Meki's visit to UMBC, as a guest of the Department of American Studies' Indigenous Heritage: Issues of Ownership and Representation course, will help our campus community to better understand and appreciate the diversity and dynamic qualities of indigenous cultures, including indigenous identities and everyday practices, the performance of culture, intangible cultural heritage, and issues surrounding cultural appropriation. 

This event will be held on Thursday, December 6, 2018 in the  Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery.

BmoreArt is seeking a full-time Advertising and Distribution Manager to join our team in Baltimore, MD.

BmoreArt is seeking a full-time Managing Editor to join our team in Baltimore, MD.

BmoreArt is a Baltimore-based print magazine and webzine that celebrates, questions, and critiques art and culture. It started out as a community-based blog in 2007 and evolved into a professional webzine in 2014 and biannual print journal in 2015. BmoreArt works with a diverse team of writers, art historians, artists, photographers, and designers to create a multifaceted and authentic vision of Baltimore as a place for creativity and community, but also serves as a constructive critic.

Overview:

The Baltimore Museum of Art seeks a highly-motivated Advancement Services Coordinator to enter constituent and gift information into the Museum’s donor database and play a pivotal role on the advancement team.

The Advancement Services Coordinator collaborates with advancement staff to ensure that constituent and gift information are logged accurately and reconciles advancement financial transactions with finance staff on a monthly basis.

Responsibilities:

Responsibilities include but are not limited to:

Center for Social Science Scholarship/CAHSS Summer Faculty Research Fellowship

The application for the 2019 Center for Social Science Scholarship/CAHSS Summer Faculty Research Fellowship with expanded eligibility criteria is now available.

To download the application, visit our website.

Deadline: Friday, February 15, 2019. 

A drop-in info session will be held Monday, December 17, 
from Noon-2pm in the Public Policy Building, room 451.

We are now accepting applications for the Center for Social Science Scholarship/CAHSS Summer Faculty Research Fellowship (SFRF). The purpose of this fellowship is to support significant social science research in CAHSS, resulting in a submittable product by December 2019.

Applications are welcome from any tenured or tenure-track faculty doing social science research in any CAHSS department. Fellows will receive a $6,000 stipend during the summer of 2019.

By December 2019, each Fellow is expected to complete an external grant or fellowship proposal OR an article, policy paper, book, or book chapter. Fellows who are preparing an external grant or fellowship proposal agree to work with MIPAR for pre-award and post-grant management assistance.

Funds for this fellowship are provided by the Center for Social Science Scholarship, the UMBC College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHSS) and the Vice President for Research.

This Veteran’s Day marked the one hundred year anniversary of the armistice signed between Allied and Central Powers of World War I at Compiègne, France to end fighting on the Western front. The conflict resulted in an unprecedented level of death and destruction as the products of industrialization–airplanes, tanks, submarines, machine guns, and poison gas–were deployed as modern machines of war. Alongside these new technologies photography played a more central role than ever before in documenting the war. The Photography Collections at UMBC include a large group of photographs from World War I that were distributed as press images by the news bureau Underwood and Underwood. Documenting every aspect of the conflict, from training drills to life in the trenches, from explosions on the front to the burial of fallen soldiers, this archive provides valuable historical evidence, and demonstrates how photography brought the realities of the battlefield into people’s homes.  

Whereas photography had been present at conflicts during the nineteenth century, including the Mexican-American War, Crimean War, U. S. Civil War, and Paris Commune, slow exposure times and cumbersome equipment meant that the action of battle evaded capture by the camera. Instead, portraits of soldiers and views of the aftermath of battlefields stood in for the events of combat. Due to the high cost of photographic printing, the images that circulated in newspapers and magazines hewed to traditional methods of illustration, and artists translated photographs into woodcuts or lithographs that could be more easily reproduced. With the development of halftone printing in 1881 and later advancements in film speed and more portable cameras, the action of battle was captured in photographs for the first time during World War I and distributed quickly on a global scale through news agencies and the press.

Soldiers carried small and easy-to-use Kodak brownie and vest pocket cameras with them to the front, sending home pictures that documented an individual experience of the war. Meanwhile, armies employed staff photographers who provided documentation for military use. For example, the American photographer Edward Steichen served as chief of the Photographic Section of the American Expeditionary Forces and produced aerial photographs of the Western Front from a birds’ eye view. His photographs served as reconnaissance for strategic positioning and tracked German movements. Most nations did not allow press photographers embedded on the battlefield, so the photographs disseminated through news media came directly from the military. Many of the photographs distributed by Underwood and Underwood bear stamps indicating the date that they passed review by government censors. Published images were also accompanied by explanatory captions, which can also be found on the verso of many of the photographs in UMBC’s collection. The information received by readers back home was thus shaped by the military’s official point of view along with that of the news source.

The World War I photographs in UMBC’s Special Collections encompass a wide variety of subjects, including scenes from the trenches and more light-hearted moments of camaraderie among troops. While many of the images are visually striking, their ability to convey clear information about the events of the war often rests on the text that accompanies them. It can be difficult to tell the difference, for example, between a training maneuver and the heat of battle. What do we make of a portrait of a man wearing a strange knitted balaclava or a glamorous woman in nurse’s uniform holding up a sash covered in military insignia? In the case of the former, the caption informs us that this man is a sailor wearing woolens knitted by women volunteers from throughout the United States, who supplied their own yarn and their time to the war effort. In the latter image, Detroit society girl and New York concert singer Marjorie Kay displays the 154 decorations that she collected while serving as a nurse in the U. S. Army Ambulance Corps. The stories told by these photographs—and about the “war to end all wars”—are manifold.

-- Beth Saunders, Curator and Head of Special Collections & Library Gallery

To view these World War I photographs and others from the Underwood and Underwood archive in person, stop by the Special Collections Reading Room in the Albin O. Kuhn Library, open Monday to Friday 1:00-4:00pm and Thursday 1:00-8:00pm.