2022 Editor's Note
Welcome to Confluence: The Newsletter for the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences! In last year’s CLArion, I forecasted change in the upcoming year, and here we are.
After the new college name was confirmed last summer, Karley Schoenberg (Confluence’s designer) and I collaborated in Fall 2021 to propose a fresh name for the publication. We liked “Confluence” for many reasons including its definition as “a coming or flowing together, meeting, or gathering at one point” (Merriam-Webster) which coordinates well with the merging of the former College of Liberal Arts and School of Fine Arts, the intersectional relationships and research in the college, the way art (whether in a gallery, on a stage, in a video, or on paper) brings people together, and the confluence of the St. Louis River with Lake Superior and other nearby rivers.
Coinciding with the publication’s name change was another forged connection; this year’s news-letter staff includes a student intern: Kiana Yarbrough. It was important to me to provide a student with
experience in publishing and hopefully propel them to future successes. Kiana has been a pleasure to work with and an asset to the team.
Beyond those exciting developments for the present and future, this past year, I eagerly searched for the earliest issues of CLArion because we didn’t have an organized archive of the publication. I am thrilled to announce you’re reading the tenth-anniversary issue of the newsletter, and UMD Librarian Laura Vavrosky has crafted lovely web archives for CLArion and Confluence in the UMD Digital Conservancy Collection. Thanks to Karley Schoenberg, links to all previous issues can additionally be found on the newsletter’s website: cahss.d.umn.edu/confluence. I encourage you to peruse the collection to witness the publication’s evolution, seek out familiar faces, and remember activities and accomplishments from the past decade.
Furthermore, if you have a story, accomplishment, publication, milestone, or comment to share, please send an email to me at [email protected] to help carry the publication into its next decade!
Whitney Jacobson
Editor, Confluence
View the 2021–2022 Confluence Publication in a Tagged PDF Format
Adaptation really has been the name of the game over these past two years. We’ve learned to adapt (whether we wanted to or not) to Zoom meetings, working remotely, and wearing masks in public.
Erin Cain (Political Science and Philosophy ‘23) entered her freshman year at UMD with a unique perspective; she had recently returned from a self-funded backpacking trip through Europe.
A different way of communicating science to the public, and Indigenous viewers will take heart in it: “Someone from the village can do it! You can make an impact.”
Dr. Sara Blaylock (Art History) is sharing her rediscovery of East German artists of the 1980s in a recent publication.
It took Jay Jackson three interviews to get Zoom founder Eric Yuan and his team to hire him in 2013.
Wow, what a year it has been. I am continually surprised by all the twists and turns of our world.