May 2012 Archives
The Graduate Student Association (GSA) Senate elected the 2012-2013 GSA Executive Board on Monday, May 7th. Listed below are the new Executive Board Members:
President – Doaa Rashed, LLC
Vice President – Jesse Fox, Biological Sciences
Vice President, External Affairs – Samuel T. Haile, Biological Sciences
Treasurer – Patricia Abete, Biological Sciences
Historian – Ian Brown, LLC
Please congratulate the new Executive Board members if you see them!
Hannah M. Mugambi (Assistant Professor, School of Arts and Sciences, American University of Nigeria) will be in Yale this summer working as curriculum counsellor for Exploration Schools, and starting a new project in Yola. Their university's vision is to become a development university, so all students are working with community projects to solve local problems. She is teaching the Freshman seminar, and giving a lecture on women and development once a semester. She has also developed a project on health and violence against women in which students work with abused women to train them in IT or entrepreneurship.
LLC & GSA would like to congratulate the following oral & poster presentation winners of 2012!
Session I:
Oral Presentations:
Tory Williams (Biological Sciences)
Steven J. Manning (Chemistry/Biochemistry)
Hessam Majd (Mechanical Engineering)
Jared Dixon (Computer Science and Electrical Engineering )
Heidi Faust (Language, Literacy, & Culture)
Congratulations Heidi!
Juanita Ashby Bey, Ph.D., is an educator who has been an advent follower of spiritual teachers such as Iyanla Vanzant, Wayne Dyer, Rhonda Byrne, and many others. She has presented in many national forums, including at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as at conferences in Chicago, Illinois and North Carolina. Juanita Ashby Bey began using her knowledge of cognitive development and pedagogy to develop empowering activities to help women transform their lives and create authentic happiness, joy, and progress. Juanita Ashby Bey facilitates workshops and seminars to bridge cognitive processing with the work and research of prominent spiritual leaders to help women connect to and embrace their spiritual essence, support them in their process of spiritual development, encourage them to rely on their individual inner ability to persevere, assist them in recreating themselves, and advocate for the expression of their individuality. She has recently become a writer for examiner.com writing about women's issues.
LLC thanks Dr. Fred Pincus for his wonderful teaching and mentoring of students!
Fred L. Pincus, Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, will retire at the end of the semester after spending 44 years at UMBC. He came to Baltimore from UCLA as a 26-year-old instructor in 1968, the third year of UMBC’s existence. In addition to all the committee work needed to build the department and the university, Pincus taught courses in race relations, social psychology and introductory sociology. He also became very involved in the movement against the war in Vietnam and promoted campus policies to increase the number of African American students on campus. He was an early supporter of Black Studies and Women’s Studies.
In 1972, Pincus visited the People’s Republic of China. He was excited to see a non-capitalist country and for the next dozen years he learned all he could about China. He developed a course called “Social Organization in the People’s Republic of China,” wrote several articles about Chinese education and served on the editorial committee of New China, a magazine published by the US-China Friendship Association. He also became the China writer and later the education writer for The Guardian, an independent radical newsweekly published in New York.
In the late 1990s, Pincus joined the steering committee of UMBC’s (then) new Language, Literacy and Culture (LLC) doctoral program. He became interested in diversity in the United States in terms of race, class, gender and sexual orientation. He took over the graduate seminar “Constructing Race, Gender and Class” and developed the undergraduate course “Diversity and Pluralism: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.”
Over the years, Pincus published four books and monographs and several dozen scholarly articles on a wide range of topics including the role of community colleges in higher education, race relations, affirmative action, conservative education policy and diversity. Over the course of his career, he has taught between 6,000 and 7,000 undergraduates and several hundred graduate students in applied sociology, LLC, public policy and intercultural communication.
For the past several years, he has also been working on a memoir and has taken creative writing classes through the Gotham Writers Workshop based in New York City.
UMBC thanks Fred L. Pincus for his tremendous service to our community and to the field of higher education over the past 44 years. (see original post - HERE)
Join us in congratulating the following Language, Literacy and Culture students who will be receiving their Ph.D. diplomas during the graduation and hooding ceremony on May 18th at 10 a.m. in the Retriever Activities Center:
Dana Polson
Mentor: Dr. Christine Mallinson
Thesis: Longing for Theory: Performance Debate Practice in Baltimore
Danika Rockett
Mentor: Dr. Amy Froide
Thesis: Single Women in Borders: Religion and Philanthropy as Paths to Social Action in Victorian Britain
Laura Strickling
Mentor: Dr. Christine Mallinson
Thesis: A Linguistic Journey: Teachers Talk about Integrating Southern and African American English into their Teaching Practices, and the Process of Changing their Beliefs about Language
Corine Toomer
Mentor: Dr. William Rothstein
Thesis: The Breast Health of Church Going African American Women: Do Culture and Religiosity Play Important Roles in Achieving Optimal Breast Health Decisions?
After the ceremony, you are invited to join us in the LLC Conference Room 422 to celebrate with our new graduates and their families. Light refreshments will be served.
PLEASE RSVP to llc@umbc.edu.
Thursday, May 10, 2012 5-8 pm
ACIV A Wing, 4th Floor