UMBC Dresher Center for the Humanities

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/11603/130

The Dresher Center for the Humanities supports and promotes research into the social, historical, and cultural dimensions of the human experience, at UMBC, in the Baltimore-Washington region, and beyond.

The Center encourages intellectual exchange among UMBC faculty and students, cultivates interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship, and promotes the humanities as indispensable to the mission of the contemporary university. As an incubator for research, the Dresher Center supports a robust humanities environment that benefits the university, the local community, and the wider mid-Atlantic region.

The Center fosters creative thinking about the role of the humanities in public life, and through its programs, participates in the public conversation about the value of the humanities to our increasingly interconnected world.

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Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    To Live and Breathe: Women and Environmental Justice in Washington, D.C. Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Community Museum, Washington, DC
    (University of California, 2024-02-01) Hobson, Courtney C.
    Growing up in the DC suburbs of Maryland in the 1990s and early 2000s, I frequently traveled into the city for work and for leisure. However, Anacostia was a neighborhood that I rarely visited or even thought about. Not only did it have a reputation as a less-than-desirable place to live, its location on the east side of the Anacostia River created a physical separation from the rest of the city as well. Historically, the river has been plagued by pollution thanks to untreated sewage entering the waterway. As a direct result, the health of those who live along the river is under constant threat.
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    Tango, Gendered Embodiment, and Acousmatic Listening in Argentina
    (Stanford University, 2021) Berman, Jessica
    This essay considers the modernist cultural production of tango within the contexts of broadcast radio and popular print in the 1920s and 1930s, when both tango and radio were reaching their heyday. Because of its deep engagement with the changing social, economic, and media dynamics of Argentine modernity, its emphasis on cultural “newness” and experimental forms, as well as its play with matters of identity, embodiment, and belonging, tango deserves to be considered among the forms of Argentine modernism. I explore the connections between tango-canción (tango song) as broadcast on the radio, cultural conceptions of voice, and the new and changing understandings of gender identity, embodiment, and women’s roles as they emerge in popular magazines of the time. When we consider the modernism of tango or the shifting notions of embodiment, intimacy, and relation that accompany broadcast radio in the early twentieth century, we must recognize popular print as central to those developments and part of an intermedial nexus of responses to the situation of Argentine modernity. By examining the changing roles of tango’s cancionistas (female singers) in the twenties and thirties in the context of writing about women in the popular press, I show how the protocols and practices of radio and popular print offered crucial challenges to existing notions of gender in the mediascape of 1920s and 1930s Argentina.
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    Reexamining feedback on L2 digital writing
    (OJS, 2022-12-27) Elola, Idoia; Oskoz, Ana
    The integration of digital multimodal composing (DMC) in the second language (L2)and heritage language (HL) classrooms has expanded our notion of writing, shiftingfrom a focus on the written mode to include other modes of expression (e.g., visual,textual, or aural). Notwithstanding the increasing presence of L2 multimodal learningtasks, which combine different semiotic resources (e.g., language and visual compo-nents such as images or videos) as intrinsic elements used to generate meaning, in-structors have not yet modified the way in which they provide feedback. That is, de-spite the increasing integration of different modes in a multimodal task, instructorsstill focus exclusively on language development – replicating the feedback behaviorsmodeled by non-digital writing assignments – rather than on all the components ofmultimodal texts. In digitally influenced environments and societies, however, thereis a need to reconsider our approaches to feedback to pay greater attention to thelinguistic and nonlinguistic elements of DMC. With the scarcity of research on feed-back in DMC, this article first identifies a gap in multimodal teaching and researchregarding the role and focus on feedback in DMC, and, second, provides an assess-ment rubric from which to base formative feedback that addresses both linguisticand nonlinguistic elements to help students develop their multimodal texts.
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    Black COVID Stories w/ Dr. Kaye Whitehead
    (UMBC Center for Social Science Research, 2021-09-17) Anson, Ian; Whitehead, Kaye
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    Planned Parenthood in Maryland: A Vital Community Resource
    (2018) McCann, Carole
    This talk highlights Carole McCann’s project on Planned Parenthood of Maryland (PPM), which marked its 90th anniversary in 2017. Working with local archives and PPM, McCann is reconstructing the history of the organization through the work of its staff and community members, whose efforts made PPM a respected public health institution and vital affiliate in the national Planned Parenthood Federation.