On November 28, Jessica Berman, professor of English, gave a talk to Georgetown University’s Modernities Working Group. Her talk was entitled “Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Transgender?”

Berman co-edits, with Paul Saint-Amour, the Modernist Latitudes Series at Columbia University Press, and serves on the boards of the American Comparative Literature Association and the Modernist Studies Association. Her most recent book is Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism.

In the latest post on Governing magazine’s blog “Better Faster Cheaper,” John M. Kamensky, senior fellow with the IBM Center for the Business of Government, reports on compelling new findings from a study by UMBC’s Eric Zeemering, assistant professor of public policy, and co-researcher Daryl Delabbi.

Zeemering and Delabbi have found that more than half of county officials across the country are either participating in or delivering shared services or are in active discussions to do so. Why counties? Kemensky writes, “Typically, small local governments jealously guard their independence. County government is a natural place to turn to coordinate or deliver common services, whether they are police investigative services, road paving or group-purchasing contracts.” To learn more, read “The Accelerating Movement to Share Services” or see the full study, “A County Manager’s Guide to Shared Services in Local Government” (pdf).

Jessica Berman, professor of English, will spend the spring semester as a fellow at the Institute of Arts and Humanities (IAH) and a visiting Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The fellowship is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Berman’s fellowship is in conjunction with a yearlong celebration of the 100th anniversary of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which has been organized by the IAH and Carolina Performing Arts. During her fellowship, Berman will teach a course on “Modernism, Media and Performance” and conduct research on her most recent book project, “Media Migrations: Modernism, Exile and Twentieth-Century Media.”

Jodi Kelber-Kaye, associate director of the honors college, has appeared in several recent news articles discussing marriage equality and the African-American vote. Kelber-Kaye researches and teaches about historic and current struggles for LGBT equality with a focus on analyzing strategies employed by activist groups.

A December 7 story in the Afro-American entitled “Different Factors Within African American Communities Shaped Votes on Question 6” featured Kelber-Kaye’s perspective on the disconnect between how African American Marylanders were expected to vote on Question 6 and how they actually voted.  “This election dispels this myth that the African-American population is against same-sex marriage. There has not been a shift in the community, but just how we understand the issue” she said.

The Washington Times also ran a story on the same topic featuring Kelber-Kaye entitled “Blacks’ support a surprise on same-sex marriage” on December 9. The story, which is a shorter version of the one that ran in the Afro-American, was produced by the Capitol News Service.

The story also ran on Monday, December 10, on the Laurel Patch website under the headline “Different Factors Within African American Communities Shaped Votes on Question 6.”

The Andy Warhol Foundation for The Visual Arts has awarded the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture $50,000 for the upcoming project, Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki & Trevor Paglen.

The project, headed by Visiting Curator to the CADVC, Niels Van Tomme, is a traveling exhibition and publication project which explores the unique roles Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen play as meticulous observers of the global military industrial complex. Investigating forms of military surveillance, espionage, war-making, and weaponry, Farocki and Paglen each examine the deceptive and clandestine ways in which military projects have deeply transformed, and politicized, our relationship to images and the realities they seem to represent. The exhibition initiates critical questions about the crucial part images play in revealing essential but largely concealed governmental information, and places the oeuvres of Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen within the broader cultural and historical developments of the media they are creatively working with, namely photography, film, and new media.

Visibility Machines is scheduled to be presented next fall, mid-October through Decemeber, 2013.