researchers (saturated with impressive knowledge and practical wisdom) has amplified my passion for this area of research."

Rowland Smith, California Institute of the Arts Creative Writing M.F.A. Program

"I was recently accepted into the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita, California, for their Creative Writing MFA Program in their school of Critical Studies! I do not have a specified discipline yet, but I am interested in their "Writing and Performativity" track, which seeks to incorporate kinesthetic and musical notions as tools for writing. I'm very excited about this as I've long admired the school! My uncle used to take me on tours of the campus when I was a child. This program offers an excellent opportunity to incorporate both my English Lit Degree and my Acting Degree."

Ari Page, Graduating M.A. Student, thesis: (Trans)formative Works: Fanfiction, Authorship, and the Digital Lives of Transgender Fans

"While fandom has historically been a discursive space for fans to read against the grain of a text and create limit-defying paratextual transformations of a source text, trans fans have typically been left out of fan studies' analyses of fandom or regarded in the same terms as queer sexuality in fannish practices. Trans fans have unique reading and writing practices worthy of their own considerations within fan studies, and fandom itself is a rich site for trans identification. I look toward trans fans' creative responses to Teen Wolf, Steven Universe, and Ouran High School Host Club that center affect, create earnest representations of trans bodies, and challenge the limits of fan studies' notions of queerness and the body. My project calls for a new theoretical lens that uses modes of fannish interpretation that typically center on sexual identification for how we analyze the ways in which trans euphoria can be accessed through fannish creativity."

Zaira Girala Munoz, accepted into three different PhD programs, attending The Ohio State University English M.A./Ph.D. program

"I have decided to attend The Ohio State University for graduate school! Ultimately, OSU's tremendous funding offer, the kindness and empathy of the grad students and faculty, and their demonstrated commitment to graduate student well-being made OSU my choice in the end. I will also be joining UMBC (and other) McNair alum that I know within the humanities depts and beyond at OSU. My research interests sit at the interfaces of technical communication, minority studies, and the rhetoric of science and medicine. Specifically, I am interested in how medical and scientific institutions frame uncertainty within the broader context of the reproducibility crisis and how these discourses rhetorically engage with minoritized communities and vice versa."

Nishan Kumar Biswas (617/UMBC) and Robert Emberson (617/UMBC) participated in the NASA SERVIR AST (Applied Sciences Team) Science Exchange, held in Huntsville, AL, from May 10-12, 2022. The event was geared toward exploring innovations in the use of Earth observation information to address global development challenges. According to Dr. Biswas, "We are working on improving water resources and hydroclimatic disasters monitoring and prediction using satellite earth observation data provided by NASA (and other space agencies)." NASA's SERVIR global program has a mandate to address critical challenges in food security, water resources, weather and climate, land use, and disasters in developing countries using satellite data, according to its site.

During the exchange, Dr. Biswas gave a presentation titled “A Landslide Hazard and Risk Assessment System for SERVIR-Mekong”, in which he discussed the application of satellite observations and tools for landslide prediction and exposure analysis in the Lower Mekong Region in Asia. Both Drs. Biswas and Emberson participated in the discussion on critical lessons learned and feedback. They shared the findings and the challenges to increase awareness of the tools and model capabilities developed by the Landslides Team at NASA GSFC and to build the capacity of the stakeholders and regional partners to use these tools within open-source cloud-computing frameworks.

Learn more about the NASA GSFC Landslides Team's efforts and the Global Landslide Hazard Assessment for Situational Awareness (LHASA) Model this team developed. 

Dear Faculty & Staff, 

The Workplace Learning, OD & Wellness Department encourages all campus faculty and staff to complete the following needs assessment survey as part of our commitment to serving campus personal and professional development needs.  Your input is critically important as we plan learning and wellness programming for UMBC faculty and staff for the next two years.

 

We recommend that you consider taking this anonymous survey when you have had time to reflect on your personal learning and wellness goals. The survey should take no more than 15 minutes to complete. 

 

Please kindly submit your responses by June 8, 2022. The aggregate results will be shared with campus governance groups and the President's Council. Thank you in advance for your cooperation and participation in this endeavor.

  

In partnership,