Skip navigation
Past Friends of the Library & Gallery Events
Lecture and Book Signing by UMBC History Professor, Dr. Rebecca Boehling, on her book,
Life and Loss in the Shadow of the Holocaust:
A Jewish Family's Untold Story.
-
Wednesday, September 14, 2011, 4:00 p.m. - Albin O. Kuhn Library 7th Floor
-
When in 2002 UMBC Biology Professor Sue Ostrand-Rosenberg found hundreds of
WWII-era family letters in her parents’ home, she contacted History Professor
Rebecca Boehling to determine what best to do with them.
The result is this new collective biography (co-authored with Uta Larkey, Goucher College),
about a German Jewish family in Nazi Germany agonizing over whether ‘to go or to stay’
while confronting ever increasing obstacles to emigration and immigration.
The letters reveal the family members’ hopes and fears as they are scattered over three continents,
forced to contend with wartime postal delays and the deafening silence of loved ones left behind.
-
This Humanities Forum Event is co-sponsored by the Friends of the AOK Library & Gallery
and the Dresher Center for the Humanities.
-
A reception, sponsored by the Libby Kuhn Endowment Fund, followed the lecture.
-
The book was published in July, 2011. Synopsis from Publisher:
A family's recently discovered correspondence provides the inspiration for this fascinating
and deeply moving account of Jewish family life before, during and after the Holocaust.
Rebecca Boehling and Uta Larkey reveal how the Kaufmann-Steinberg family
was pulled apart under the Nazi regime and dispersed over three continents.
The family's unique eight-way correspondence across two generations brings
into sharp focus the dilemma of Jews in Nazi Germany facing the painful decisions of when,
if and to where they should emigrate. The authors capture the family members' fluctuating emotions
of hope, optimism, resignation and despair as well as the day-to-day concerns,
experiences and dynamics of family life despite the threat of increasing persecution.
Headed by two sisters who were amongst the first female business owners in Essen,
the family was far from conventional and their story contributes
new dimensions to our understanding of Jewish life in Germany and in exile during these dark years.
• A unique account of a German-Jewish family trying to escape the Holocaust,
based on a remarkable collection of recently discovered letters and diaries
• Brings together Jewish life in Nazi Germany, the US and Palestine,
illuminating the day-to-day experience of exile as well as the lives of those left behind
• Captures the dynamics of everyday family life during extraordinary times.
-
See also
the Amazon.com page for the book.
Gallery Exhibition and Event:
"Sleeping Beauties: Memorial Photographs from the Burns Archive,"
April 11 – May 31, 2011
-
For as much as people of the 21st century avoid the subjects of death and postmortem photography,
those of the 19th century embraced it.
The living were depicted with their deceased loved ones with whom they were often not portrayed previously.
The personal nature of postmortem imagery frequently makes it difficult for us to view memorial images
from the past much less from our own time.
This exhibition surveyed memorial photography from the 19th through 21st centuries and showed
how the artistic efforts of the photographers contributed to the emotional qualities of the images.
The imagery connects us across the generations to those who would have died unnoticed
had they not been given by photographic means a kind of immortality.
-
A lecture on the exhibit by Dr. Stanley Burns, from whose collection the images are drawn,
was presented on Thursday, April 14, 2011 in the Gallery.
A reception, sponsored by the Libby Kuhn Endowment Fund, followed the lecture.
A Celebration of Writing and Art: the Release of Bartleby 2011
-
Thursday, April 28, 2011, 5:30 - 7 p.m. on the 7th floor of the Library.
-
A Celebration of Writing and Art: the Release of Bartleby 2011, UMBC's
creative arts journal, marking its 31st year of publishing the best of
UMBC students' prose, poetry, and art. The event featured readings by
the authors of selected poetry and prose in the new issue, and artistic
interpretations of their work by students from Visual Arts.
-
A reception, sponsored by the Libby Kuhn Endowment Fund, followed the program.
-
This event was free and open to the public.
-
For more information on Bartleby, see:
the Bartleby home page.
Poetry Reading by UMBC Faculty Members, April 12, 2011
-
Tuesday, April 12, 2011, 4:00 p.m. in the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery
-
Sponsored by the Departments of English and Psychology,
the Friends of the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery,
and the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
-
A reception, sponsored by the Libby Kuhn Endowment Fund, followed the readings.
-
The participating faculty poets were:
Robert Deluty, Psychology
-
Dr. Robert H. Deluty has been a psychology professor at UMBC since 1980,
and is presently the Associate Dean of the Graduate School.
For 18 years, he served as the director of the clinical psychology doctoral program.
He received a Board of Regents’ Faculty Award for Excellence in Mentoring (2001),
and was named Presidential Teaching Professor (2002).
His poems and essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Baltimore Sun,
Modern Haiku, The Pegasus Review, Voices: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy,
Muse of Fire, and many other newspapers, journals, and anthologies. His 30th book,
Making Riddles Out of Answers, was published in March, 2011.
Michael Fallon, English
-
Michael Fallon is a poet and essayist and a Senior Lecturer in English at UMBC
where he has taught Creative Writing, literature, and composition since 1985.
Fallon was President of the Maryland State Poetry and Literary Society (1984-91)
and has edited the literary magazines Puerto del Sol (1980-81)
and the Maryland Poetry Review (1984-91) where Fallon was the founding editor.
Fallon has been active as a contest judge for Poetry Out Loud
and for State Fellowship Awards in Poetry and as a Literary Arts Grant Review Panelist
for the Maryland State Arts Council and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation.
Fallon’s poems have been widely published in literary magazines, anthologies,
and pamphlets as well as broadcast on radio and recorded on CDs.
Poems have appeared recently in the American Scholar, The Antietam Review,
Sin Fronteras, the Oyez Review, and the Loch Raven Review.
Essays have appeared in the Maryland English Journal, in Lite Magazine
and most recently an essay on Edgar Allen Poe titled, "Rediscovering Poe: The Mask and the Man"
appeared in the Loch Raven Review. Fallon’s book of poems,
A History of the Color Black was published by Dolphin-Moon Press in 1991.
His ms of poems, The Great Before and After is looking for a publisher,
and he just completed a new ms of poetry entitled, Since You Have No Body.
He was a winner of a Maryland State Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry in 2009.
Peotr Gwiazda, English
-
Piotr Gwiazda has been at UMBC since 2002, where is now an Associate Professor of English.
He is the author of two books, Gagarin Street:
Poems (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2005) and James Merrill and W.H. Auden:
Homosexuality and Poetic Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
His poems and translations have appeared in many journals, including AGNI Online,
Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Rattle, and The Southern Review.
Nicole Pekarske, English
-
Nicole Pekarske has been teaching at UMBC since 2003. A graduate of
College Park, she holds Master of Fine Arts and Doctoral degrees in
poetry and has been honored with grants from the American Scandinavian
Foundation, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Maryland State Arts
Council. Her first book of poems, Intermissa, Venus, came out in 2004,
and her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine and other top literary
journals.
Gallery Exhibit:
“Psychic Projections/Photographic Impressions:
Paranormal Photographs from the Jule Eisenbud Collection on Ted Serios,” January 26 – March 27, 2011
-
In 2002, the UMBC Photography Collections received the "Jule Eisenbud Collection on Ted Serios and Thoughtographic Photography."
The collection documented the research performed by Dr. Eisenbud, a Denver psychiatrist,
in partnership with his subject Ted Serios, a Chicago paranormal image maker.
-
This exhibition focused on Serios's imagery as a manifestation of the creative process and as an insight into the philosophy of mind.
On view were approximately 60 frames holding multiple examples of original "thoughtographs"
and a selection of enlarged photographic prints from the originals.
Films documenting the photographic process of Serios were shown and a selection of primary documents culled from the archive
(letters, notes, etc.) were contextualized and presented.
Programming included presentations by outstanding scholars such as Dr. Stephan Braude,
an authority on the study of the mind in relationship to the paranormal.
-
At 6 p.m., Thursday, February 3, Stephen Braude,
professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy, presented a public lecture on Serios’s work.
Lecture by Jane Donawerth:
"Technologies of Gender: Science in Science Fiction by Women in the Pulp Magazines"
-
Thursday, March 10, 2011, 4:00 p.m. in the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery
-
Sponsored by the Department of English,
the Friends of the Ablin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery,
and the Gender and Women's Studies Program.
-
From 1926, when the science fiction magazines and fan clubs were invented
by Hugo Gernsback, until 1960, when the paperback novel took over the sf
market, the magazines printed on cheap, over-sized wood-pulp paper with
garish covers were the primary venue for publishing science fiction. For
quite a while, science fiction history ignored women writers in the
pulps, but they were there. Even today, many historians assume that women
writers wrote a kind of domestic science fiction--one 1950s editor called
it "diaper sf"--and left the "hard" science to the men. In this lecture,
Professor Donawerth contests this assumption and explores the science in
women's short fiction. Drawing on the SF collections of UMBC, Penn State,
and the Toronto Public Library Judith Merril Collection, Professor
Donawerth considers the invention of prostheses and blood transfusion in
stories by Clare Winger Harris and Kathleen Ludwick, the science of
reproduction and contraception in fiction by Katherine Maclean and Eileen
Gunn, and the development of television in works by C. L. Moore and James
Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon). Bound by constraints of gender but not
always limited by them, women writers often deploy representations of
science in their science fiction to explore anxieties about women's
roles--about the body and its parts and the ways we use them to construct
masculinity and femininity; about reproduction, reluctance to reproduce,
and the science that might substitute for women's wombs; and about women
as communicators and technologies of connection and alienation.
-
A reception, sponsored by the Libby Kuhn Endowment Fund, followed the lecture.
-
Jane Donawerth is a Professor of English and Affiliate in Women's Studies
at the University of Maryland College Park. She has published articles on
sf in Extrapolation, Science Fiction Studies, and PMLA, co-edited with
Carol Kolmerten of Hood College Utopian and Science Fiction by Women:
Worlds of Difference, and authored Frankenstein's Daughters: Women Writing
Science Fiction. She won the International Association for Fantasy and
the Arts Career Award for her work on gender and science fiction. She has
also taught and published widely on Shakespeare, early modern women
writers, and history of rhetorical theory by women. She is currently
working on a book on the science in science fiction by women in the pulp
magazines.
