In the News

by Karen Shih '09, Between The Columns

From writing to directing to acting, women are underrepresented in every area of theater production. A new initiative from the Big Ten Theatre Chairs aims to change that by commissioning, producing and publicizing up to five new women-written plays over the next five years.

“This is a very unique initiative. It’s about raising consciousness in order to represent the student population as well as the audience, both of which are mostly female,” says Leigh Wilson Smiley, director of the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and a new member of the theatre chairs group. “We need to start to get the female voice 
out there.” 

The plays will not only be written by women but also feature substantial female roles. Naomi Iizuka of the University of San Diego, known for works reflecting her multicultural background, has been commissioned to write the first one. It will be ready for the 2014–15 season, and each Big Ten university will have the opportunity to perform it on a 
main stage or do a staged reading. It’s one way Maryland’s Big Ten membership is helping 
areas beyond athletics.

 “I’ll have partners across the country,” Smiley says. “This is a chance to influence the national conversation.”   

by Virginia Terhune, The Gazette

Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian, 73, will soon be flying in from Paris to attend an artist’s reception in his honor on Wednesday at the University of Maryland, College Park.

In 2000, Gao was the first Chinese-born writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature for his plays, poetry, short stories and novels. But Gao is also globally known as an artist and avant-garde filmmaker. His brush-and-ink paintings and films are on display at The Art Gallery in UMD’s Art-Sociology Building through Dec. 20.

The exhibit of 27 paintings and three films, called “The Inner Landscape: The Paintings and Films of Gao Xingjian” is curated by Jason C. Kuo, a professor in the Department of Art History.

“There’s a lot of interest in his work around the world because he’s multi-faceted,” said Kuo. “He writes novels, short stories, essay and art theory.”

Gao and Kuo will give an informal talk and host a Q&A during the Wednesday reception. On hand will be translators fluent in Chinese and French who will interpret for Gao, who does not speak English.

On the afternoon of Dec. 5, Gao and Kuo will attend a stage reading and discussion of Gao’s plays at the Cafritz Foundation Theatre at the Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts on campus. The readings will be performed in English by students in the Globalization and Theatre class.

To read more, please click here.

by Shannon Gallagher, The Diamondback

John Lithgow’s experiences range from acting in the popular Showtime drama Dexter and voicing Shrek’s Lord Farquaad, to writing children’s books and winning a Tony for his performance on Broadway.

Last night, Lithgow, introduced by arts and humanities college Dean Bonnie Thornton Dill as a “master of storytelling,” spoke about his time in the entertainment world to an audience of students, faculty and staff at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center as part of the Arts & Humanities Dean’s Lecture Series.

Growing up, Lithgow said, he served as his younger sister’s “go-to babysitter and her chief source of entertainment,” a role that instilled the power of entertainment in him very early.

“Just like children, adults want to be transported, to be taken on a voyage of exploration far beyond the boundaries of the world they know,” he said. “They are hungry for the heart-swelling suspension of disbelief that comes so easily to children.”

An actor of remarkable versatility, Lithgow has since taken on a wide range of roles in comedy, tragedy and horror — both on the stage and in films — in works including NBC sitcom 3rd Rock From the Sun, Broadway musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and 1984 movie Footloose.

To read more, please click here. 
 
 

by Liam Farrell, Terp Magazine 

It was a story conceived in one of the most primal ways possible, inspired amidst rainy nights, vivid dreams and shared ghost stories. By this fall, technology will allow people around the world to see how Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” grew from a teenager’s vision on the shores of Lake Geneva to a centerpiece of 19th-century British literature.

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is a partner with the Bodleian Library at Oxford, England, and the New York Public Library in creating the digital Shelley-Godwin Archive, which has received a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. When completed, it will have images of major works and correspondence from Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and other writers in their circle.

Documents encompassing “Frankenstein” will be available in time for Halloween. With a longstanding debate surrounding how much of the story was written by Mary or husband Percy, students and scholars will be able to see original notebook pages in her handwriting and revisions he made.

“This allows people to understand the life of a literary work,” says Neil Fraistat, an English professor, director of MITH and Shelley scholar leading the project at Maryland.

Broader goals are to get students involved in curating online material by looking for transcription mistakes, encoding source material online and getting a critical appreciation for the documents. Then, people around the world can view original manuscripts and transcriptions side-by-side while annotating and sharing their own findings. “This is ultimately about the public and making them part of the humanities,” Fraistat says. “It allows us not just to project out what we do but to bring the public in to what we do.”

Perhaps the inspiration for the next great monster tale won’t come sitting around a campfire but in front of a computer screen

See the archive at shelleygodwinarchive.org.

by Jason Farman, The Chronicle of Higher Education

Since I’ve been teaching in higher education, I have always been very confident of my teaching abilities. I knew I was a good teacher; that is, until fall semester of 2012.

I had just been awarded a fellowship with the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Maryland, given to 10 faculty members each year from disciplines all across the campus. I then met with my fellow faculty members every Friday morning for an hour to discuss teaching methods, pedagogical theories, and the role of face-to-face learning in the digital age.

Working alongside these seasoned scholar-teachers, I realized that everything I had taken for granted about my own teaching wasn’t always the best approach. I very quickly realized that each one of my assumptions had to be reevaluated, beginning with the idea that I was a good teacher.

Throughout the academic year working with the Center for Teaching Excellence, I built my teaching philosophy from the ground up, holding each of my assumptions under close examination. In the end, I crafted the following Manifesto for Active Learning.

To read more, please click here.