Scholars Sylvia Edoigiawerie, Samantha Herath, Mark Ebeid, Jeremiah Quijote, and Mark Rowley, from the Program in Interdisciplinary Training for Undergraduates in Biological and Mathematical Sciences (UBM), presented their research at the UMBC Summer Undergraduate Research Fest  held August 10, 2016 at UMBC (http://surf.umbc.edu/).   The program is supported by the National Science Foundation.  At the core of this program is the belief that modern scientific problems demand multidisciplinary approaches, and that cross-disciplinary training will accelerate discovery and prepare students to be scientific leaders in the 21st century. Program Directors are Jeff Leips, Professor of Biological Sciences and Nagaraj Neerchal, Professor of Mathematics & Statistics. 

     Pictures of the scholars presenting at this event are posted under the Achievements > Conference Presentations link of the UBM website.

THE BALTIMORE OFFICE OF PROMOTION & THE ARTS, INC.

Position Description

Contract Administrator

Finance Department

Marjoleine Kars and Kate Brown, both professors in UMBC’s history department, have been awarded prestigious fellowships to study at the European University Institute (EUI) in Italy for fall 2016.

Kars and Brown are recipients of the Fernand Braduel Senior Fellowships, which “provide a framework for established academics with an international reputation to pursue their research at the EUI. Fellowships last for up to ten months in one of the EUI’s four Departments which in turn invite fellows to participate in departmental activities (seminars, workshops, colloquia, etc.),” according to a description on the EUI website.

During her fellowship, Kars will finish her writing her current book project Freedom Marooned: An Atlantic Slave Rebellion in the Early Modern Dutch Caribbean. She is in the midst of finishing a ten-year research project about a little known but immense eighteenth-century slave rebellion in a Dutch colony in South America (now the Republic of Guyana). Kars has previously written a book about a farmers’ rebellion in pre-revolutionary North Carolina: “Breaking Loose Together”: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), and she was a Dresher Center fellow in spring 2015. Read more about her work in the EUI’s announcement of her fellowship.

For her Fernand Braduel Fellowship, Kate Brown will work on her research project Circumnavigation: History’s Renovation in the Age of the Anthropocene. Brown is currently working on a research project about the communities circling the Chernobyl Zone. Earlier this year, Brown was named a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and she has received significant recognition for her 2013 book Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013). Read more about Brown’s work and research in the EUI announcement.

As part of their residencies, Kars and Brown will also participate in the EUI’s Summer School in Comparative and Transnational History: Theories, Methodology and Case Studies. Kars will present Caribbean Slave Rebellions, Transnational History, and Nationalism and Brown’s talk is titled Soft Bodies: the child centered communities at ground zero of American and Soviet nuclear complexes. 

Learn more about the European University Institute and its prestigious fellowships and research programs on the EUI website.

Images: Marjoleine Kars and Kate Brown. Photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC. 

As the 2016 Summer Olympics opened in Rio, John Rennie Short, professor of public policy, published an evocative commentary in The Conversation outlining challenges Olympic host cities face in organizing such a massive, resource- and infrastructure-intensive event.

In his article “On rocky road to Rio, the biggest loser may be the glory of hosting Olympics,” Short, who is an expert on urban issues, traced the history of the Summer Olympics, which have been held since 1896. He explained that the increasing size of the games and growing global coverage have contributed to the creation of underlying structural problems.

“The IOC often touts hosting the Olympics as a force for good, and there are the positive examples of Barcelona and Sydney. But for many cities, hosting the Olympic Games means taking on expensive projects where the costs are always underestimated, the benefits always overestimated and the legacy is obsolete athletic venues,” wrote Short. “Rio presents the worst-case scenario of costly overruns and inadequate infrastructure.”

Professor Short also described the rising costs of hosting the games and that potential host cities have backed out of consideration due to the potential lasting financial impact.

“The IOC maintains this power though the bidding process whereby cities have to compete to host the games. The arrangement favors the IOC as it forces cities to try to outdo each other,” he explained.

Short was also recently interviewed by Slate and The Atlantic about his proposal to establish a permanent host site for the Olympic Games designed to alleviate many of the problems he described in his article in The Conversation. 

For complete media coverage, read below.

On rocky road to Rio, the biggest loser may be the glory of hosting Olympics (The Conversation)
The Olympics should be in Vancouver. Winter and Summer. Every Two Years. Forever. (Slate) 
What if the Olympics were always held in the same city? (The Atlantic)

Images: Olympic Rings at St. Pancras Railway Station, London, 2011. Photo by David Holt, CC by-SA 2.0. John Rennie Short, photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.