Spring 2025 UMDRFA Events
UMDRFA announces a new initiative, Silver Terp Seminars featuring UMD retired faculty. In addition to its ongoing webinars on topics related to retirement. these online seminars will be on scholarly subjects in all disciplines with a strong emphasis on presentations and contents designed for a broad audience rather than for academic specialists.
Keep an eye out for further talks for this academic year and for information about our program planning for 2025-2026.
- March 28, 2025, 1 pm: Charles Caramello (English) – “Horses in the Great War of 1914-1918: They Had No Choice” – World War I was the last major “horse war.” Horses served in the millions both as warhorses for cavalry and, in greater numbers, as workhorses for transporting personnel and material. They endured brutal conditions and suffered often horrific deaths. An estimated seven million perished. In addition to official records, this talk uses wartime photographs, recruitment posters, and paintings to tell their story.
- April 16, 2025, 1 pm: Ralph Bennett (Architectural Planning and Preservation) – Ralph will talk about the evolution of the purple line. Ralph is Board President of Purple Line NOW, a longstanding advocacy group for what seems to be the longest running civil work project on earth. He will explain the outcome, and describe its qualities, benefits, and currently predicted completion date, and accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and X.
- May 14, 2025, 1 pm: Donald Kettle (School of Public Policy) – Trump 2.0: Is It the End of the Democracy as We Know It—Or Is It the Restoration? Donald Trump came barreling into office with more energy behind his ideas, more smart people to implement them, and more urgency to break a lot of china very quickly. Some analysts worry that he’s fatally breaking the fundamental norms of liberal democracy. Others say that, at long last, he’s blowing the barnacles off the ship of state. Where are we? Where are we going? And how should we assess the big changes that inevitably are on the way?
- June 11, 2025, 1 pm: Adele Berlin (English) – How to Read the Bible – We don’t all read the same Bible and we don’t read it the same way. This webinar will look at different ways that Jews, Christians, and academic scholars understand the Bible.