College of Arts and Humanities

To: Colleagues
From: Bonnie Thornton Dill, Dean
Date: August 23, 2013
Re: Latin American Studies Center Director
 
I’m pleased to announce the appointment of Alejandro Cañeque as Interim Director of the Latin American Studies Center, effective August 23, 2013.
 
Currently an associate professor in the Department of History, Alejandro is a specialist in the history of colonial Latin America and the Spanish empire. He teaches courses on the history of the encounter between Europeans and natives in the New World, colonial Spanish America, early modern imperialism and colonialism in the Atlantic world. In addition to the United States, he has taught in the United Kingdom,Mexico, Peru and Spain.
 
Alejandro’s main area of research is the political and religious cultures of the early modern Spanish world, with an emphasis on colonial Spanish America. He is the author of “The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico” (2004) and contributor to the edition of Juan de Palafox’s “Virtues of the Indian” (2009). His works, “The Americas,” “Historia Mexicana,” “Revista de Indias” and “Histórica,” were published in the Colonial Latin American Review. He is currently working on a book-length study of the politics of martyrdom on the frontiers of the Spanish empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
 
The Latin American Studies Center has long serviced the campus and larger community as a research center dedicated to the teaching of topics related to Latin America and the Caribbean. Over the 2013-14 academic term, Alejandro will provide oversight for the center’s curricular offerings, undergraduate certificate program
and outreach activities.
 
Alejandro holds a licenciatura (or license) in geography and history from the Universidad de Sevilla in Spain, and a M.A. in Latin American studies and a Ph.D. in Latin American history from New York University.
 
I also announce that Jennifer Baur Sanchez is the center’s new coordinator, replacing Winslow Robertson and responsible for course scheduling, events and publicity.
 
Finally, I want to take this time to thank Karin Rosemblatt for her service as the center’s director for the past five years.

By Anne Midgette, Washington Post

So let’s talk Stravinsky. Heard anything about Stravinsky lately? The centennial of “The Rite of Spring” this year seems to me to have occasioned more tributes, spin-offs, and homages than I can remember seeing since the last Mozart year (2006) and Bach year (2000). Forget Verdi, forget Wagner (both of whom are having bicentennials this year); we’ve seized on “Rite” as a watershed moment in the development of contemporary music, and it’s being feted as the gateway to modernity around the world. (I may have been reactionary in pointing out in the Washington Post some weeks ago that Diaghilev, who commissioned the piece, was in the business of creating commercial as well as artistic successes.)

The New York Philharmonic got its “Rite” stuff in at the start of this season. Tonight, it’s closing out the season with another look at Stravinsky ballets called “A Dancer’s Dream”: a multimedia puppet-choreography-video production of “The Fairy’s Kiss” and “Petrushka,” overseen by director Doug Fitch, known to Philharmonic audiences for “Le Grand Macabre” and “The Cunning Little Vixen” in 2010 and 2011 respectively.

What the website doesn’t tell you, though, is that this “Petrushka” originated at the University of Maryland Symphony Orchestra in 2008, where Fitch was an artist in residence. (The Philharmonic does credit James Ross, UMD’s director of orchestral activities, as the “music consultant.”)

Read more here

By Natalie Kornicks

The College of Arts and Humanities would like to congratulate Art History and Archaeology Professor Abby McEwen on receiving the 2013 Dedalus Foundation Senior Fellowship for her project, a book titled “Revolutionary Horizons: Art and Polemics in 1950s Cuba.” The fellowship includes a stipend of $30,000, the maximum amount of money awarded to a recipient.

“The fellowship is supporting final stages of work on my book manuscript,” McEwen said. “And the stipend will support a semester of research leave from the university (in Fall 2013), as well as travel to Miami and Havana.”

Her book, which she expects to complete by the end of the fellowship year, considers the emergence of abstract art in Havana and its promulgation within a radicalized cultural filed, circumscribed by the national discourse of cubanía and the Cold War ideological divide. Abstraction, both a physical form and an ideological platform, signaled new possibilities for art as a means of social and political transformation, and is the focus of McEwen’s research.

In addition to the Dedalus Senior Fellowship, her project has also been supported by grants and fellowships from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the University of Maryland Graduate School.

The Dedalus Foundation’s Senior Fellowship program is intended to encourage and support critical and historical studies of modern art and modernism. Under this program, fellowships are awarded to writers and scholars who have demonstrated their abilities through previous accomplishments and who are not currently matriculated for academic degrees.

Congratulations again to Assistant Professor McEwen on receiving this prestigious fellowship! 

By Mark Wilson, Fast Company

Pink is for girls. Blue is for boys. Of course our society allows exceptions now and again, but imagine showing up to a boy’s baby shower with a pink bib and matching pink shoes. There would be whispers that either you’re nuts or you must not have seen the ultrasound on Facebook.

But things weren’t always this way. Jo B. Paoletti, historian and author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys, has found that pink and blue designations are extremely recent phenomena. Around the turn of the century, both sexes wore easily bleached white dresses up to age 6, meaning that gender neutral clothing was the norm. Then things slowly shifted.

Read more