Faculty Working Groups for Fall 2020
The Dresher Center for the Humanities welcomes one new Faculty Working Groups for 2020 - 2021: Latin American Feminisms (see description below)
All Faculty Working Groups are accepting new members. To join a group, contact its leader(s) to find out about upcoming activities.
Digital Storytelling
This group explores the research focus of digital storytelling including discussions of digital literacies and competencies in the humanities and social sciences, narrative and storytelling research, and classroom work across disciplines. The working group serves as a steering body for ongoing digital storytelling activities and connects with other campus work that involves storytelling for civic agency and engagement. The group promotes opportunities for faculty involved in digital storytelling research to share their experiences through presentations, workshops, roundtables and a possible one-day conference.
Disability Studies
This group will focus on reading interdisciplinary scholarship in disability studies (DS) and its application in higher education and other contexts. They will read and discuss DS and DS-related theories of embodiment, epistemology, methodology, subaltern politics, and cultural analysis. Applications of DS include programs of inclusion, universal design, and accessibility in education and elsewhere (such as accessibility in technology and digital spaces). Group conversations will include how faculty can use DS scholarship in their classes and to redesign their own teaching practices.
Immigration
The Immigration faculty working group brings together faculty members and graduate students who study international migration. Its purpose is to promote interdisciplinary collaboration in teaching, research, and service related to international migration at UMBC. International migration is a complex phenomenon, with cultural, economic and political aspects. Its causes, processes and consequences have been analyzed in multiple disciplines, from a variety of theoretical perspectives and with different research methods. UMBC currently has several faculty members and graduate students whose work on immigration reflects this diversity of approaches. However, for the most part, this work has been carried out independently, by individual faculty members and graduate students within their home departments. There is an untapped potential for interdisciplinary collaboration in teaching, research and service related to this broad theme.
*NEW* Latin American Feminisms
Leaders: María Célleri (Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies), Tania Lizarazo (Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communications and Global Studies), Yolanda Valencia (Geography and Environmental Systems), and Thania Muñoz D. (Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication)
The Latin American Feminisms Working Group is an interdisciplinary multilingual research group that focuses on feminist and decolonial Latin American and Caribbean scholarship from a hemispheric perspective. Attentive to the inequitable politics of translation between South America and North America, the group centers scholarship from and for Latin America and the Caribbean.In particular, it considers the formation of Latin American and Caribbean feminisms from a decolonial and intersectional framework that honors the work of Indigenous, Black, and Brown women. We bring together faculty, graduate students, artists, and community members from the humanities and social sciences to engage in and debate issues around race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, mobility, feminism and decoloniality as these pertain to the Latin American and Caribbean hemisphere, which begins in the Southern Cone and extends to the Latinx/Chicanx diaspora. We read and discuss recent work around Latin American and Caribbean studies, invite scholars from Latin America to speak about their work, as well as collaborate to support our work and move our research projects forward.
Sound Studies
Over the past decade, sound studies has been generating a buzz in disciplines across the humanities. The dual purpose of this group is to: 1) facilitate more cross-disciplinary discussions about sound, and 2) bring together faculty members with shared interests to encourage collaboration. The group discusses relevant sound studies issues from different disciplinary perspectives, has informal presentations of their own in-process work, and listens to invited talks from guest speakers.
]]>
The Dresher Center for the Humanities welcomes one new Faculty Working Groups for 2020 - 2021: Latin American Feminisms (see description below) All Faculty Working Groups are accepting new...
https://dev.my.umbc.edu/api/v0/pixel/news/95380/guest@my.umbc.edu/03458f4cacdd52b729394ae1408a5dee/api/pixel
news
Dresher Center for the Humanities
https://dev.my.umbc.edu/groups/dreshercenter
https://assets4-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/437/6dda54c5192d6585a47c6fdf52414404/xsmall.png?1755621628
https://assets3-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/437/6dda54c5192d6585a47c6fdf52414404/original.png?1755621628
https://assets1-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/437/6dda54c5192d6585a47c6fdf52414404/xxlarge.png?1755621628
https://assets3-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/437/6dda54c5192d6585a47c6fdf52414404/xlarge.png?1755621628
https://assets4-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/437/6dda54c5192d6585a47c6fdf52414404/large.png?1755621628
https://assets1-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/437/6dda54c5192d6585a47c6fdf52414404/medium.png?1755621628
https://assets2-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/437/6dda54c5192d6585a47c6fdf52414404/small.png?1755621628
https://assets4-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/437/6dda54c5192d6585a47c6fdf52414404/xsmall.png?1755621628
https://assets1-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/437/6dda54c5192d6585a47c6fdf52414404/xxsmall.png?1755621628
Dresher Center for the Humanities
0
0
true
Wed, 02 Sep 2020 12:40:03 -0400
New Digital Collection Online: George H. Seeley Photographs
View these dreamy glass negatives and transparencies now!
We're pleased to announce that the George H. Seeley Photographs digital collection is now available on our Digital Collections site! Enjoy these digitized glass negatives and transparencies of landscapes, nature scenes, animals, and people. Read more about Seeley below in a blog post written by UMBC alum Ben Rybczynski who as an intern in fall 2019 scanned Seeley's photographs, rehoused them into acid free four flap folders and boxes, and transcribed Seeley's notes from the original paper sleeves. Thanks Ben! Here's Ben's blog post about his experience with the collection:
The importance of context is easily ignored when looking at a historic piece of art. At first glance, the photographs of George Seeley could easily be mistaken as blurry, failed images of landscapes. But once you apply context to them, it becomes clear that these out-of-focus photographs of quiet pastures and snow-covered riverbanks were major pieces in the revolution that completely changed the art world and took photography from a science to one of the most accessible art forms in history.
George Seeley of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, was born in 1880, a time in which photography was still mostly used for family portraits and documentation of important events. Not many artists, especially not in America, saw the value of photography as an art form. Seeley attended the Massachusetts Normal School (now known as Massachusetts College of Art and Design), where he studied painting under the tutelage of Joseph DeCamp. It wasn’t long however, until Seeley was introduced to photography by F. Holland Day, and he quickly took to the new medium. In 1904, George Seeley joined the Photo-Secession, a movement led by Holland Day and Alfred Stieglitz which sought to elevate the photographer as an artist rather than a simple documentarian. Seeley, a fan of impressionism, took to the thriving pictorialist movement highlighted by the secession and continued to produce images following its tenets for many years even after it declined in popularity.
The majority of Seeley’s images in this collection are landscape scenes of the countryside and coast. Often, these images carried the characteristic soft focus of pictorialism, paired with exposures that ranged from remarkably underexposed to almost completely blown out. That is not to say that Seeley was bad at exposing his images, as many others have perfect exposures, rather it was likely a conscious choice in order to achieve a more evocative composition. This is further supported by the medium. Film as we know it today had not been invented yet, and so all of these images were taken on small glass plates. The light-sensitive emulsion was applied directly to the glass, and then exposed the same as any other photograph. However, these were not then enlarged onto paper as they would be today. Instead, these negative transparencies were then transferred via a contact exposure to another glass plate, where the positive image could then be viewed by holding it up to a light source such as a window, or displayed through devices such as a Magic Lantern, which was an early form of a projector. These constraints meant that each image had to be thought out carefully, as there was not a lot of post-processing, and an individual exposure was considerably more expensive than it would be later on in history. This also meant that every plate that I rehoused was likely a one-of-a-kind object that Seeley himself created almost 100 years ago. Once you realize that, you start to handle them even more carefully than before.
Working with Seeley’s images has been enlightening. Despite the fact that my personal work has been rather abstract for several years, the works of the pictorialists still seemed odd to me. It was difficult to not look at them from the perspective of a modern photographer, where it is demanded that we throw out any image that is out of focus or not properly exposed. After analyzing dozens of these images, however, I feel as though I understand the movement much better now. Often times, the images reminded me of the sort of subjects that I gravitated towards when I was first learning photography. I also came from a background of still-life painting, and so I would typically just walk through the local woods and shoot scenes not unlike Seeley’s. Upon realizing this, it became incredibly clear to me how these images are instrumental to the birth of photography as an art.
Almost all of Seeley’s coastal work depicts
waves crashing against rocks, but paired with the soft focus, the entire image
takes on a quality almost as if the photograph itself is being overcome by the
rushing water. I chose this image out of the rest because it was the only one
that pulled the frame back, giving it a much more picturesque quality.
This image immediately stood out to me due to
the fact that it was the only double-exposure in the entire collection. While
it’s possible this was simply a happy accident, the quality of lights and darks
suggests to me that Seeley was experimenting with the concept and was quite
successful in this attempt.
To me, this image is almost an optical
illusion. When I first scanned it, I misidentified the bottom half as a negative
of a building. It took me a moment before I realized that it was water, and
that it was in fact a positive print. In my opinion, that makes this one of the
best examples of pictorialism in the collection, as well as one of the most
visually intriguing.
There are not many portraits in this
collection, unsurprisingly, but of the few, this is my favorite. It has a very
relaxed feeling, almost as if Seeley pulled out his camera and asked the model
to hold the pose he was already in.
Thanks Ben!
View more Digital Collections. Questions? Contact Special Collections. Check us out on Instagram too!
]]>
We're pleased to announce that the George H. Seeley Photographs digital collection is now available on our Digital Collections site! Enjoy these digitized glass negatives and transparencies of...
https://cdm16629.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/georgeseeley
https://dev.my.umbc.edu/api/v0/pixel/news/95343/guest@my.umbc.edu/75c60c097e8685a7a61ccc5b8eb680ce/api/pixel
active
digitalcollections
photography
specialcollections
Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery
https://dev.my.umbc.edu/groups/library
https://assets1-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/016/854d6fae5ee42911677c739ee1734486/xsmall.png?1279120404
https://assets2-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/016/854d6fae5ee42911677c739ee1734486/original.png?1279120404
https://assets2-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/016/854d6fae5ee42911677c739ee1734486/xxlarge.png?1279120404
https://assets4-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/016/854d6fae5ee42911677c739ee1734486/xlarge.png?1279120404
https://assets2-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/016/854d6fae5ee42911677c739ee1734486/large.png?1279120404
https://assets1-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/016/854d6fae5ee42911677c739ee1734486/medium.png?1279120404
https://assets2-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/016/854d6fae5ee42911677c739ee1734486/small.png?1279120404
https://assets1-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/016/854d6fae5ee42911677c739ee1734486/xsmall.png?1279120404
https://assets1-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/016/854d6fae5ee42911677c739ee1734486/xxsmall.png?1279120404
Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery
https://assets1-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/095/343/0dfaa4d7c8017e2d0d38d54c3cebe29d/xxlarge.jpg?1598979983
https://assets2-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/095/343/0dfaa4d7c8017e2d0d38d54c3cebe29d/xlarge.jpg?1598979983
https://assets4-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/095/343/0dfaa4d7c8017e2d0d38d54c3cebe29d/large.jpg?1598979983
https://assets1-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/095/343/0dfaa4d7c8017e2d0d38d54c3cebe29d/medium.jpg?1598979983
https://assets3-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/095/343/0dfaa4d7c8017e2d0d38d54c3cebe29d/small.jpg?1598979983
https://assets4-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/095/343/0dfaa4d7c8017e2d0d38d54c3cebe29d/xsmall.jpg?1598979983
https://assets2-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/095/343/0dfaa4d7c8017e2d0d38d54c3cebe29d/xxsmall.jpg?1598979983
2
0
true
Tue, 01 Sep 2020 13:24:58 -0400
Wed, 02 Sep 2020 10:15:43 -0400
Visit us in the Virtual Study Room this Fall!
With AOK Library's Virtual Study Room, you can work alongside your fellow Retrievers for a focused study environment. Drop in during open hours.
Enter the WebEx Virtual Study Room during open hours: https://umbc.webex.com/meet/VSR
Open Hours for August 27 - December 16
- Mondays 11 AM - 3 PM
- Tuesdays 11 AM - 2 PM and 4 PM - 6 PM
- Wednesdays 11 AM - 3 PM
- Thursdays 2 PM - 6 PM
- Fridays 2 PM - 4 PM
What to Expect
An AOK Library staff member will greet you in the chat box and ask you what you're working on. You don't need to share if you'd rather not, but doing so might help you keep on task!
The staff member will check in with you periodically to ask you how your work is going and if you need any help.
You have the option to show your face, which can help you to stay focused and at your computer. But this is totally optional. Your microphone will remain muted during your visit.
Instrumental music will be playing, but you can mute it if you prefer.
This virtual study room is set up as a shared community that is welcoming and respectful of all. Those who engage in inappropriate behavior will be immediately removed from the room. Offensive, obscene, threatening, discriminatory, or otherwise inappropriate language or content sharing is strictly prohibited.
]]>
With AOK Library's Virtual Study Room, you can work alongside your fellow Retrievers for a focused study environment. Drop in during open hours. Enter the WebEx Virtual Study Room during open...
https://dev.my.umbc.edu/api/v0/pixel/news/95323/guest@my.umbc.edu/8b74c92681a525a312230489e147e9d3/api/pixel
Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery
https://dev.my.umbc.edu/groups/library
https://assets1-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/016/854d6fae5ee42911677c739ee1734486/xsmall.png?1279120404
https://assets2-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/016/854d6fae5ee42911677c739ee1734486/original.png?1279120404
https://assets2-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/016/854d6fae5ee42911677c739ee1734486/xxlarge.png?1279120404
https://assets4-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/016/854d6fae5ee42911677c739ee1734486/xlarge.png?1279120404
https://assets2-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/016/854d6fae5ee42911677c739ee1734486/large.png?1279120404
https://assets1-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/016/854d6fae5ee42911677c739ee1734486/medium.png?1279120404
https://assets2-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/016/854d6fae5ee42911677c739ee1734486/small.png?1279120404
https://assets1-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/016/854d6fae5ee42911677c739ee1734486/xsmall.png?1279120404
https://assets1-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/000/016/854d6fae5ee42911677c739ee1734486/xxsmall.png?1279120404
Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery
https://assets1-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/095/323/be3a7e8ce61a1db9af2b0c0a05905e39/xxlarge.jpg?1598907724
https://assets2-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/095/323/be3a7e8ce61a1db9af2b0c0a05905e39/xlarge.jpg?1598907724
https://assets3-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/095/323/be3a7e8ce61a1db9af2b0c0a05905e39/large.jpg?1598907724
https://assets4-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/095/323/be3a7e8ce61a1db9af2b0c0a05905e39/medium.jpg?1598907724
https://assets2-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/095/323/be3a7e8ce61a1db9af2b0c0a05905e39/small.jpg?1598907724
https://assets2-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/095/323/be3a7e8ce61a1db9af2b0c0a05905e39/xsmall.jpg?1598907724
https://assets3-dev.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/095/323/be3a7e8ce61a1db9af2b0c0a05905e39/xxsmall.jpg?1598907724
11
1
true
Mon, 31 Aug 2020 17:08:44 -0400
Fri, 04 Sep 2020 10:18:21 -0400