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Honors and Awards

NEH Grant Supports Study of Immigrant Influence on African American Culture
8/30/19

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded a $50,000 collaborative research grant to the College of Arts and Humanities’ Center for Global Migration Studies for a project entitled “Immigration and the Making of African America.” Led by Julie Greene, professor of history, the project will explore the largely untold history of immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America and how they have influenced African American culture and society during the 20th and 21st centuries. 

The grant will support a conference in April 2020 that will connect humanities scholars across the nation as well as fund the planning of a future publication. Scholars will also engage with curators from the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. 

“Across the 20th century, and particularly since 1965, immigration from across the African diaspora has profoundly reshaped the African American experience,” said Greene. “Yet only rarely do immigration scholars and African Americanists engage in dialogue with one another. This project aims to bridge that gap, and along the way, illuminate experiences of race and migration in the modern United States.” 

Greene is director of the Center for Global Migration Studies at the University of Maryland. Her particular interests are in the history of labor and immigration. Her most recent book, “The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal,” focuses on the tens of thousands of working men and women who traveled across the world to live and labor on the canal project. 

The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency that supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy and other areas of the humanities. Created in 1965, the agency reviews and funds selected proposals from around the country.  The highly competitive Collaborative Research Grant is awarded to approximately 14 percent of all submitted proposals.

For more information on Greene’s NEH grant and others awarded during this grant cycle, visit the NEH website. 

New Software to Digitize Persian and Arabic Materials
7/8/19

College Park, Md.—The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a two-year, $800,000 grant to the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) to develop technology expanding digital access to a vast trove of literature from the pre-modern Persian and Arabic world.

"The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project (AOCP)" will support the 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 in UMD's College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU), leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers, including David Smith, associate professor in the College of Computer and Information Sciences at Northeastern University, Sarah Bowen Savant, professor of Islamic history at Aga Khan University (AKU) in London, Maxim Romanovuniversitätassistent für digital humanities at the University of Vienna along with Raffaele Viglianti, research programmer in the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. 

"We realized that there was work being done separately in different areas to create tools for digitizing Persian and Arabic documents," said Miller, "but there wasn't a lot of communication across fields and these new advances were not making their way into the hands of users." 

To date, the development of digitization software has primarily focused on Latin-script languages, and in many cases requires specialized knowledge to run. Existing Persian and Arabic digitization tools fall short on accuracy and are often prohibitively expensive for academic and public users. 

Through the creation of new digitization tools for Persian and Arabic, the project team hopes to challenge traditional narratives of Islamic cultural history. The staggering number of Persian and Arabic texts produced in the pre-modern period make it humanly impossible to read them all, even in an entire scholarly lifetime.

"These thousands of unread texts are a potential treasure trove," said Miller. "Until we really get into it and begin digitizing and then examining them, we won't know what we might find or what new narratives and histories might unfold."

The grant will also fund two postdoctoral fellows and two graduate fellows in computer science and Middle Eastern studies. 

"Our goal is to grow capacity throughout these fields," Miller said, "which means both training scholars of Persian and Arabic in digital methods and computer scientists in the particularities of Persian and Arabic documents."

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has supported other UMD projects in the intersections of cultural studies and digital humanities, including the African-American Digital Humanities Initiative, Documenting The Now Phase 2 and Books.Files, all led by faculty and staff in ARHU. UMD is a widely-acknowledged leader in not only digital humanities, but also Persian and Arabic studies. The Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, which supported an earlier version of this project, is a premier center for the study and teaching of Persian culture in the U.S.

"Centering the digital humanities through the lens of cultural studies is among the college’s top priorities," said Bonnie Thornton Dill, ARHU dean and professor. "As scholars and teachers, our goal is to offer researchers and students new modes of inquiry that expand and deepen their abilities to understand and interpret our increasingly multicultural, global society."

Image: With the new Mellon Foundation grant, OpenITI’s digitization platform, CorpusBuilder, developed in collaboration with the SHARIAsource project of Harvard Law School, will be transformed into a full digital text production pipeline.

Mellon Foundation Awards $2.8M for Research, Digitization in Humanities
7/9/19

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded two grants totaling $2.8 million to the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) to encourage research in black digital humanities and to develop technology expanding digital access to books from the pre-modern Persian and Arabic world. 

A $2 million, three-year grant will support the second phase of the African American History, Culture and Digital Humanities (AADHUM) initiative. Housed in the College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU), AADHUUM seeks to expand and institutionalize the field of black digital humanities at UMD and beyond. The first phase of the initiative was also funded by The Mellon Foundation. 
 
"African American history and culture are central to American history and culture," said Bonnie Thornton Dill, dean of the college and professor of women’s studies. "Making this knowledge widely available and giving people the opportunity to have hands-on experiences using digital technology to tell important stories is critical to enhancing our democracy."

She will continue to lead the project with Daryle Williams, associate professor of history and ARHU associate dean for faculty affairs, and Trevor Muñoz, interim director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and assistant dean for digital humanities research in the University Libraries.

They will establish a long-term home for black digital humanities at UMD by hiring additional faculty, formalizing a competitive graduate research training and professionalization experience, offering mentor-training programs, expanding research partnerships with historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and developing best practices for tenure and promotion in black digital humanities.

Muñoz said AADHum has transformed the practice of digital humanities at MITH.
    
“If MITH offers a workshop on digital mapping, we need to make space for discussing the vulnerability that mapping certain populations, like activists or undocumented immigrants, creates,” he said.

The second Mellon Foundation grant, of $800,000 over two years, will support the 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 college’s School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Northeastern University, Aga Khan University (AKU) in London and the University of Vienna along with Raffaele Viglianti, research programmer at MITH.

"We realized that there was work being done separately in different areas to create tools for digitizing Persian and Arabic documents," said Miller, "but there wasn't a lot of communication across fields and these new advances were not making their way into the hands of users."

To date, the development of digitization software has primarily focused on Latin-script languages, and in many cases requires specialized knowledge to run. Existing Persian and Arabic digitization tools fall short on accuracy and are often prohibitively expensive for academic and public users.

"These thousands of unread texts are a potential treasure trove," said Miller. "Until we really get into it and begin digitizing and then examining them, we won't know what we might find or what new narratives and histories might unfold."

As part of the research team’s commitment to innovative software development and collaborative, interdisciplinary research, it will foster a community of users by hosting regular training sessions, establishing online user groups and teaching an undergraduate digital humanities class hosted jointly at Maryland and AKU through UMD's Global Classrooms Initiative.

The grant will also fund two postdoctoral fellows and two graduate fellows in computer science and Middle Eastern studies.

"Our goal is to grow capacity throughout these fields," Miller said, "which means both training scholars of Persian and Arabic in digital methods and computer scientists in the particularities of Persian and Arabic documents."

By K. Lorraine Graham

Mellon Foundation Awards $2M to Advance Black Studies and Digital Humanities
7/8/19

College Park, Md.—The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a three-year, $2,000,000 grant to the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) for the second phase of the African American History, Culture and Digital Humanities (AADHUM) initiative. Housed in the College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU), AADHUUM seeks to expand and institutionalize the field of Black digital humanities at UMD and beyond.  

Since its inception three years ago, AADHUM has been an incubator for innovative scholarship and teaching that increases access to important resources on African American history and culture in America while creating a new generation of technologically-savvy researchers.

The first phase of AADHUM was funded by a $1.25 million Mellon Foundation grant, bringing together students and scholars of African American studies and digital humanities to enrich and expand both fields. The original grant enabled the AADHUM team to lay the foundation necessary to meet the challenges of the integration of scholarship, training and community engagement. 

"African American history and culture are central to American history and culture," said Bonnie Thornton Dill, dean of the college and professor of women’s studies. "Making this knowledge widely available and giving people the opportunity to have hands-on experiences using digital technology to tell important stories is critical to enhancing our democracy."

An undergraduate research course on African American history and culture and digital archives is exemplary of AADHum's inclusive approach. Assistant Professor of Communications Catherine Knight Steele, who directed the initiative through June 2019, collaboratively taught the course with AADHUM postdoctoral associate Jessica Lu. Students created archival projects around Black digital culture and learned a variety of coding languages and digital tools to build them. They presented their work at the inaugural AADHUM conference in 2018, "Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black."

Thornton Dill will continue to lead the project with Daryle Williams, associate professor of history and ARHU associate dean for faculty affairs, and Trevor Muñoz, interim director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and assistant dean for digital humanities research in the University of Maryland Libraries.

The leadership team will establish a long-term home for black digital humanities at UMD by hiring additional faculty, formalizing a competitive graduate research training and professionalization experience, offering mentor-training programs, expanding research partnerships with nearby historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and developing best practices for tenure and promotion in black digital humanities. 

Muñoz said AADHUM has transformed the practice of digital humanities at MITH.

“If MITH offers a workshop on digital mapping, we need to make space for discussing the vulnerability that mapping certain populations, like activists or undocumented immigrants, creates,” he said. “AADHUM has shifted our approach to what we study and how we study it."

UMD has significant resources to support and sustain AADHUM's work. In recent years, ARHU has hired 10 new faculty members in different units who work in African American history and culture. With the support of MITH and several other ARHU units, the college also launched a new graduate certificate in Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities in 2017. 

"AADHum's innovative model of scholarship and training gives us a template for conducting research in the field of cultural studies using digital tools,"said Thornton Dill. "This interdisciplinary approach will help both scholars and students address the wonders and challenges of a diverse, changing world," said Thornton Dill.

Theatre Professor Jennifer Barclay Wins IRNE Award
5/6/19

Congratulations to Assistant Professor of Theatre Jennifer Barclay, in UMD’s School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS), who received a 2019 Best New Play (Small Theater) Award for “Ripe Frenzy,” a provocative play infusing innovative storytelling and immersive media projections to explore mass shootings in small town America. The play raises questions at the intersections of social values, the media and gun violence.

Awarded by Independent Reviewers of New England (IRNE),  IRNE Awards recognize talent and achievement in the Boston theater community, where "Ripe Frenzy" premiered in 2017 at the New Repertory Theatre. The play also ran at Synchronicity Theatre in Atlanta, GA and Greenway Court Theatre in Los Angeles, CA as part of a National New Play Network rolling world premiere.

"It’s a thrill to be honored for a production that I’m incredibly proud of, and one that was a true collaborative success,” says Barclay.

Early in the playwriting process Barclay partnered with TDPS colleague Jared Mezzocchi, associate professor and projection design specialist,  to incorporate video projection into the play as an integral character in the story. This summer Mezzocchi will direct a production of  “Ripe Frenzy” at Andy's Summer Playhouse, where he is producing artistic director for this nearly 50-year old summer youth theater program in Wilton, NH.

"Ripe Frenzy" was also awarded the 2016 National New Play Network Smith Prize for Political Theatre and the 2018 Dramatists Guild Writers Alliance Grant.

(From right, Veronika Duerr, Stacy Fischer and Samantha Richert on stage in “Ripe Frenzy” by Jennifer Barclay, produced at New Repertory Theatre in Boston in 2018. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky; Jennifer Barclay (second photograph), is assistant professor of theater at UMD).

UMD Social Justice Day 2019 Awards
4/10/19

Social Justice Day is an annual University of Maryland (UMD) event that brings the campus community together to engage with social justice issues through a variety of events. The work of building, implementing and sustaining social justice initiatives is an ongoing effort that extends beyond the day itself. The newly-established UMD Social Justice Day awards were created to celebrate and honor this ongoing work. The 2019 awards will recognize on-campus initiatives that increase awareness, engage others or change lives related to immigration, migration or refugee issues.

The UMD Social Justice Day Planning Committee selected the winners from nominations by students, faculty and staff across campus. The 2019 winners are:

 

Baha’i Chair for World Peace

The Bahá'í Chair for World Peace promotes a vision of world peace that considers the safety, health and happiness of every person in every corner of the world. Directed by Hoda Mahmoudi, the Bahá'í Chair addresses numerous social justice issues through courses, research, lectures, symposia, conferences and community outreach. One of their many initiatives is the lecture series on Structural Racism and the Root Causes of Prejudice. Since the series' founding in 2012, the series has featured nearly 30 leading scholars who explore solutions to racial prejudice.

Michelle Smith Collaboratory for Visual Culture

The Michelle Smith Collaboratory engages the campus community through initiatives that showcase how art is a tool for social connection and change. Lead by Director Quint Gregory and Associate Director Christian Cloke, the collaboratory has partnered with both the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Riversdale House Museum on numerous archival and curatorial projects to make African American history more accessible to the public. For example, the collaboratory hosts transcribe-a-thons where participants help transcribe millions of documents pertaining to African-American history and culture.

George and Lisa Zakhem Kahlil Gibran Chair for Values and Peace

The Gibran Chair, directed by May Rihani, implements a variety of projects that emphasize the importance of social justice, equality and diversity. Among their initiatives is the Knowledge Center About Arab Women, or "HUB." HUB is a research and networking website for women and their allies in the Arab world. The site includes several groundbreaking resources, including directories of women leaders and pioneers in the Arab world, presentations on Arab women's leadership, a report on gender in Arab countries and a scholarly bibliography for further research on Arab women's leadership.

“Global Service in the Dominican Republic” course

This three-credit, winter term education abroad course a is a 12-day service learning program co-lead by Jazmin Pichardo, assistant director of diversity training and education in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and Jeremy Gombin-Sperling, Ph.D. student in the College of Education. The course is based in Santiago de Los Caballeros in the Dominican Republic. Students work with Accion Callejera, a non-profit organization that provides social services for children who are navigating numerous social barriers, including homelessness, economic insecurity and racism. To date, students have contributed over 100 hours of service through activities such as tutoring, cleaning facilities and providing program support. Students return home with a new awareness of their social and cultural identities and report feeling more comfortable participating in difficult conversations around social justice issues.

“Learning Together/Aprendiendo Juntos” course

Created and taught by Ana Patricia Rodríguez, professor in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, this course provides students the opportunity to work at Hollywood Elementary School in College Park tutoring children and teaching English to their parents. Students gain hands-on experience in education, social services, translation, communication and business. This course is the most recent example  Rodríguez' distinguished career in community-engaged teaching and research, and informs her current book project on community-engaged and collaborative learning in U.S. Latina/o studies, which will discuss many of the best practices she has used in this class, including the use of oral histories, digital storytelling.

Peer to Peer UMD program

Peer to Peer is a student organization that partners with the International Rescue Committee to provide tutoring and mentoring for refugee youth in Prince George's County. Founded in 2017 by Shivani Shah '19, Spanish and biological sciences, the program has about 30 mentors who work with approximately 40 refugee students at area high schools, middle schools and public libraries, providing everything from homework help and SAT-preparation to weekend trips and outings. The program has been immensely successful. Nearly all of the refugee youth who receive tutoring are on the honor roll now.

UMD Undocuterps

UMD Undocuterps provides year-round support and advocacy to undocumented students through numerous resources, including activities for community-building and support, trainings and technical assistance. Through the efforts of the Program Coordinator Laura Bohórquez Garcia, UMD Undocuterps addresses the needs of undocumented students and provides them with the resources and support they need to be successful. In addition to supporting undocumented students, the Undocuterps website provides timely educational resources to the campus community, including a recent primer on "Black and Undocumented: 5 Ways We Can Stop Erasing Black Folk from Conversations Around Immigration."

Social Justice Day Awards will be presented on Thursday, April 11, at 12:30 p.m., in McKeldin Library, room 6137 (Special Events Room).

For more information about Social Justice Day, including the keynote lecture featuring Diane Guerrero in conversation with UND Undocuterps, visit the event website.

Spring 2019 ARHU Faculty Funds Awards

 

 

 

 

 

Conference

  • Kristy Maddux - COMM
    2019 Biennial Rhetoric Society of America Institute, 6/3/2019
  • José M. Naharro-Calderón - SLLC-SPAP
    Spain’s Exiles in the Americas and Maryland: "Alive in our Hearts,” 10/23/2019
  • Juan Carlos Quintero-Herencia - SLLC-SPAP
    Image, Critique, Politics: Desistance and Polemics in the Caribbean, 9/12/2019
  • Orrin Wang - ENGL
    Romanticism NOW: Print, Electric, and World: A Symposium in the Fields of Romantic Studies, Book History, and the Digital Humanities Celebrating the Scholarship of Neil Fraistat, 4/17/2020

Seed Grants

  • Lindsey Anderson - COMM
  • Jorge Bravo - CLAS
  • Joseph Grimmer - MUSC
  • Barbara Haggh-Huglo - MUSC
  • Avital Karpman - JWST
  • Cy Keener - ARTT
  • Ji Youn Kim - COMM
  • Siv Lie - MUSC
  • Abigail McEwen - ARTH
  • Kendra Portier - TDPS
  • Shawn Parry-Giles - COMM
  • William Robin - MUSC
  • Jason Rudy - ENGL
  • Foon Sham - ARTT

Subvention

  • Mercedes Baillargeon - SLLC
  • Sarah Frisof - MUSC
  • Jordana Moore Saggese - ARTH

 

Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt won for her book, "The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910-1950."
1/29/19

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) today unveiled 48 Subject Category Winners for the 2019 PROSE Awards (#PROSEAwards) honoring scholarly works published in 2018. These winners were selected from 165 Finalists previously identified from the more than 500 entries in this year’s PROSE Awards competition. According to a panel of 18 judges, the Subject Category Winners announced today demonstrate exceptional scholarship and have made make a significant contribution to a field of study.

Read the full announcement and see the complete list of winners on the Association of American Publishers website.

Image: Oscar S. Frías and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales. Mapa etnográfico de la República mexicana / [México, D.F.] UNAM: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, 1940.

Freedmen and Southern Society Project Wins NEH Grant
8/10/18

Maryland history department's Freedmen and Southern Society Project, directed by Professor Leslie Rowland, wins $325,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue work on the publication of its volumes.

$12 Million Grant to Improve Access to Chronic Disease Care in Maryland
11/26/18

Linda Aldoory, professor of communication and associate dean for research and development, is part of a research team that has received a five-year, $12 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The CDC has awarded the Prince George’s County Health Department a $12 million, five-year cooperative agreement to improve access to chronic disease care for an estimated 1.2 million residents in Prince George’s, Calvert, Charles and St. Mary’s counties. The cooperative agreement will fund strategies that establish or strengthen the integration of clinical practice with evidence-based public health programs to improve treatment resources, prevention programs and overall health outcomes for patients at high-risk for diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

Partners include: Calvert County Health Department; Charles County Health Department; Chesapeake Regional Information System for our Patients; Community Care Coordination Team; Existing CDC-recognized Diabetes Prevention Programs; Health Quality Innovators; HealthCare Dynamics International; Institute for Public Health Innovation; Maryland Department of Health; Maryland Rural Health Association; P3 Pharmacist Network (University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, Maryland Pharmacists Association, Maryland General Assembly, Maryland Department of Health); Prince George’s County Healthcare Alliance, Inc.; St. Mary’s AccessHealth; St. Mary’s County Health Department; Totally Linked Care, LLC (CalvertHealth Memorial Hospital, University of Maryland Capital Region North, Doctors Community Hospital, Fort Washington Medical Center, MedStar Southern Maryland Hospital Center, MedStar St. Mary’s Hospital, Area Agencies on Aging, Maryland State Medical Society and Primary Care Providers, Prince George’s County Health Department, Calvert County Health Department); University of Maryland, School of Arts and Humanities, Department of Communication; University of Maryland, School of Medicine, Department of Epidemiology & Public Health; and the University of Maryland, School of Public Health, Horowitz Center for Health Literacy.

Aldoory is the Health Communication Lead on the cooperative agreement. The CDC awarded only 14 teams across the country to improve chronic disease health care and prevention. The local team that Aldoory is part of will focus on Prince George's County and Southern Maryland. Aldoory's work will involve developing and implementing tailored messaging to reach underserved communities with the goals of 1) increasing awareness of diabetes and cardiovascular disease and 2) eliminating barriers to participation in programs for prevention and disease management.

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