Research and Scholarly Work

Dean Thornton Dill created a special COVID Relief Fund to help support TTK faculty who have been met with barriers to their promotion and tenure goals over the last year due to COVID. Examples of funded requests include purchase of books and resource materials, digital subscriptions, duplication of archival materials, and professional editing services. The following faculty were awarded funds this semester. 

• Mercédès Baillargeon, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

• Julius Fleming, Jr., Department of English

• Bayley Marquez, Department of American Studies

• Thomas Zeller, Department of History

By Robert S. Levine

Robert S. Levine is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland and the author, most recently, of the forthcoming book “The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson” (W. W. Norton). His website is go.umd.edu/robertslevine.

In a recent interview, Georgia’s Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R) blamed his state’s new voting rights restrictions on the shadow cast by former president Donald Trump and his acolyte Rudolph W. Giuliani. Their false claims of election fraud, he said, spread misinformation and created the momentum for the restrictions that became law. Duncan may be correct about the precipitating cause, but Georgia has a longer history of suppressing access to the ballot. And this history reveals a fundamental truth. The new election laws were created almost exclusively by White people with a calculated design to deprive Black Georgians of their fundamental right of citizenship: the vote.

No one can help us to understand the stakes of the debate over voting rights in Georgia better than the great civil rights leader Frederick Douglass.

For Douglass, the Civil War was fought not only to end slavery, but also, as he regularly declared, to ensure that Black people have “equal rights before the law.” In the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, Douglass increasingly focused on Black people’s right to vote. His best known Civil War speech, “The Mission of the War,” maintained that the successful outcome of the war would “invest the black man everywhere with the right to vote and be voted for.”

In a nation in which Black men were denied the vote in most states, even in the North, Midwest and West, this was a radical agenda. In fact, after the Civil War, Lincoln had declared that only selected Black people — “the very intelligent” and those who served in the Union Army — should be allowed to vote. His reactionary successor, Andrew Johnson, also initially said he could support some forms of limited Black suffrage.

But increasingly Johnson sought to suppress the Black vote — and Douglass pushed back. At a White House meeting with Johnson in February 1866, Douglass demanded that the president place “in our hand the ballot with which to save ourselves.” Johnson remained resistant, so Douglass urged the Radical Republicans in Congress to use legislation to ensure that right. To some extent he was pleased with the Republicans’ creation of the 14th Amendment, which brought citizenship to African Americans, but he was angered that the amendment left the matter of voting to the individual states. In an essay published in the 1867 Atlantic Monthly, Douglass excoriated the Republicans, calling the 14th Amendment an “unfortunate blunder” that sustained “an emasculated citizenship” for African Americans. True Reconstruction, he said, could not occur without the empowerment of Black people through “the elective franchise.”

Douglass’s efforts and those of other African American activists paid off with the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, which prohibited the federal government and each state from denying or abridging citizens’ right to vote based on their “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Douglass hailed the amendment’s ratification, and proclaimed: “The black man is free, the black man is a citizen, the black man is enfranchised, and this by the organic law of the land.”

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By Jessica Weiss ’05

From aboard a fixed-wing Cessna airplane, Associate Professor of Art Shannon Collis got a bird’s-eye view of some of Canada’s largest mining projects last year. 

That aerial footage—which includes open-pit mines, waste ponds and refineries—is among the elements of her new installation, “Strata,” a multi-sensory experience that allows visitors to travel “above and through” the areas surrounding Fort Hills Suncor Oil Sands and Syncrude Oil Plant, the third-largest known crude bitumen reservoir on the planet. That’s where millions of barrels of oil are dredged up each day from beneath thousands of miles of boreal forest. 

Presented as a multi-screen projection with surround sound, “Strata” is currently at the Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College in suburban Philadelphia. “Strata” is a reference to layers in the ground, or what happens when earth is being excavated.

The project “reveals the human imprint on the region and the range of its social, economic and environmental implications,” Collis said. “And it invites visitors to contemplate and process these issues at a time of unprecedented environmental urgency.” 

Collis, who is from Canada and now lives in Baltimore, was awarded a $10,000 Rubys Artist Grant through the Baltimore-based Robert W. Deutsch Foundation to travel to the oil sands in western Canada in early 2020 to capture digital video, drone cinematography and sound recordings of the area. 

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Collis was forced to return to the United States in the midst of her field research. So, she began to explore possible ways to collect footage from afar. She found a number of collaborators in Fort McMurray Aviation and the local YMM Angel Flight Club, who helped her gather additional video footage. 

“I initially felt defeated and disappointed, but I realized that some of the work could be done remotely with the willingness and support from others in the industry and beyond,” she said. “I was really excited about this possibility, which opened my eyes to new research methods.”

Collis is a faculty member in the new Immersive Media Design (IMD) major at UMD, a unique collaboration between the College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU) and the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS), which allows students to learn to create their own immersive media. 

Being forced to shift course in light of the pandemic was a challenge, Collis said. But ultimately, it expands future possibilities both for her and her students. 

“The whole experience has truly redefined the way I think about my research—and the immersive nature of my work,” she added. “I think this could make future research richer.”

“Strata” is currently only available to a small number of Ursinus students and faculty, but plans are in the works to implement ongoing virtual programming and virtual visits of the gallery space.   

Learn more here. 

By Jessica Weiss ’05 

$4.8 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will fund a new lab at the University of Maryland to facilitate research and scholarship at the intersection of race and technology, and to develop a pipeline program to introduce undergraduates and those in the local community to the field of Black digital studies. 

The Black Communication and Technology (BCaT) Lab is part of a new multi-institutional project led in part by UMD Assistant Professor of Communication Catherine Knight Steele that seeks to work toward an “equitable digital future” through engaging in research on topics like racial inequality, disability justice and Black digital spaces.

The Mellon Foundation grant to the University of Michigan, which is leading the project, will create the Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, & Optimism (DISCO) network, a collective of six scholars at institutions across the country.

Steele’s focus, Black digital studies, encompasses the ways that technology—both its possibilities and impediments it can create—impacts African Americans. 

“In this political climate and our post-COVID world, it’s exactly the time for a project like this,” said Steele, who is collaborating with Lisa Nakamura and Remi Yergeau of the University of Michigan, André Brock of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Rayvon Fouché of Purdue University and Stephanie Dinkins of SUNY Stony Brook University on the grant. 

As with the BCaT Lab, partners will leverage their areas of expertise to establish new research hubs, courses and more at their institutions, and will share best practices through monthly meetings. 

At UMD, the BCaT Lab will develop a program model to introduce undergraduates to digital research through workshops and coursework, help students carry out graduate research and create a mentoring network for students and faculty to navigate Black digital studies, focusing on collaboration across generations of researchers. 

“In addition to teaching how to do research in race and technology, the BCaT Lab will explore how to create an effective pipeline of people of color working in the field,” Steele said. “How do we create and sustain a network of scholars who have adequate support, quality instruction and access to mentoring and advising, to move the field in a productive new direction?” 

Eventually, Steele hopes to introduce students in Prince George’s County high schools to the field of Black digital studies and encourage future scholarship.

Steele was the founding director of the Andrew W. Mellon funded African American Digital Humanities (AADHUM) initiative at Maryland, which brings together the fields of African American studies and digital humanities in order to expand upon both fields, making the digital humanities more inclusive of African American history and culture while enriching African American studies research with new methods, archives and tools. 

Her forthcoming book, “Digital Black Feminism,” examines the relationship between Black women and technology over the centuries in the U.S. 

The BCaT Lab will be up and running in Fall 2021, working with undergraduate and graduate students and hosting events, Steele said. A postdoctoral fellow will begin in the lab next year.  

By David Nakamura 

Amid increased public attention on anti-Asian hate incidents, some Republicans and conservative-leaning advocacy groups are seeking to leverage the debate to bolster their long-standing efforts to overturn affirmative action policies at elite universities and high schools.GOP lawmakers have railed against the admissions criteria used by Ivy League schools, saying they discriminate against Asian American students. Influential pundits, including podcast host Ben Shapiro, have made similar arguments on social media, suggesting that Democrats and liberal groups have been duplicitous in their advocacy. 

And on Tuesday, a new coalition of Asian American groups, based mostly on the West Coast, called on the Justice Department to reinstate a Trump administration lawsuit — which the Biden administration dropped in February — that had accused Yale University of discriminating against White and Asian American students in its admissions.

“We condemn anti-Asian hate, but we call for action not empty rhetoric. People who are appalled by the broader attacks on Asians should be equally outraged by Asian students being deprived of their fair chance at a college education based on their race,” said Linda Yang, director of Washington Asians for Equality, a group formed in 2018 to oppose affirmative action measures in Washington state.

Yang, a co-founder of the new coalition, told reporters on a conference call that she hopes President Biden “has the courage to officially acknowledge that anti-Asian racism existed before covid-19” and direct the Justice Department to reinstate the Yale case.

In a statement, Yale spokeswoman Karen N. Peart rejected any assertion that the school’s admission’s process is discriminatory.

“Yale considers every applicant as a whole person; race and ethnicity alone never determine admission; and Yale never imposes numerical quotas or targets,” she said, noting that Asian Americans comprise about 26 percent of the school’s incoming class each year, up from 14 percent 20 years ago.

Democrats have denounced the efforts as a disingenuous attempt by Republicans to score political points on an ideological issue, and to shift the focus away from rising racism and xenophobia against Asian Americans over the past year that, they argue, was fanned in part by President Donald Trump’s rhetoric in blaming China for the coronavirus pandemic.

“This is a cynical use of a moment of real pain to further an agenda that [a majority of] the Asian American community does not even support,” said Janelle Wong, a professor at the University of Maryland and co-founder of AAPI Data, a demographic and policy research operation that conducts polling among Asian American and Pacific Islanders.

Surveys from AAPI Data in 2012 and 2016 showed that a drop in support for affirmative action among Asian Americans was attributed largely to more negative views specifically among Chinese Americans. Support among other Asian American groups held roughly steady at about 73 percent, the survey found.

"They are trying to end any consideration of race in public policy, which is not consistent with ending racial discrimination,” Wong said of Republicans.

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