The PROF-it (Professors-in-Training) program encourages you to apply to be a Spring 2015 CCBC Teaching Fellow. The fellowship program provides additional support for University System of Maryland graduate and postdoctoral adjuncts at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) through a teaching stipend and faculty mentorship. Those interested in the fellowship must be involved members of the PROF-it community and submit their adjunct application through the CCBC website in addition to submitting their fellowship application to PROF-it.

Early submissions are still being accepted through Friday, November 21; the final deadline for submission is Friday, December 5, 2014. Please visit the PROF-it page for more information and to download your application: http://promiseagep.wordpress.com/archived-posts/prof-it-professors-in-training/spring-2015ccbcfellow/.

On Thursday, November 20, History Associate Professor Anne Rubin appeared on WYPR’s Humanities Connection to discuss her research and digital humanities project, “Mapping Memory: Digitizing Sherman’s March to the Sea.” The project uses digital storytelling to explore Sherman’s historic 1864 March to the Sea during the Civil War. On December 2, Rubin will further discuss her research with Visual Arts Associate Professor Kelley Bell at the Humanities Forum at UMBC.

Earlier this year, Rubin published, Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory (UNC Press 2014). In the book, Rubin analyzes stories and myths about Sherman’s March, one of the most symbolically potent events of the Civil War, as a lens for examining how Americans’ ways of thinking about the Civil War have changed over time.

On November 14, the Wall Street Journal published a review of Rubin’s book. Written by author Fergus M. Bordewich, he states: “Anne Sarah Rubin…offers an engrossing exploration of the ways in which the march has been recounted and understood over the years. She notes that it ‘has come to stand for devastation and destruction, fire and brimstone, war against civilians, and for the Civil War in microcosm.'”

He later adds: “Ms. Rubin is more interested in the often contradictory ways in which white and black Southerners, and Union veterans, remembered the march…In essence, there is no single story of Sherman’s March but thousands, and though the Union forces wreaked havoc on the towns in Sherman’s path, their actions do not add up to the apocalyptic barbarism that plays such a role in Lost Cause mythology. That mythology, Ms. Rubin makes clear, was crafted by the Jim Crow politics and resurgent Southern chauvinism of the post-Reconstruction period.”

To read the complete review titled, “The Path to Power,” click here (subscription required).

UMBC’s Performing Arts and Humanities Building received a positive review in the Baltimore Business Journal in an article published November 18. Written by Klaus Philipsen, president of ArchPlan Inc., an architectural firm in downtown Baltimore, the review describes how the building is poised to make a lasting impact: “…this state-of-the art performance venue, designed by top-level experts, will indeed let students create community. It gives UMBC — and Baltimore County — a cutting edge in the region.”

The author comments on specific features of the building and highlights the PAHB’s ability to house several different academic programs while providing modern facilities and spaces for performances, teaching, and research.

“The 176,000-square-foot center accommodates a diverse program ranging from classrooms for philosophers and English majors to dance and music studios, a concert hall, black box and proscenium theaters and a high-tech recording studio.” He later adds, “each theater, music room, practice studio and classroom represents perfection of its own, visually, functionally and acoustically.”

To read the complete review titled, “UMBC’s new arts building creates community,” click here.

The Corporate Sponsorship Specialist for the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts (BOPA) is a regular, full-time, exempt position reporting to the Development Director. The primary responsibilities are to identify, inform, cultivate, solicit, thank, oversee benefit fulfillment and steward relationships with sponsors up to $25,000 to secure financial support for BOPA programs in meeting its mission of making Baltimore a more creative and vibrant city. This includes various festivals, events, arts initiatives/projects and other BOPA programs as needed.

With this playlist, I just wanted comfort and to work through the tangles of relationships. I wanted to explore the complexities of love in individual relationships and in networks of relationships. All of the depth–or maybe the lack thereof–in the joy, the frustration, the passion, the calm, the tears. This playlist rests on the simultaneity of our love and our connection.

Go have a lil’ listen.

What to do when you achieve a dream job before 30? Brigitte Pribnow Moore ’05, theatre, says you should expand the scope and ambition of that dream. Moore is the executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Young Playwrights’ Theater (YPT), a group that fosters arts education in area schools via playwriting and allows highschool writers to collaborate with professional theatre makers to see their own work on the stage.

The 2013 recipient of the UMBC Outstanding Alumni of the Year Award in the Visual and Performing Arts has big plans. Over the next three years, Moore aims to expand her organization to an even larger portion of greater Washington and increase its budget to $1 million. And her early successes – including YPT being named as the 2014 winner of The Washington Post Award for Excellence in Nonprofit Management – have already earned her the status of a rising arts management leader.

Moore says UMBC gave her a great start. She arrived at UMBC from her small hometown in Connecticut helped by a University Fellow scholarship. “UMBC’s acting program was amazing: It was kind of conservatory-like in its style but also allowed us to explore other liberal arts,” she says.

One area that Moore explored was political science. She volunteered in campaigns during the 2004 election cycle, and wrote and edited a weekly newsletter for Progressive Maryland – a statewide advocacy organization. The academic freedom to push beyond theatre not only allowed Moore to “learn about the world through a different lens,” but it also led her to Annapolis after graduation to work as legislative director for two Maryland state delegates.

Yet despite her passion for social justice and politics, Moore devoted considerable time to exploring the theatre world as a freelance director and the artistic director of The Unmentionable Theatre – a company dedicated to producing new plays with social and political themes.

Then, in 2006, an ad for a job at Young Playwrights Theater caught Moore’s attention. Although she had never heard of the group before answering the ad, YPT seemed a perfect opportunity to fulfill her desire to make a significant social impact through theatre. As YPT’s vision statement notes, it “seeks to create social justice by providing all young people with the opportunity to realize the power and value of their own voices.”

YPT was just over a decade old in 2006. As a small nonprofit, its four-person staff wore many hats. “It was a period of rapid transition and growth for YPT,” says Moore. “On any given day, I would go from producing a play to making copies to writing a grant proposal.” One of the things she valued most was that “everyone who works at YPT is also an artist,” a situation that she says allowed the playwrights and professional actors employed there to “bring their craft to their work.”

As YPT grew in size and ambition, Moore found it necessary to cultivate and increase her own knowledge and skill set. As YPT’s development director, she enrolled in Georgetown University’s Nonprofit Management Certificate program in 2008, and then continued her studies there from 2010 to 2012, eventually earning a master’s degree in public relations and corporate communications at Georgetown.

That advanced training and the hard work she’d already put into the theatre paid off when the executive director position at YPT opened up in 2012. And Moore has pursued a number of partnerships across the country, helped along in late 2012 by the publication of a book that sums up the theatre’s work and mission: Write to Dream: A Collection of Plays by the Students of Young Playwrights’ Theater And the Tools to Turn Anyone into a Young Playwright.

Moore may have found her dream job, but she did so by being true to her desire to use art for social change. “Am I being true to that?” is a question that Moore says she continues to ask herself as YPT expands to reach a greater number of students locally and nationally.

— Sara Barker

Read the full issue of the Summer 2014 UMBC Magazine.