For the past ten years the UMBC Game Developers Club has organized a Digital Entertainment Conference with a day of games industry veterans speaking on a variety of topics.  The event is free, open to all, and includes lunch.

UMBC’s 11th annual Digital Entertainment Conference will be held from 11:00am to 5:00pm on Saturday, April 30, 2016 in Skylight Lounge on the 3rd floor of the Commons.

Presenters

• Marc Olano – UMBC Professor & Game GFX Programmer
• Eric Jordan – Senior Software Engineer at Firaxis
• Tom Symonds – Artist at Stardock Games
• Ching Lau – Senior Environment Artist at Zenimax
• Nate Flynn – Owner/Developer at Geek Monster Games

Schedule

Note: Q&A with the presenter occurs between each hour

11:00am-11:45am    Tom Symonds :: Life in the Art Department
12:00pm-12:45pm   Marc Olano :: Graphics Research for Games
01:00pm-02:00pm  LUNCH! Pizza and Drinks
02:00pm-02:45pm  Eric Jordan :: Game Industry Careers
03:00pm-03:45pm  Nate Flynn :: Convention Booths
04:00pm-04:45pm  Ching Lau :: Of Teaching in the Classroom

UMBC introduced Ryan Odom as the Retriever’s new head coach of men’s basketball at a press conference held on campus today, April 7, 2016. Odom joins the America East program as its 9th head coach.

“We are so happy to have Coach Odom join the UMBC family,” said UMBC Athletics Director Tim Hall. “The hiring of Odom is an important step in the future of UMBC athletics. We have found a fantastic fit for UMBC as Ryan Odom embodies and lives our values.”

Coach Odom has twenty years of coaching experience. He joins the UMBC program after leading the Lenoir-Rhyne (NC) University basketball team to a 21-10 record last season and the school’s first appearance in the NCAA Division II Regional Finals.

Prior to his success at Lenoir-Rhyne, he served on UNC Charlotte’s staff for five years and helped them earn a bid to the National Invitational Tournament (NIT) in 2013. Odom also held assistant coach positions at Virginia Tech, American, UNC Asheville, and Furman. He served as a graduate assistant at South Florida during the 1996-97 basketball season.

Odom graduated from Hampden-Sydney (VA) in 1996 with a bachelor’s degree in economics, where he was a four-year starting point guard on the men’s basketball team. He finished his career as the school’s leader in made 3-pointers and served as team captain his senior year. The team record was 80-30 during his time at Hampden-Sydney. They earned two bids to the NCAA Division III Basketball Tournament. Ryan is the son of retired South Carolina head coach, Dave Odom.

“I’m so excited to join the UMBC family and so grateful for the opportunity to lead the UMBC men’s basketball program. I look forward to developing lasting relationships throughout our campus and the greater Baltimore community,” said Odom. “My goal is to establish a winning culture and support our student athletes so that they perform at their best, on and off the court.”

Media coverage:
Baltimore Sun: “New men’s basketball coach Ryan Odom calls UMBC a ‘sleeping giant’”
WBAL: “UMBC hires Ryan Odom as men’s basketball coach”
PressBox: “UMBC Names Ryan Odom As New Head Coach For Men’s Basketball”

Images: UMBC Athletic Director Tim Hall and Ryan Odom, new head coach of men’s basketball, Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC’s Society of Women Engineers (SWE) hosted “Fight the Stereotype,” an event focused on challenging gender and racial stereotypes related to STEM education and careers, on April 5, 2016.

Julie Ross, dean of UMBC’s College of Engineering and Information Technology, spoke about the importance of debunking stereotypes related to engineering fields, particularly pertaining to women and minorities. “People are well meaning,” she said, “but they have stereotypes in mind about what engineers look like, talk like, act like.”

“How will you fight the stereotype?” Ross asked the audience. “How do we dispel the stereotypes and respond?”

Before Nina Davuluri, an advocate for STEM education for girls and women and Miss America 2014, shared her story, she asked attendees to bring to mind any preconceptions or stereotypes they had about her as a former winner of the Miss America Pageant and an Indian-America. “I grew up feeling that I could never fit in this role of Miss America because of the stereotypes,” she shared.

Davuluri encouraged audience members to share stereotypes that they are facing, and to engage in an open conversation about misconceptions, to challenge societal assumptions and microaggressions that can dissuade women and minority students from pursuing their goals.

She says that when she won the Miss America Pageant in 2014, it showed that “it was time for the organization to have a winner that represented the U.S. population,” which is much more diverse than stereotypes suggest.   

Davuluri offered, based on her experience, that in addition to public statements, role modeling, and supporting anti-stereotype campaigns, it can also be effective to speak with people one-on-one in an effort to fight against broader societal stereotypes, saying, “that is how we need to learn.”

Mona Patel ‘18, chemical engineering, president of UMBC’s SWE chapter, said she hopes attendees continue to educate others moving forward. “My goal for this academic year was to encourage students to get involved in STEM outreach and to educate students on this campus about certain stereotypes,” she shared, adding “we hope you take away an important message and continue to educate others around you.”

Images: UMBC SWE members with Dean Julie Ross and Nina Davuluri (top) and SWE pins (bottom). Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Jessica Berman, director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities and professor of English, has published a new edited volume of 33 essays by leading scholars on the life, work, and multiple contexts for Virginia Woolf’s writing.

The book, titled A Companion to Virginia Woolf, was published last month by Wiley. It is one of the first to examine Woolf in global contexts with essays on “Reading Woolf in India,” “Woolf in Hispanic Countries,” and “Woolf, the Hogarth Press and Global Print Culture.” It approaches Woolf’s writing from a variety of perspectives, including colonialism, modernism, queer theory, and digital humanities, among other disciplines.

Berman introduces the volume and also writes an essay in the book on Woolf’s Three Guineas.

The work has already received strong praise, including a review from the University of Oxford’s David Bradshaw: “A probing and compendious crow’s nest of a handbook that splendidly epitomises the global reach and indisputable genius of the, full-range of Virginia Woolf’s writings. Diligently up-to-the-minute while equally alert to the deeper histories of her critical heritage, it deserves to become a standard primer for scholars and general readers alike.”

Berman’s teaching and research interests include modernism from a transnational perspective, literature and culture, and feminist and literary theory. Her previous books include Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism (Columbia University Press, 2011), and Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (Cambridge University Press, 2001, paper 2006). She is second vice-president of the Modernist Studies Association, to succeed to vice-president (2015-16) and president (2016-17).

Read more about her work on the English department website.

Header image: Jessica Berman speaking at a Dresher Center for the Humanities event. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.