Study abroad can involve a complex set of logistics and, while there are certainly support resources available, starting the process can be challenging for students who are juggling many responsibilities. “Getting a passport is often the first step in changing a student’s mindset about international education, to see it as a realistic option for them,” says Brian Souders, Ph.D. ’09, language literacy, and culture, IES associate director.

The program also highlighted how simply being prepared to travel internationally—by developing cross-cultural communication or foreign language skills, or securing that first passport—can make a new graduate more competitive in the job market.

“It is important for students to apply for a passport now to ensure they are ready for professional opportunities after graduation,” says David Di Maria, associate vice provost for international education. “If their boss needs someone to travel to another country to assist with an important project, we want UMBC graduates to be able to stand up and say, ‘I have my passport. I’m ready to go,’ or even better, ‘I have my passport, and I have prior international experience from studying abroad while a student at UMBC.’”

Heather Moore ‘18, media and communications studies, was thrilled to submit her passport application. She wants to use travel to merge her first career in business with her new focus on communications. “I have not traveled abroad before and it is something I have always wanted to do. I am now one step closer to making it happen.”

Beyond the Passport Caravan, UMBC study abroad student leaders also work to share the message that credit-bearing international experiences can open doors for future careers through weekly Study Abroad 101 information sessions.

Marijka Frazier ‘19, social work, studied Spanish in Madrid, while living with a host family to strengthen her language skills. “I plan to go back as an English assistant in schools to further my knowledge of Spanish for a couple of years before continuing to a master’s in social work to become a bilingual play therapist,” she shares.

Megan Savastuk ‘18, emergency health services and global studies, studied Spanish in Costa Rica and will teach English in Japan next fall while studying building code design for national disasters. Sara Masoudi ‘18, computer science, who is also a Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) Scholar, studied computer science in Sweden, and says being part of CWIT and having an international study experience helped her secure a position on Disney’s ESPN web team for after she graduates this spring.

Zidwick is also working to increase awareness of credit-bearing international educational opportunities among faculty, recently hosting a packed workshop on faculty-led educational experiences abroad with CEA, another study abroad partner. Caroline Forestiere, associate professor and chair of political science, shared her successful experiences leading groups of students to Italy, focused on learning Italian language and politics. Faculty also heard about the work of colleagues like Chuck Eggleton, professor and chair of mechanical engineering, who is exploring bringing students to Colombia after winning a Fulbright award in the country last year, and Preminda Jacob, associate professor of visual arts, who is examining opportunities for arts-focused student experiences in India.

Christine Mallinson, professor of language, literacy, and culture, is already planning to lead a new credit-bearing educational experience in Amsterdam, English as A Global Language, this summer. The program is designed for students interested in studying the roots, development, and globalization of the English language and its many variations.

Students interested in faculty-led international learning experiences for the summer of 2019 should apply by next February. The deadline for individual study abroad opportunities for the summer and fall of 2018 is Saturday, March 10. IES requests that students attend a Study Abroad 101 session before initiating the application process. Sessions are held on Mondays, 12 – 1 p.m., and Thursdays, 3 – 4 p.m., each week during the fall and spring semesters in Administration Building room 218.

All images by Marlayna Demond ‘11 for UMBC.

The UMBC Dresher Center for the Humanities will host its second Humanities Teaching Lab (HT Lab) on Thursday, March 8, with a focus on how digital media tools can help boost access to and further equity in humanities education and research. The HT Labs theme “Digital Humanities and Difference in Research and Teaching” extends a conversation already underway in the vibrant humanities community convened through UMBC’s new Inclusion Imperative program, funded by the Andrew W.  Mellon Foundation.

Roopika Risam, assistant professor of English and secondary English education at Salem State University, will deliver the keynote address in the UMBC Dresher Center for the Humanities in the Performing Arts and Humanities Building from, 11:30 – 1 p.m. Risam, who wrote the book New Digital World: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy, will discuss her new project Mapping W.E.B. DuBois. Joining her will be UMBC faculty panelists Anne Sarah Rubin, professor of history and associate director of the Imaging Research Center; Bryce Peake, assistant professor of media and communication studies; Tania Lizarazo, assistant professor of modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication; and Drew Holladay, assistant professor of English.

The expanded use of digital tools has enabled new, visionary kinds of humanities work in formats that would have been impossible ten or twenty years ago. It has also increased the visibility and accessibility of existing humanities research that pushes the boundaries on issues of race, community, equity, access, and agency.

“The way I make sense of the giant field of digital humanities is that it emphasizes human creativity and how people creatively engage with issues of oppression and segregation,” says Peake. On one hand, he explains, “this approach is a way to help students use digital tools to create humanities scholarship through coding.” At the same time, “it is also a way of helping students think critically about existing humanities work through data science analysis by teaching them how to the understand algorithms that guide us to sources, how to talk to data scientists, and how to understand the social media platforms that they rely on to do humanities work.”

Risam, who focuses on what a postcolonial critique brings to the digital humanities, also sees the field as a major opportunity to reach new audiences and revisit questions humanities scholars have been asking for centuries with new tools like digital textual analysis, mapping, and data visualization. “For English majors, who are skilled at being incisive readers, communicating, writing effectively, making arguments, and evaluating evidence, it means having a new medium to critically apply existing skills,” she explains.

“There is so much textual production happening online and if we were to dismiss it we would be missing out on an important moment on how humans are producing text and composing,” Risam says. “We need to look at how these tools are being used and ask the same challenging questions of this new form of composition that we have traditionally asked about alphabetic or published text.”

Panelist Drew Holladay agrees that today’s popular digital platforms are essential to working in the humanities. Holladay’s health research centers on communication, specifically the digital rhetoric of health and medicine, by focusing on the ways in which people with disabilities talk about themselves online compared to how health practitioners describe them. He views platforms like Facebook as not only relevant subjects of or platforms for research, but also as a gateway to connect students with current research on how social media impacts our use of language and how persuasion changes in digital spaces.

“I often hear from students, I didn’t know you could do this in English,” reflects Holladay. “Digital humanities research helps dispel the stereotype that the humanities are disconnected from the way the world is changing right now.”

Through the digital humanities, he notes, English composition moves beyond writing to include composing with video, podcasts, building websites, or utilizing databases—a broader range of forms of cultural expression and communication. For example, Holladay suggests, digital humanities opens avenues for us to examine the multitude of media and public conversations around the film Black Panther: a comic that has become a blockbuster movie, and has now led to new cultural production in many forms, from fan fiction to cosplay.

To study Black Panther, Holladay argues, you must change your methods of analysis as forms of media and culture evolve. “You could analyze the film from a traditional text analysis point of view, but digital humanities also lets you consider the movie as a wider cultural event where narrative, art, culture, and activism come together,” he says. “It is a cultural text that communicates social and political issues of our time and inspires critical conversations in classrooms.”