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Research and Scholarly Work

8/17/22

By Karen Shih ’09

For Black Americans, the simple act of eating can be fraught. Gathering for a barbecue in a public park can lead to run-ins with the police. Dining on traditional dishes, developed through ingenuity and necessity out of generations of slavery and poverty, can lead to racist ridicule. In her latest book, “Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America,” which is available in print this week, American studies Professor Psyche Williams-Forson breaks down how unfair scrutiny of what Black Americans eat keeps society from addressing systemic inequities.

Why did you want to write this book?
Shaming Black people for what and where they eat is not new. It began during enslavement; the ways farms and plantations were set up were about surveilling Black bodies. And it’s moved straight into the contemporary moment, such as the (2018) arrest of the young Black men at a Starbucks in Philadelphia. People feel they’ve been given permission to overcorrect Black people’s lives, from music to clothing to language to food, because these things go against the grain of whiteness and “correctness.”

We all need to eat, so it’s easy to dismiss the unseen power dynamics around food. But if we are going to have conversations about people’s freedoms, we need to talk about food.

What’s an example of how Black Americans are food shamed?
My book opens with the D.C. Metro worker who was eating on the train in uniform, when a woman took her picture and blasted it on social media. The employee was literally going from one part of her job to the next, trying to fit in a meal. She knew Metro was no longer issuing fines for eating so she did so. Then she has her life exposed.

What are some food misconceptions that you address?
People like to criticize fast-food restaurants, but they are major gathering hubs for the elderly and other people who are alone. Farmers markets aren’t utopias. If you don’t set up in Black neighborhoods, offer food that’s culturally relevant and accept Black vendors, people won’t feel welcome. Also, dollar stores can be important sources of food. If you’re on a fixed income, and you can go in and buy 20 items with $20, that can make a difference in people’s lives.

How can the conversation about Black food culture be harmful?
We hear a lot about Black people and their diets, and how they’re unhealthy and obese because of soul food—but you can’t blame ill health squarely on food. Look at “the stroke belt,” which stretches across the South. These are states with repressive policies and laws. There’s a lot of wage inequality, people who are unhoused, people who are unemployed. Society wants food to do the heavy lifting because it takes our focus away from systemic inequalities that keep people mired in oppression, which contributes to psychological and physical disease.

3/8/23

By Matthew Kirschenbaum

What if, in the end, we are done in not by intercontinental ballistic missiles or climate change, not by microscopic pathogens or a mountain-size meteor, but by … text? Simple, plain, unadorned text, but in quantities so immense as to be all but unimaginable—a tsunami of text swept into a self-perpetuating cataract of content that makes it functionally impossible to reliably communicate in any digital setting?

Our relationship to the written word is fundamentally changing. So-called generative artificial intelligence has gone mainstream through programs like ChatGPT, which use large language models, or LLMs, to statistically predict the next letter or word in a sequence, yielding sentences and paragraphs that mimic the content of whatever documents they are trained on. They have brought something like autocomplete to the entirety of the internet. For now, people are still typing the actual prompts for these programs and, likewise, the models are still (mostly) trained on human prose instead of their own machine-made opuses.

But circumstances could change—as evidenced by the release last week of an API for ChatGPT, which will allow the technology to be integrated directly into web applications such as social media and online shopping. It is easy now to imagine a setup wherein machines could prompt other machines to put out text ad infinitum, flooding the internet with synthetic text devoid of human agency or intent: gray goo, but for the written word.

Exactly that scenario already played out on a small scale when, last June, a tweaked version of GPT-J, an open-source model, was patched into the anonymous message board 4chan and posted 15,000 largely toxic messages in 24 hours. Say someone sets up a system for a program like ChatGPT to query itself repeatedly and automatically publish the output on websites or social media; an endlessly iterating stream of content that does little more than get in everyone’s way, but that also (inevitably) gets absorbed back into the training sets for models publishing their own new content on the internet. What if lots of people—whether motivated by advertising money, or political or ideological agendas, or just mischief-making—were to start doing that, with hundreds and then thousands and perhaps millions or billions of such posts every single day flooding the open internet, commingling with search results, spreading across social-media platforms, infiltrating Wikipedia entries, and, above all, providing fodder to be mined for future generations of machine-learning systems? Major publishers are already experimenting: The tech-news site CNET has published dozens of stories written with the assistance of AI in hopes of attracting traffic, more than half of which were at one point found to contain errors. We may quickly find ourselves facing a textpocalypse, where machine-written language becomes the norm and human-written prose the exception.

Like the prized pen strokes of a calligrapher, a human document online could become a rarity to be curated, protected, and preserved. Meanwhile, the algorithmic underpinnings of society will operate on a textual knowledge base that is more and more artificial, its origins in the ceaseless churn of the language models. Think of it as an ongoing planetary spam event, but unlike spam—for which we have more or less effective safeguards—there may prove to be no reliable way of flagging and filtering the next generation of machine-made text. “Don’t believe everything you read” may become “Don’t believe anything you read” when it’s online.

This is an ironic outcome for digital text, which has long been seen as an empowering format. In the 1980s, hackers and hobbyists extolled the virtues of the text file: an ASCII document that flitted easily back and forth across the frail modem connections that knitted together the dial-up bulletin-board scene. More recently, advocates of so-called minimal computing have endorsed plain text as a format with a low carbon footprint that is easily shareable regardless of platform constraints.

But plain text is also the easiest digital format to automate. People have been doing it in one form or another since the 1950s. Today the norms of the contemporary culture industry are well on their way to the automation and algorithmic optimization of written language. Content farms that churn out low-quality prose to attract adware employ these tools, but they still depend on legions of under- or unemployed creatives to string characters into proper words, words into legible sentences, sentences into coherent paragraphs. Once automating and scaling up that labor is possible, what incentive will there be to rein it in?

William Safire, who was among the first to diagnose the rise of “content” as a unique internet category in the late 1990s, was also perhaps the first to point out that content need bear no relation to truth or accuracy in order to fulfill its basic function, which is simply to exist; or, as Kate Eichhorn has argued in a recent book about content, to circulate. That’s because the appetite for “content” is at least as much about creating new targets for advertising revenue as it is actual sustenance for human audiences. This is to say nothing of even darker agendas, such as the kind of information warfare we now see across the global geopolitical sphere. The AI researcher Gary Marcus has demonstrated the seeming ease with which language models are capable of generating a grotesquely warped narrative of January 6, 2021, which could be weaponized as disinformation on a massive scale.

There’s still another dimension here. Text is content, but it’s a special kind of content—meta-content, if you will. Beneath the surface of every webpage, you will find text—angle-bracketed instructions, or code—for how it should look and behave. Browsers and servers connect by exchanging text. Programming is done in plain text. Images and video and audio are all described—tagged—with text called metadata. The web is much more than text, but everything on the web is text at some fundamental level.

For a long time, the basic paradigm has been what we have termed the “read-write web.” We not only consumed content but could also produce it, participating in the creation of the web through edits, comments, and uploads. We are now on the verge of something much more like a “write-write web”: the web writing and rewriting itself, and maybe even rewiring itself in the process. (ChatGPT and its kindred can write code as easily as they can write prose, after all.)

We face, in essence, a crisis of never-ending spam, a debilitating amalgamation of human and machine authorship. From Finn Brunton’s 2013 book, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, we learn about existing methods for spreading spurious content on the internet, such as “bifacing” websites which feature pages that are designed for human readers and others that are optimized for the bot crawlers that populate search engines; email messages composed as a pastiche of famous literary works harvested from online corpora such as Project Gutenberg, the better to sneak past filters (“litspam”); whole networks of blogs populated by autonomous content to drive links and traffic (“splogs”); and “algorithmic journalism,” where automated reporting (on topics such as sports scores, the stock-market ticker, and seismic tremors) is put out over the wires. Brunton also details the origins of the botnets that rose to infamy during the 2016 election cycle in the U.S. and Brexit in the U.K.

All of these phenomena, to say nothing of the garden-variety Viagra spam that used to be such a nuisance, are functions of text—more text than we can imagine or contemplate, only the merest slivers of it ever glimpsed by human eyeballs, but that clogs up servers, telecom cables, and data centers nonetheless: “120 billion messages a day surging in a gray tide of text around the world, trickling through the filters, as dull as smog,” as Brunton puts it.

We have often talked about the internet as a great flowering of human expression and creativity. Nothing less than a “world wide web” of buzzing connectivity. But there is a very strong argument that, probably as early as the mid-1990s, when corporate interests began establishing footholds, it was already on its way to becoming something very different. Not just commercialized in the usual sense—the very fabric of the network was transformed into an engine for minting capital. Spam, in all its motley and menacing variety, teaches us that the web has already been writing itself for some time. Now all of the necessary logics—commercial, technological, and otherwise—may finally be in place for an accelerated textpocalypse.

“An emergency need arose for someone to write 300 words of [allegedly] funny stuff for an issue of @outsidemagazine we’re closing. I bashed it out on the Chiclet keys of my laptop during the first half of the Super Bowl *while* drinking a beer,” Alex Heard, Outside’s editorial director, tweeted last month. “Surely this is my finest hour.”

The tweet is self-deprecating humor with a touch of humblebragging, entirely unremarkable and innocuous as Twitter goes. But, popping up in my feed as I was writing this very article, it gave me pause. Writing is often unglamorous. It is labor; it is a job that has to get done, sometimes even during the big game. Heard’s tweet captured the reality of an awful lot of writing right now, especially written content for the web: task-driven, completed to spec, under deadlines and external pressure.

That enormous mid-range of workaday writing—content—is where generative AI is already starting to take hold. The first indicator is the integration into word-processing software. ChatGPT will be tested in Office; it may also soon be in your doctor’s notes or your lawyer’s brief. It is also possibly a silent partner in something you’ve already read online today. Unbelievably, a major research university has acknowledged using ChatGPT to script a campus-wide email message in response to the mass shooting at Michigan State. Meanwhile, the editor of a long-running science-fiction journal released data that show a dramatic uptick in spammed submissions beginning late last year, coinciding with ChatGPT’s rollout. (Days later he was forced to close submissions altogether because of the deluge of automated content.) And Amazon has seen an influx of titles that claim ChatGPT “co-authorship” on its Kindle Direct platform, where the economies of scale mean even a handful of sales will make money.

Whether or not a fully automated textpocalypse comes to pass, the trends are only accelerating. From a piece of genre fiction to your doctor’s report, you may not always be able to presume human authorship behind whatever it is you are reading. Writing, but more specifically digital text—as a category of human expression—will become estranged from us.

The “Properties” window for the document in which I am working lists a total of 941 minutes of editing and some 60 revisions. That’s more than 15 hours. Whole paragraphs have been deleted, inserted, and deleted again—all of that before it even got to a copy editor or a fact-checker.

Am I worried that ChatGPT could have done that work better? No. But I am worried it may not matter. Swept up as training data for the next generation of generative AI, my words here won’t be able to help themselves: They, too, will be fossil fuel for the coming textpocalypse.

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Matthew Kirschenbaum is a professor of English and digital studies at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Harvard University Press, 2016) and Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).

 

2/27/23

Big congratulations to Masato Nakamura, whose dissertation on "Sources of argument role insensitivity in verb processing" has received a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant (2240434) from the National Science Foundation, with the support of advisor Colin Phillips. Abstract below, along with links to some of the past awards made to our dissertators.

Sources of argument role insensitivity in verb processing

Humans generally understand utterances quickly and accurately, even in noisy or degraded environments for listening or reading. Many researchers have attributed this success to people’s ability to rapidly predict upcoming words. Previous studies have demonstrated various kinds of evidence for prediction mechanisms, e.g., more predictable words are read more quickly. But less is known about the mechanisms by which predictions are generated. This project investigates these mechanisms, by focusing on situations where people appear to make inappropriate predictions. A useful test case is “role reversed” sentence pairs, such as “the customer that the waitress had served” and “the waitress that the customer served”, in which who did what to whom is reversed. Some psycholinguistic measures of prediction, particularly those involving comprehension, suggest that the verb “served” is equally expected in both sentences, despite being inappropriate in the second. This has been taken as evidence that humans ignore the roles of nouns when generating expectations. However, some other measures of prediction suggest that humans generate appropriate expectations in those same sentences, making full use of role information. This project seeks to resolve this discrepancy.

The project combines computational and experimental methods to investigate why different measures indicate a greater or lesser role for semantic roles in moment-by-moment prediction in language. The project will develop a computational model of linguistic prediction that seeks to capture how a shared set of cognitive processes maps onto different experimental measures. The model will be extended based on results from new experiments. In order to understand the time course of predictions and the contributions of different task elements, the experiments will systematically vary whether or not participants are shown anomalous continuations, and what kind of response participants are required to give. The project also develops and refines a scalable pipeline for semi-automatic analysis of spoken language data in psycholinguistic experiments, which can be used by other researchers.

2/16/23

Co-edited with Eileen Boris, Heidi Gottfried, and Joo-Cheong Tham, Julie Greene has published Global Labor Migration: New Directions with the University of Illinois Press. This project brings to fruition a long-term project of the Center for Global Migration Studies.

According to the publisher, "Around the world, hundreds of millions of labor migrants endure exploitation, lack of basic rights, and institutionalized discrimination and marginalization. What dynamics and drivers have created a world in which such a huge--and rapidly growing--group toils as marginalized men and women, existing as a lower caste institutionally and juridically? In what ways did labor migrants shape their living and working conditions in the past, and what opportunities exist for them today?

Global Labor Migration presents new multidisciplinary, transregional perspectives on issues surrounding global labor migration. The essays go beyond disciplinary boundaries, with sociologists, ethnographers, legal scholars, and historians contributing research that extends comparison among and within world regions. Looking at migrant workers from the late nineteenth century to the present day, the contributors illustrate the need for broader perspectives that study labor migration over longer timeframes and from wider geographic areas. The result is a unique, much-needed collection that delves into one of the world’s most pressing issues, generates scholarly dialogue, and proposes cutting-edge research agendas and methods."

See the publisher's website here for more information.

2/23/23

By Maryland Today Staff 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes students need an instructional pick-me-up between violin lessons. Others can’t afford as many lessons as their talent merits, or they live in a place where violin teachers are in short supply.

A new artificial intelligence-powered system under development by a University of Maryland classical violinist and a computer scientist with expertise in robotics and computer vision could fill in those gaps.

“Our project combines the expertise of traditional violin pedagogy with artificial intelligence and machine learning technology,” said Irina Muresanu, an internationally known concert violinist and an associate professor of violin in the School of Music. “Our aim is to ultimately create software that will be able to provide guidance for all string instruments, and even other instruments.”

The system is not designed to replace human expertise, but to augment it, the researchers say.

“Our system will observe the players using vision and audio, and will analyze the playing in order to give the appropriate feedback, and also to give suggestions on what to practice,” said Cornelia Fermüller, a research scientist with the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and the Computer Vision Laboratory.

The research is funded by a 2021 Maryland Innovation Initiative Award, as well as a Grand Challenges Team Project grant announced last week.

(Video produced by Maria Herd M.A. '19)

2/16/23

By ARHU Staff

In support of programs, initiatives and projects designed to impact enduring and emerging societal issues, the University of Maryland’s Grand Challenges Grants Program has awarded $30 million in funding to 50 projects and 185 faculty members across every school and college on campus. Among them, ARHU faculty are the recipients of one Institutional Grant, three Impact Awards, four Team Project Grants and one Individual Project Grant.

ARHU faculty are partnering with colleagues across campus to focus on groundbreaking and impactful research on topics including racial and social justice, education, pandemic preparedness and ethical technologies. Their work will shape the future of our community, state, nation and world.

Grand Challenges Grants with ARHU faculty involvement are outlined below. Please visit each project page for comprehensive details and a full list of participating faculty.

INSTITUTIONAL GRANT (up to $1M per year for 3 years of funding): 

Maryland Initiative for Literacy & Equity (MILE): seeks to transform and integrate practices in education, speech pathology, library sciences, and parent/family engagement through streamlined and cutting-edge models of professional development and community outreach. (Colleges Represented: College of Education (EDUC), ARHU, College of Behavioral and Social Sciences (BSOS), College of Information Studies (INFO), School of Public Policy (SPP))

Principal Investigator (PI): Donald Bolger (EDUC)

ARHU Co-Principal Investigators (Co-PIs): 

Kira Gor, Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Colin Phillips, Professor, Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, Department of Linguistics; Director, Language Science Center

Juan Uriagereka, Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; Department of Linguistics

Learn more: research.umd.edu/mile

IMPACT AWARDS (up to $250K per year for 2 years of funding): 

Urban Equity Collaborative: seeks to strengthen community-based institutions and the work of community activists around issues of urban inequality. (Colleges Represented: School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (ARCH), ARHU, School of Public Health (SPHL))

PI: Willow Lung-Amam (ARCH)

ARHU Co-PI: Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Associate Professor, Department of American Studies

Learn more: research.umd.edu/urbanequity

Pandemic Preparedness Institute (PPI): integrates a broad array of social and behavioral sciences to learn from COVID-19 and other disasters to better prepare for future public health emergencies. (Colleges Represented: SPHL, ARHU, BSOS, EDUC, INFO, Philip Merrill College of Journalism (JOUR))

Co-PI: Cynthia Bauer (SPHL) 

ARHU Co-PI and team members: 

Brooke Fisher Liu (Co-PI), Professor, Department of Communication

Anita Atwell Seate, Associate Professor, Department of Communication

Carina Zelaya, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication

Learn more: research.umd.edu/ppi

Values-Centered Artificial Intelligence: aims to promote the development of AI in a way that is not only ethical, but that advances human well-being more generally. (Colleges Represented: College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS), ARHU, Robert H. Smith School of Business (BMGT), BSOS, EDUC, INFO, JOUR, SPHL) 

PI: Hal Daumé III (CMNS)

ARHU Co-PI: John Horty, Professor, Department of Philosophy

Learn more: research.umd.edu/vcai

TEAM PROJECT GRANTS (up to $500K per year for 3 years of funding):

Africa Through Language and Area Studies (ATLAS): will establish a central focal point for the study of African languages, history and contemporary issues in the UMD community with the goal of increasing the understanding of the African continent and its growing global influence. (Colleges Represented: ARHU, BSOS) 

ARHU PI: Miranda Abadir, Second Language Acquisition, National Foreign Language Center

Learn more: research.umd.edu/atlas

Music Education for All: aims to develop an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform, VAIolin, that will democratize music education. (Colleges Represented: ARHU, CMNS) 

ARHU PI: Irina Muresanu, Associate Professor, School of Music

Learn more: research.umd.edu/music-ai

Fostering Inclusivity Through Technology (FIT): will develop a video-calling platform that promotes mutual understanding by highlighting team sentiment, building rapport with strangers, connecting past and current topics in conversations, and unobtrusively identifying and resolving misunderstandings. (Colleges Represented: BSOS, ARHU, BGMT, CMNS, A. James Clark School of Engineering (ENGR), INFO) 

PI: Yi Ting Huang (BSOS)

ARHU Co-PI: Shevaun Lewis, Assistant Research Professor and Assistant Director, Language Science Center

Learn more: research.umd.edu/fit

Anti-Black Racism Initiative: seeks to build upon the state of Maryland’s legacy of racial equity and social justice and will position the University of Maryland as a leading anti-Black racist institution through three strategic and institutional initiatives that will amplify the new anti-Black racism (ABR) minor. (Colleges Represented: BSOS, ARHU, EDUC, SPHL)

PI: Jeanette Snider (BSOS)

ARHU Co-PIs: 

John Drabinski, Professor, African American Studies and English, Department of English

Psyche Williams-Forson, Professor and Chair, Department of American Studies

Learn more: research.umd.edu/abri

INDIVIDUAL PROJECT GRANT (up to $50,000 per year for 3 years): 

Human Rights Politics and Policies: Lessons from Latin America: two conferences, three articles and an edited volume that provides a definitive history of human rights in Latin America and corrects overly broad criticisms of human rights movements made by scholars who work on the United States and Europe. (College Represented: ARHU) 

Karin Rosemblatt, Professor and Director of the Center for Historical Studies, Department of History

Learn more: research.umd.edu/human-rights-latin-america

2/15/23

By Sala Levin ’10 

Feb 15, 2023

Which version was better: the original “Nothing Compares 2 U” by Prince, or the cover by Sinéad O’Connor, who turned his funky number into a haunting breakup lament? How about “I Will Always Love You”? Was it more successful as Dolly Parton’s plaintive tune or as Whitney Houston’s power ballad?

For pop music diehards, bickering over the merits of cover songs and their original versions is as much fun as debating whether the art on the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album is meant to tell listeners that Paul is dead. Stephanie Shonekan, an ethnomusicologist and new dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, has turned these amiable arguments into fodder for her podcast, “Cover Story.

Shonekan’s podcasting career began in 2015, when she was chair of Black studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia. It was a tense time on campus, as students protested racism at the university, ultimately leading to the resignations of the chancellor and the system president. She decided to launch a show called “#Black,” where members of the campus community could come together weekly to talk about the struggles Black people faced at the university and around the country.

In 2020, Shonekan returned to Mizzou after a few years at the University of Massachusetts. KBIA, the local NPR affiliate that had produced “#Black,” asked her to come back. “I definitely wanted to continue podcasting, but I wanted something a little more joyful, a little bit more uplifting, a little bit more reflective of all the ways Black people live, not just at the brunt of white supremacy,” she said.

So she turned to her work in ethnomusicology. The daughter of a Trinidadian mother and a Nigerian father, Shonekan had grown up with the sounds of calypso music and West African highlife, full of jazzy horns and guitar plucking. She learned that she could tell “who people are by the music that they create, the music that they disseminate, the music that they consume, the stories that are told in that music,” she said.

In each episode, Shonekan and a guest—music fans from different walks of life—discuss two versions of a song, analyzing their differences and merits. In all cases, either the song’s initial artist or the cover artist (or both) are people of color.

In the show’s first season, which debuted last spring, Shonekan and her guests mulled over “Yesterday,” “Piece of My Heart” and “Before I Let Go.” They take up songs like “Respect” and “Ghost of Tom Joad” in the second season that began in October.

Some “Cover Story” episodes delve into the personal memories associated with specific songs. In season two, Shonekan invited her husband as a guest to talk about “their” song, “I Believe in You and Me,” originally recorded by the Four Tops and covered by Whitney Houston. “It was great to have a conversation around love and life and how it started and how it’s going, and how that song remains true to our relationship.”

But some marital disputes can’t be fixed with a song. Shonekan insists that the Houston version is better, but her husband remains solidly Team Four Tops.

2/8/23

Faculty members are invited to nominate candidates for the 2022-23 Undergraduate Researchers of the Year awards ($1,000 prize), presented annually in conjunction with Maryland’s Undergraduate Research Day (April 26, 2023). Nominations are due by Sunday, March 26, 2023.

PLEASE NOTE: Eligibility is limited to SENIORS (may be graduating in May 2023, Summer 2023, or have graduated in December 2022). A maximum of ONE (1) student nomination per faculty member can be accepted.

This award recognizes individual undergraduates (not teams) who have distinguished themselves exceptionally - **above and beyond expectations** - in research activities over the span of their time at the University. Nominated students should exemplify excellence in undergraduate research and show great promise for further accomplishment. 

Up to 6 awards, with prizes of $1000 each, will be presented in conjunction with Undergraduate Research Day (April 26, 2023).

ELIGIBILITY: Nominees must be SENIORS graduating in May 2023 or Summer 2023, or be alumni who began the 2022 academic year as SENIORS but who graduated in December 2022. Please note: a maximum of ONE (1) student nomination per faculty member can be accepted.

DEADLINE: Nominations should be sent to ugresearch@umd.edu no later than SUNDAY, MARCH 26, 2023 and should include: 

  1. student’s name and email address;
  2. a statement of nomination highlighting what is especially notable and exciting about the student’s accomplishment(s) – if you have recently written a recommendation letter for this student that effectively describes their research accomplishments, you may submit that as your nomination statement.

We welcome any additional information, hyperlinks, etc., that would help illuminate your nominee’s accomplishments. 

**Nominated students will be asked to provide a research resume or CV, copies of relevant presentations/papers, and a personal reflection on their research activities.**

Questions? Contact Francis DuVinage, Director, National Scholarships Office and Maryland Center for Undergraduate Research (duvinage@umd.edu). 

Through the support of the Collections Fellowship I was able to spend several days in Paris working at the Institut de France in the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (AIBL). There, I studied the unpublished materials of Charles Clermont-Ganneau that are in the Cabinet du Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum (CIS). Access to this collection was granted by the kind permission of Christian Robin, the AIBL’s director. In Paris, I worked with Maria Gorea, the director of the Cabinet du CIS, where I benefited from her knowledge of Clermont-Ganneau and her ability to decipher his difficult handwriting. Dr. Gorea and her student Noémie Carpentier also were of great assistance with French technical terms that I came across in Clermont-Ganneau’s writings.


   
 
 The research is part of my larger project on the Hebrew funerary inscriptions from Silwan, which include the Royal Steward Inscription. That inscription together with a shorter inscription were first documented by Clermont-Ganneau in Silwan in 1870. He eventually purchased them for the British Museum, where they reside today. This summer in London I was able to study Clermont-Ganneau’s correspondence with the British Museum in the museum’s archives. My work in Paris, supported by the ASOR Collections Fellowship, continued my investigation into the acquisition of the artifacts. Clermont-Ganneau’s papers in the Cabinet du CIS shed important light on two aspects involving the Hebrew epigraphic sources. First his papers describe the French diplomat / archaeologist’s efforts to buy the inscriptions from the Arab homeowner in Silwan, including details on how the inscriptions were extracted. Much of this information was left out of his 1899 published account of his discovery. Second, his notes, drawings, squeezes and casts (plaster and papier-mâché) reveal the extent of his work to translate the inscriptions, as well as his plans –ultimately unfilled– plans to publish them.
    

Access to Clermont-Ganneau’s papers was critical for my project, which seeks to publish the first comprehensive edition of the funerary inscriptions from Silwan. My collections study in Paris will allow me to write a chapter on the history of research that provides insight into the events that led to the acquisition of a famous Hebrew artifact from Jerusalem that is today prominently displayed in the British Museum.

 

Interested in applying for a 2023 Study of Collections Fellowship? The deadline is February 28.

Learn more about applying here.

 

Associate Professor of History Antoine Borrut Awarded NEH Fellowship about the role of astrological histories in early Islam.

Date of Publication: 
2023-01-26

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