Research and Scholarly Work

New York, NY – 7 December 2022 – The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is awarding its twenty-ninth annual Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book to La Marr Jurelle Bruce, associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, for How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, published by Duke University Press. 

The MLA Prize for a First Book was established in 1993. It is awarded annually for the first book-length publication of a member of the association that is a literary or linguistic study, a critical edition of an important work, or a critical biography.

The MLA Prize for a First Book is one of nineteen awards that will be presented on 6 January 2023, during the association’s annual convention. The members of the selection committee were Grace Lavery (Univ. of California, Berkeley); Christopher M. Lupke (Univ. of Alberta); Tobias Menely (Univ. of California, Davis); Brian Russell Roberts (Brigham Young Univ.); Mikko Tuhkanen (Texas A&M Univ., College Station), chair; Christophe Wall-Romana (Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities); and Michelle Zerba (Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge).

The committee’s citation for Bruce’s book reads:

In How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, La Marr Jurelle Bruce offers us a new practice of Black criticism by focusing on the generativity of what has most frequently been pathologized and dismissed: Black madness. While the study is rooted in a Foucauldian critique of psychiatry, Bruce counters the Eurocentrism of Continental philosophy by demonstrating the ways that jazz solos, slapstick routines, rapped verses, and other forms of cultural expression have theorized Black life and Black resistance. Bruce develops original and provocative readings across media and genres, and the impact of his work will be felt in multiple fields and disciplines.

The Modern Language Association of America and its over 20,000 members in 100 countries work to strengthen the study and teaching of languages and literature. Founded in 1883, the MLA provides opportunities for its members to share their scholarly findings and teaching experiences with colleagues and to discuss trends in the academy. The MLA sustains one of the finest publication programs in the humanities, producing a variety of publications for language and literature professionals and for the general public. The association publishes the MLA International Bibliography, the only comprehensive bibliography in language and literature, available online. The MLA Annual Convention features meetings on a wide variety of subjects. More information on MLA programs is available at www.mla.org.

Before the establishment of the MLA Prize for a First Book in 1993, members who were authors of first books were eligible, along with other members, to compete for the association’s James Russell Lowell Prize, established in 1969. Apart from its limitation to members’ first books, the MLA Prize for a First Book follows the same criteria and definitions as the Lowell Prize

The MLA Prize for a First Book is awarded under the auspices of the association’s Committee on Honors and Awards. Other awards sponsored by the committee are the William Riley Parker Prize; the James Russell Lowell Prize; the Howard R. Marraro Prize; the Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize; the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize; the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars; the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize; the Morton N. Cohen Award; the MLA Prizes for a Scholarly Edition and for Collaborative, Bibliographical, or Archival Scholarship; the Lois Roth Award; the William Sanders Scarborough Prize; the Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies; the MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies; the MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages; the Matei Calinescu Prize; the MLA Prize for an Edited Collection; the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prizes for Comparative Literary Studies, for French and Francophone Studies, for Italian Studies, for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures, for a Translation of a Literary Work, for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature, for African Studies, for East Asian Studies, for Middle Eastern Studies, and for South Asian Studies; and the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies. A complete list of current and previous winners can be found on the MLA website.

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Read the full press release below.

By Chris Carroll 

In the University of Maryland's new $30 million Grand Challenges Grants program, more potentially world-changing ideas will now get the chance to thrive.

Besides awarding three major institutional grants to UMD researchers (who will receive 100% matches from their academic units) to work toward establishing new research institutes, centers or academic units, university leaders have decided to grab the opportunity to fund other semifinalists in the category as well.

Photo by Stephanie S. Cordle

“We have nine semifinalists, and we have to narrow it down to three—but we don’t want to lose any of these incredibly promising, compelling ideas for addressing the world’s biggest challenges,” Senior Vice President and Provost Jennifer King Rice said.

The new Grand Challenge Impact Awards—up to $200,000 per year for two years with some additional matching from colleges—will be announced along with institutional and project grants (both individual and team-based) near the start of the Spring 2023 semester.

To address the world’s top challenges, from racial equity to pandemic preparedness to climate change, the university will invest up to $30 million in the grant program: Institutional winners will be awarded a total of $3 million over three years, including the college or school match, with up to 10 team project grants and 50 individual project grants each receiving total amounts of $1.5 million and $150,000, respectively.

Rice spoke to Maryland Today to provide an update on the selection process and explain how the program will strengthen research in every UMD college and school—and potentially benefit all of humanity.

What’s the status of the winner selection process?
We received 24 submissions for institutional grants by the deadline in July, and in September we narrowed that down to nine. In early November, those project teams made presentations to campus leaders including President (Darryll J.) Pines, myself and a number of key administrators at the university who could both help inform the decision on the finalists and also be instrumental in helping find additional sources of revenue for the projects, whether it’s from state or federal agencies, or from foundations and philanthropic sources. Now we’re in the process of narrowing this down to three winners. The other six projects will be offered Grand Challenge Impact Awards.

There were also 111 team and individual investigator project grant proposals submitted by the deadline in early October. At the end of January, we’ll announce the final awardees in all the categories.

What has most impressed you when you look at the full scope of the proposals?
Scope is exactly what I was going to say; I was impressed and fascinated by the range of topics covered. The president and I anticipated climate change-related proposals and projects addressing pandemic preparedness, but there were other compelling topics that we didn’t expect, like one addressing literacy and equity, and another focused on values-centered artificial intelligence.

This range of “big ideas” really underscores the importance of using this sort of crowdsourcing approach to accelerating solutions to the grand challenges of our time, which is a key element of the university’s new strategic plan.

How is this grant program unique?
Other universities that have introduced grand challenge initiatives have tended to focus on priorities identified by the administration, rather than leveraging the creativity and innovation in the academic community. Our approach that held multiple levels of grant competitions provided a mechanism for members of the community to bring their biggest and best ideas forward. The ideas all come from the faculty and staff, and all of our colleges and schools are represented. If you look at some of the institutional grant finalists, they’re representing upward of six or seven different colleges. That’s very powerful and reflects the type of interdisciplinary collaboration required to address these complex and enduring challenges.

We purposefully put an emphasis on working across disciplines and bringing people together to break down the silos that can develop at any institution. We also prioritized projects that provide innovative and new opportunities for students’ learning. After all, education is our core mission, and we want to prepare the next generation of leaders who will continue to take on complex and pressing problems.

The Grand Challenge Grants program was designed to advance key elements of our university strategic plan, Fearlessly Forward, which calls for investing in faculty, students, staff, alumni and partner capacity to work across disciplines to take on these enduring challenges and contribute in meaningful ways to the public good.

What’s the committee looking for? What sets a proposal apart?
Impact. The whole idea of these Grand Challenge Grants is to create meaningful, tangible, real-world impact on our communities and our society. One of the questions that we asked all of our groups was, “If this project is successful, in 10 years, what will have changed in our communities and in our world as a result of the work that this team is doing?”

We want to leverage the incredible contributions and expertise of our faculty, and enable that to be the building blocks for accelerating transformative change.

How might this transform things at UMD?
These projects—the institutional grants, the impact awards and the project grants—will advance UMD as a leader among universities committed to advancing the public good through our work. These grants will foster collaborations that build on all the important foundational science and humanistic work already taking place on campus to amplify our impact on the world.

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Images of massive chunks of ice collapsing from Greenland’s glaciers into the ocean have become emblematic of a changing climate and the need to drastically reduce global carbon emissions.

University of Maryland Assistant Professor of Art Cy Keener is working to characterize some of these icebergs—capturing their unique identities and the ways they change as they drift in the sea.

His collaborative “Iceberg Portraiture” series is part of an exhibition now on view at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in Washington, D.C., which Keener created with landscape researcher Justine Holzman, climatologist Ignatius Rigor and scientist John Woods. It’s the result of almost four years of trips to the Arctic in which they placed trackers onto the ice to collect data with the hopes of making that information tangible and visceral.

At NAS, the 7-foot-tall digital ink-and-pastel portraits provide a glimpse into the life of four icebergs with vastly different scales and shapes—some the size of a car and others a third of a mile wide—observed and recorded in August 2021 in western Greenland.

“Each of these [icebergs] is a piece of 10,000- to 40,000-year-old ice coming off the Greenland ice sheet into the ocean,” Keener said. “In this exhibition we understand them as living things, falling apart in front of your eyes, constantly changing. We show their diversity and beauty.”

Keener’s efforts began with the development of a low-cost, open-source buoy to collect meteorological and oceanographic data to use in his work. He first traveled to the Arctic in Spring 2019 with Rigor, a senior principal research scientist at the University of Washington and the coordinator of the International Arctic Buoy Program, whose members maintain a network of buoys across the expanse of the Arctic Ocean.

At VisArts Gallery in Rockville, Maryland, he and Holzman created “Sea Ice 71.348778º N, 156.690918º W,” an installation that used hanging strips of 6-foot-long, blue-green polyester film to reflect the thickness and color of the Arctic ice based on the buoy data.

He also created various versions of “Digital Ice Core,” a sculpture piece that used electronics, data and satellite communication to link a remote field site with a digital light sculpture, made up of 1,000 LED lights. Viewers were then able to see a recreated version of the ambient light in the air, ice and ocean in close to real-time.

In 2020, Keener received a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to continue his work. And in Spring 2021, he spent nine days on a Danish navy ship on the west coast of Greenland.

In addition to the iceberg portraits, the NAS exhibition includes a continuation of Keener’s work to represent the thinning of sea ice. The nearly 8-feet-tall “Sea Ice Daily Drawings,” made of aluminum, acrylic, paper and ink, are based on some 27,000 data points that come from sensors buried meters into the ice. They show subtle temperature and color variation throughout a vertical profile of air, sea ice and ocean.

The drawings, while visually appealing, are yet another stark reminder of the inexorable changes occurring in the Arctic, Keener said: Before the 1980s, the surface of the Arctic Ocean was thoroughly covered with this thick, multi-year ice. Now it’s predicted to vanish by the middle of the century.

“As an artist, I get to go out there, be in this environment and stand on this ice before it disappears, and then try to bring life to that through installation, drawing and sculpture,” Keener said. “I’m using data not to get more statistics, but to make these things that are on their way out physically real—to extend the experience through time and tell a longer story.”

By Shannon Clark M.Jour. ’22

A side of Indigenous Baltimore hidden in plain sight for years will become more visible today, thanks to a University of Maryland graduate’s work that traces the path of important aspects of her own cultural heritage and that of thousands of other area residents.

Artist and folklorist Ashley Minner Ph.D. ’20, a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, has created a walking tour of “The Reservation,” the affectionate nickname of an area of East Baltimore roughly centered around the intersection of South Broadway and East Baltimore streets.

The area was once rich with American Indian businesses owing to thousands of members of various tribes—including many Lumbee—who migrated to the city after World War II for economic opportunity or to escape Jim Crow segregation in the South.

Determined to uplift what’s becoming a forgotten part of Baltimore history, Minner developed the illustrated guide, website and mobile app in partnership with other artists, designers, scholars and culture bearers—to transport users back in time with pictures and text, and to realize that American Indian people are still present. The Guide to Indigenous Baltimore mobile app was developed in partnership with Elizabeth Rule of the Chickasaw Nation, who also developed the Guide to Indigenous DC. These apps are the first two of her greater Guide to Indigenous Lands project.

“In many cases, you can only imagine what was there because it’s not there now,” said Minner. “After you start hearing the stories [from American Indian elders], you start looking for traces of what was in the building. As you start to walk, you get an appreciation for how much was actually there.”

Minner’s tour is also available via baltimorereservation.com, and starts at the South Broadway Baptist Church, which was founded by Lumbee tribal members who needed a safe space to worship together. The church remains, while other stops, like the Hokahey Indian Trading Post, Hartmann’s BBQ Shop and the Volcano Bar and Restaurant, have been gone for decades.

Part of Minner’s mission is scholarly, and part is personal. Growing up in Dundalk, Md., separated geographically from fellow Lumbee in her youth, she sometimes felt the pressure of being perceived as “less Indian” by her peers. At a school where “no one looked like me,” she struggled to find her own identity between two separate communities.

“Nobody expects to meet an Indian in Baltimore,” said Minner. “Growing up, you might have one or two in your whole school, and you have to make an effort to be involved in your community. You’re just always trying to make space for yourself.”

The Lumbee Tribe as a whole has faced struggles for recognition. Although they have enjoyed partial federal recognition since 1956, the passage this year of the Lumbee Recognition Act in the U.S. House of Representatives (it’s currently progressing through the Senate with sponsorship from both of North Carolina’s Republican senators) points to the potential full federal recognition of the tribe of 55,000 enrolled members, a designation the Lumbee have sought since 1888. That would afford them a range of services and benefits available to other federally recognized American Indian tribes, and greater sovereignty as a nation.

As a young person, Minner was constantly encouraged to learn more about her culture by her aunt. For nearly twenty years now, she has worked as a professional artist, often using her art as an expression of her heritage.

“I did the ‘Exquisite Lumbees’ project in collaboration with 29 other people from my generation,” said Minner. “That [project] was just about reminding ourselves that we are beautiful and powerful and part of something bigger than ourselves. Sometimes where we live tries to make us forget that.”

In Photo:

One stop on a new tour of Indigenous Baltimore by alum Ashley Minner Ph.D. '20 (below) is the the East Baltimore Church of God, founded decades ago by members of Baltimore's Lumbee community. Many Lumbee tribal members remain in the city, including local elders who gathered on East Baltimore Street (at bottom) in 2012.

Church photo courtesy Rev. Robert E. Dodson Jr., colorization by Katie Lively; Ashley Minner portrait courtesy of Jill Fannon; Lumbee elders photo courtesy of Sue Hunt Vasquez

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Tune in on YouTube at 6 p.m. today for a virtual launch and community celebration for the Illustrated Guide to East Baltimore’s Historic American Indian “Reservation,” baltimorereservation.com, and the Guide to Indigenous Baltimore mobile app.

Ground Works, a2ru's peer-reviewed platform for arts-integrated research, announces a call for submissions to a special themed issue entitled Creating Knowledge in Common. With this issue, we seek to lift up university-community partnered research and inquiry that center the arts. We invite submissions that deepen our understanding of how the structures, processes, and outcomes of such partnerships result in reciprocal relationships that advance new knowledge. In addition, submissions should make clear how the shared work benefits both the academic and the community partners. 

Ground Works encourages a wide array of submission types that incorporate multimedia to tell the story of creating knowledge in common. All submissions must be received and flagged for consideration in this special issue by January 31, 2023. Read the full call for submissions, and contact a2ru-editorgw@umich.edu with any questions.