Honors and Awards

Professor GerShun Avilez's book Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire is nominated for the P. Sterling Stuckey Book Prize. The award is given by The Association for the Study of The Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), a non profit organization of international scholars seeking to further their understanding of Africa and the African Diaspora. The award committee will consider scholarly articles on any period and from any discipline published in English and is particularly interested in publications that are methodologically and conceptually innovative and demonstrate academic excellence.

About Black Queer Freedom

From the publisher: Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomic injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists’ work throughout the black diaspora. GerShun Avilez analyzes the work of diasporic artists who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice. He first focuses on how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether on the street or across borders. From there, he pivots to institutional spaces--specifically prisons and hospitals--and the ways such places seek to expose queer bodies in order to control them. Throughout, he reveals how desire and art open routes to black queer freedom when policy, the law, racism, and homophobia threaten physical safety, civil rights, and social mobility.

Michigan State University has received a $650,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to continue the work being done by the Humane Metrics for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HuMetricsHSS) initiative, an international partnership committed to establishing more humane indicators of excellence in academia with a particular focus on the humanities and social sciences.  

The goal of the HuMetricsHSS initiative is to empower people at all levels of academic institutions by identifying core values and aligning reward mechanisms in every area — from grades and funding to promotion and tenure — with those values. 

The initiative is led by an international group of co-PIs from the academic and nonprofit sectors including Christopher Long, Michigan State University, Dean of College of Arts & Letters and Dean of the Honors College; Nicky Agate, University of Pennsylvania, Snyder-Granader Assistant University Librarian for Research Data and Digital Scholarship; Rebecca Kennison, K|N Consultants, Executive Director and Principal; Jason Rhody, Social Science Research Council, Program Director;  Simone Sacchi, European University Institute, Open Science Librarian; Bonnie Thornton Dill, University of Maryland, College Park, Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities and Professor in The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Penny Weber, Social Science Research Council Digital Culture Program, Projects Coordinator, and HuMetricsHSS Project Manager; and Bonnie Russell, Michigan State University, MESH Research and HuMetricsHSS Assistant Project Manager. 

Established in 2016, the HuMetricsHSS initiative arose from a growing sense that the work by faculty and staff of academic institutions was increasingly driven by opaque and limited assessment mechanisms that reward a narrow scope of activities and fail to recognize the wide array of publicly focused, socially oriented scholarship that motivates faculty, staff, students, and administrators.  

The initiative began working with academic institutions to create a values-enacted approach for recognizing labor that is often invisible, underappreciated, and unrewarded and that supports engaged and socially responsible scholarship and scholarly practice by aligning the values that animate that work with the activities that bring it to life.  

This is the third grant the HuMetricsHSS initiative has received from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The first, awarded in 2017 for $309,000, allowed for a series of workshops that identified values and practices to enrich scholarship in an effort to better recognize, promote, and nurture scholarly practices. The second Mellon grant, awarded in 2019 for $695,000, funded the first implementation round of the initiative.  

“We stand at an inflection point of transformative change in higher education,” Long said. “There is an openness to new approaches and an appreciation of the action-oriented examples the HuMetricsHSS initiative offers.”  

The world has changed dramatically since the initial two grants were awarded.   

“The systemic inequities that were already obvious to many have come to the fore in the last year with the COVID-19 pandemic and the reckoning with racism with which we are grappling,” Thornton Dill said. “Within the academy, hierarchical inequities that undervalue teaching, which is central to the academic endeavor, have now become undeniably evident, as have issues of social and economic precarity among student populations, many of whom are now grappling not only with increased debt or financial burdens but also with the challenges of studying and learning in home environments that may not be safe or supportive for them.”  

Similar levels of precarity, driven by the economic uncertainties of tuition-driven revenue, are keenly felt by contingent faculty and hourly waged staff, many of whom are recent graduate students who may carry considerable debt load.  

“As we have learned through discussions with faculty and administrators in our workshops and through the research interviews facilitated by Foundation funding, inequalities and inequities appear to be growing rather than shrinking,” Kennison said. “Faculty, staff, and administrators are urgently searching for values-enacted evaluation frameworks that enable them to reshape the culture of higher education so that the academy is more humane, supportive, open, and just.” 

Under this latest Mellon grant, over the next 18 months, the HuMetricsHSS initiative will: 

• provide models of institutional transformation to demonstrate the potential of values frameworks in applied settings while fostering greater engagement in additional institutions;  
• scale-up training and infrastructure to support the use of values frameworks through developing train-the-trainer workshops and by enhancing the HuMetricsHSS toolkit;  
• build and expand communities of practice by fostering engaged, cross-pollinating networks through regular communication, facilitating collaboration through knowledge sharing and transparent idea generation, and coordinating with aligned initiatives on messaging and amplification of the work.  

“For the next phase of HuMetricsHSS work, we envision operating on several axes that focus on engagement, implementation, scalability, and sustainability,” Rhody said. “Each of these efforts sets the framework for institutional transformation, building toward the long-term goal for HuMetricsHSS to support widespread transformation across a supported, funded institutional cohort.” 

By Jessica Weiss ’05

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $100,000 grant to support the continued development of user-friendly, open-source software capable of creating digital texts from Persian and Arabic books. 

Matthew Thomas Miller, assistant professor in the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Northeastern University, Aga Khan University (AKU) in London and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at Maryland. The Mellon Foundation has been funding the team’s work since 2019.

“We are honored that The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has again supported our efforts,” Miller said. “They have been global leaders in building open-source tools and open-access collections for the expansion in access to and digital preservation of cultural traditions across the world, and we are delighted to be a part of these efforts.”

The project, known as “OpenITI AOCP,” aims to enable the digitization of texts from the premodern Islamicate world—an enormous tradition stretching over 1,000 years. The tools being created by the project team will be free and open to use and will allow academics and the public to produce high-quality digital transcriptions of Persian and Arabic printed texts, from poetry to the Quran. 

“Premodern Islamicate textual production is a massive and understudied archive that remains particularly underrepresented in the field of digital humanities,” Miller said. “This democratization of access to digital text production will change the landscape of Islamicate studies.”

Thus far, the project team—made up of computer science and humanities experts—has successfully improved the accuracy of Persian and Arabic optical character recognition (OCR) tools, which are tools that transfer printed text into machine-encoded text, and have begun experimenting on Ottoman Turkish and Urdu. They are integrating those tools into a platform called eScriptorium. They also held a training session at the University of Maryland in 2020 for OCR experts from all over the world. And they taught a Spring 2021 Global Classrooms course, “The Islamicate World 2.0: Studying Islamic Cultures through Computational Textual Analysis,” on the basics of computational textual analysis as it relates to textual data about the Islamicate world.

Next steps include finalizing the open-source software for widespread use, as well as holding additional workshops and community building activities around the new tools. This latest Mellon grant will last one year. 

Earlier this year, Miller was awarded $282,905 by the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the project.

Image description: The introduction to George B. Whiting's Kitab fi al-Imtina‘ ‘an Shurb al-Muskirat, published in Beirut by American Mission Press in 1838 and housed at Harvard's Houghton Library (*98Miss168). Licensed for non-commercial use.

By Jessica Weiss ’05

A $790,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will fund the creation of a new sculpture at the University of Maryland’s David C. Driskell Center and the identification, cataloging, preservation and digitization of prominent archives in the field of African American art.
 
The sculpture commemorating Driskell, a legendary artist, art historian and UMD distinguished university professor emeritus who died in 2020 at age 88, will be created by well-known African American artist Melvin “Mel” Edwards, a longtime friend. The stainless steel abstract artwork—tentatively measuring 12 feet long, 12 feet wide and 20 feet high—will be erected outside Cole Field House, home of the Driskell Center, by the end of the three-year grant.
 
The Dr. Tritobia Hayes-Benjamin Archive, a gift to the Driskell Center from the late art historian’s estate, will be the first collection made accessible by the grant. It includes thousands of primary source materials related to African American art, including photographic prints and contact sheets of works by major African American female artists, artist biographies written on index cards and a collection of 35 mm slides of artworks previously unknown to researchers. A longtime faculty member at Howard University, Hayes-Benjamin Ph.D. ’91 was Driskell’s first doctoral student in art history at UMD.
 
Professor Curlee R. Holton, director of the Driskell Center, said the grant exemplifies the center’s commitment both to advancing appreciation of African American art and creating a home for artists and scholars.
 
“Driskell impacted and transformed the American art canon by bringing African American art to the forefront,” Holton said. “Our mission is to continue that goal and to enhance and expand on it. We’re overjoyed at the opportunity to do so and honored to receive this major grant.”
 
Driskell, best known for his groundbreaking exhibition “Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750-1950,” joined the faculty of the Department of Art at Maryland in 1977 and served as its chair from 1978-83. The Driskell Center was established in 2001 to exhibit the work of African American artists at all stages of their careers and to house Driskell’s extensive archive: a public collection of his letters, photos, handwritten notes and catalogs.
 
The grant dedicates $500,000 to supporting the center’s work to expand on its collection by cataloguing and preserving additional archives.
 
Hayes-Benjamin (1944-2014), who concentrated her Ph.D. studies at UMD on African American art, went on to serve at Howard as professor of art history, associate dean of the College of Fine Arts and director of the Howard University Gallery of Art.
 
“The university is committed to maintaining and building upon David’s dedication to develop future generations of Black artists and students of African American and African diasporic art,” said Bonnie Thornton Dill, dean of the College of Arts and Humanities. “This grant helps us continue the important work of extending the research capacity and impact of the center by digitizing materials and making them accessible and available worldwide to scholars, researchers and all those interested in African American art.”
 
The award from the Mellon Foundation will support a full-time archivist position and a graduate student and other expenses to inventory, catalog and digitize the 75 linear feet of materials from the Hayes-Benjamin Archive, estimated to contain some 20,000-25,000 items. The center’s staff will also identify and acquire additional archives for the center’s archive.
 
At the Driskell Center, Holton said, the archives will be “cared for and respected.”
 
“An archive is full of assets, full of jewels, and we are the caretaker of that,” he said. “This validates our history and our commitment.”

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Lisa W. Carney, who completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese last year, has won a 2021 Charles A. Caramello Distinguished Dissertation Award for her dissertation that explored the stories told about dreams in Kichwa, a Quechuan language spoken in Ecuador. The annual award, given by the Graduate School, recognizes four students who defended their dissertation in the previous calendar year. 

Carney is currently a postdoctoral associate at the Latin American Studies Center and coordinator of the Dissertation Success Program at the Graduate School Writing Center. 

“It matters profoundly what stories we as a society pay attention to and whose voices we listen to,” Carney said. “It means a lot to me to have been able to support the ongoing efforts of Amazonian indigenous communities to have their languages and knowledge recognized and supported more broadly.” 

Carney holds a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish literature from Dartmouth College and a Master of Arts in Latin American literature and culture from the Ohio State University. While volunteering for a summer in Ecuador as an undergraduate, she heard Kichwa-speakers (who call themselves Runa) reference their dreams in decision-making processes. She was drawn to the narratives and storytelling techniques and set out to learn Kichwa to be able to dive deeper.

To research the topic, Carney made video recordings of Kichwa narrators as they told their dream stories, transcribed and translated the recordings and worked with a handful of Runa women to learn to interpret the stories.

Carney found that Runa tell the stories of their dreams when they learn something valuable from the dream experience. Her dissertation, “By the Authority of Dreams: Truth and Knowledge in Kichwa Muskuy Narratives,” explores the storytelling elements and their significance. 

“They use a range of performative techniques like gestures, vocal modulations and descriptive language to evoke imagery and emotion,” she said, “which is key to conveying their credibility as speakers and the authoritativeness of the knowledge they are sharing.” 

Carney’s larger research interests include indigenous cultural production, like narrative and song. 

Though researching and writing her dissertation was challenging, Carney said she was propelled by the collaborative nature of the work and the opportunity to recognize the artistry and knowledge of the Runa women she worked with. 

“I kept myself motivated by thinking of the collaborators who generously shared their knowledge and time with me in hopes of promoting their communities’ values,” she said.