Kathy O’Dell, the associate dean of the college of arts, humanities and social sciences, has been appointed to the Maryland State Arts Council.

The Council is an appointed body of 17 citizens. Thirteen are named by the Governor to three-year terms, which are renewable once. Two private citizens and two legislators are appointed by the President of the Senate and Speaker of the House.

“The newly appointed councilors represent broad arts expertise across a diversity of Maryland communities and professional backgrounds,” said Theresa Colvin, executive director of the MSAC. “Under the leadership of our new chair, Barbara Bershon, they will be a great asset to the arts in Maryland.”

O’Dell chairs the Arts Education in Maryland Schools Alliance’s Higher Education in the Arts Task Force, and is a member of The Maryland State Department of Education’s Fine Arts Education Advisory Panel. O’Dell is on the Exhibits Committee of Howard County Center for the Arts and has served on the boards of Maryland Art Place, Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance and the Contemporary Museum.

The Maryland State Arts Council, an agency of the Maryland Department of Business & Economic Development, Division of Tourism, Film and the Arts, is dedicated to cultivating a vibrant cultural community where the arts thrive. The mission of the council is to encourage and invest in the advancement of the arts for the people of Maryland.

Kevin A. Wisniewski, first year Ph.D. candidate in the Language, Literacy, and Culture program, was named a 2012-2013 HASTAC Scholar.  Dr. Craig Saper, Director of the LLC program, was selected to serve as Wisniewski’s HASTAC Mentor. 

HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, pronounced “haystack”) is a virtual organization of over 7000 individuals and institutions inspired by the possibilities that new technologies offer for shaping how society learns, teaches, communicates, creates, and organizes at the local and global levels. It was founded by Cathy N. Davidson, former Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies and co-founder of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, and David Theo Goldberg, Director of the University of California’s state-wide Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI),

The HASTAC Scholars program is an annual fellowship program that recognizes graduate students who are engaged in innovative work across disciplines.  Among their duties, HASTAC Scholars blog, host forums, organize events and discuss new ideas, projects, experiments, and technologies that re-conceive teaching, learning, research, writing and structuring knowledge. They also function as links between their home institutions and the virtual community they foster on the HASTAC site.

Wisniewski’s research investigates the future of the book and changing face of publishing in the digital world.  He will be founding a new group and forum at HASTAC dedicated to digital publishing; his blog can be found here.

Ellen Handler Spitz recently reviewed the Museum of Modern Art exhibit “The Century of the Child:: Growing by Design 1900-2000” for the online magazine artcritical.

Spitz says that the exhibit “bypasses emotion.”  “Much of the intense passion, however—the felt crises, anxieties, puzzlements, riotous humor, and delirious joys— that characterize living children both mentally and behaviorally has gone missing,” she writes.

Spitz says that through the exhibit, you come to see how children are used to advance adult ideas, and that today’s “child is as much a projection of adult fantasy and social ideology as the pale coy innocents of the pre-Raphaelites or the bedizened seventeenth century infantas of Velázquez.”

She concludes that there is “no such thing as the child but rather millions of uniquely responsive children, and adults, for whom childhood, despite varying degrees of distance, can still be occasionally invoked.”

Spitz’s piece, “MoMA and Child: The Century of the Child at the Museum of Modern Art,” appeared on the website on September 24.

Kimberly Moffitt, assistant professor of American Studies, responded to the new film “Won’t Back Down” in a September 28 Baltimore Sun op-ed entitled “Education blame game leaves kids behind.”

The film, inspired by true events, tells the story of America’s public school system through the story of two women from disparate socioeconomic backgrounds who find common ground when both are faced with the task of finding better public school alternatives for their  children with learning differences.

Moffitt relates the tone of the movie, with it’s heroes and villans, to the discussion around Baltimore’s public schools. “Where we go wrong is in focusing on fault and blame when it comes to the failing schools (charters and traditional) in our district. If we allow ourselves to  remain in the contentious ‘us versus them’ state depicted in ‘Won’t Back Down,’  it will be a missed opportunity for our fair city. We must avoid unproductive debates and instead focus on the models that foster success.”

Moffitt ends her piece with a call to “rally the troops, not to take over schools but to contribute our time, resources  and ideas to offer the world-class education all of our children deserve.”

Lee Boot, associate director of the Imaging Research Center, is featured in Convergence, a new book from theNational Academy of Sciences that highlights the academy’s exceptional and growing art collection.

Boots contribution includes a commission he created for the collection last year is included in the book and an essay by him pointing to new directions in the collaboration between artists and scientists. Boot’s essay is one of only fourteen in the book.  The book alsi includes essays from art and science thought-leaders as E. O. Wilson, Roald Hoffmann, Anne Collins Goodyear, Andrew Solomon, and Lucy Lippard, and artwork from well-known artists such as Tim Rollins and the Start Twins.

The entire book is available online free of charge; Boot’s contribution can be seen here.