Research and Scholarly Work

UMD Libraries is pleased to announce the recipients of the inaugural TOME@UMD grants:

• Siv B. Lie, Ph.D., of the School of Music and her work, Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France;  
• Mauro Resmini, Ph.D., of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures and his work, Italian Political Cinema; 
• Thurka Sangaramoorthy, Ph.D., of the Department of Anthropology and her work, Immigration and the Landscape of Care in Rural America;  
• Thomas Zeller, Ph.D., from the Department of History and his work, Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters.

The TOME@UMD (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) grant program sponsors the publication of open access, digital monographs of UMD faculty members.

Scholarly monographs are detailed written accounts of research in specialized subjects, and are especially critical in the dissemination of knowledge in the arts, humanities, and social sciences disciplines.Publishing open access monographs removes access barriers and allows for research to be used freely by anyone.

All UMD faculty members were invited to apply and submissions were evaluated on the potential impact of their work both in their field and beyond academia; the benefits of the open access distribution for their work; and the potential to enhance equity, diversity and inclusion in the production and dissemination of knowledge.

TOME is a national initiative to advance open-access (OA) publishing of monographs in the humanities and social sciences. TOME’s goal is to make this important scholarship available to readers across the globe, without cost and access barriers. 

TOME@UMD is led by the University Libraries in partnership with the Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost, and the College of Arts and Humanities.

By Sala Levin ’10

In 2000 and again in 2010, Congress asked the U.S. Department of Education to conduct a nationwide study on the status of arts education in schools—information advocates used to argue for broader access to horizon-expanding activities ranging from watercolor painting to singing in the school musical.

After no such study was mandated in 2020, Kenneth Elpus, associate professor of music education in the University of Maryland’s School of Music, realized an arts education researcher would need to take on the task. Now, with $150,000 in funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, Elpus is launching a research lab at UMD that will survey 4,000 K-12 public schools to learn about their educational programming across music, theater, dance and visual arts.

“Most efforts to collect data about the educational system in the U.S. are geared toward making reading, writing and math learning legible—so that we understand student engagement and success in those subjects. Teachers and school administrators use that data as a guidepost for setting policy and improving instruction,” said Elpus. “But when you look at the work of educating a child, there’s a lot more in preparing humans for the world than how well they read, write and do math.”

Without a recent federal study of the standing of American arts education, administrators, teachers and supporters have lacked data on trends and major changes, especially amid the disruption to schools caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. (Imagine trying to teach a middle school orchestra virtually.) That data, said Elpus, is crucial to advocates as they work to increase access to arts education and to arts educators as they strive to improve arts learning.

Elpus will examine questions like: Who’s taking arts classes? Who’s teaching them? How much funding does arts education receive? How many classes and extracurricular activities are offered? How has COVID-19 changed teaching and learning? Partner organizations including the National Association for Music Education and the National Art Education Association will help connect Elpus to educators across the country to craft survey questions that will illuminate the issues, and to distribute the survey.

Yan Li, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics in the School of Public Health and professor in the Joint Program in Survey Methodology, is serving as statistician and methodologist on the project, while four graduate students are also supported by the grant. Funding for the lab also comes from the School of Music, the College of Arts and Humanities and the Division of Research.

Elpus hopes the data will help influence legislative decisions and funding for primary and secondary arts education. “Very few people would ever … want to deny (a student) the opportunity for aesthetic and emotional understanding, but in the way that education works in the U.S., the decisions are made by policymakers who want to be informed by data,” he said. “When we collect and analyze high-quality data on arts education, then we have a stronger position from which to effect positive change in education policy.”

The University of Maryland Office of the Provost and Office of the Vice President for Research have announced ten recipients of this year’s Independent Scholarship, Research and Creativity Awards (ISRCA). The grant funding will support a variety of research studies and scholarly explorations ranging from poetry and literature to the immigrant experience.

“We are excited to support these projects, which embody faculty creativity and demonstrate the versatility and broad expertise of our researchers,” said Senior Vice President and Provost Jennifer King Rice.

The ISRCA program, launched in 2019, is designed to support the professional advancement of faculty engaged in scholarly and creative pursuits that use historical, humanistic, interpretive, or ethnographic approaches; explore aesthetic, ethical, and/or cultural values and their roles in society; conduct critical or rhetorical analysis; engage in archival and/or field research; and develop or produce creative works. Awardees are selected based on peer review of the quality of the proposed project, the degree to which the project will lead to the applicant’s professional advancement, and the potential academic and societal impact of the project.

In all, 44 eligible proposals were submitted, representing 9 colleges and 29 departments across campus. The awards, worth up to $10K, support faculty and their research expenses.  

“We were greatly pleased to see the strong faculty interest and engagement in this program, and the robust and diverse research areas explored by our faculty,” said Interim Vice President for Research Amitabh Varshney. 

This year’s award recipients are:

In References We Trust? A History of Peer Review in the Sciences  
Melinda Baldwin, Associate Professor (ARHU-History)

Landscape Memories, Migration, and Commons Management in Forest Systems
Madeline Brown, Assistant Professor (BSOS-Anthropology)

Radical Lens: The Photographs of Nancy Shia 
Nancy Mirabal, Associate Professor (ARHU-American Studies)

 Navigating Prolonged Legal Limbo: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Recipients in the D.C. Metro Region
Christina Getrich, Associate Professor (BSOS-Anthropology)

Kippax Colonoware Sourcing and Trade Study
Donald Linebaugh, Professor (ARCH-Historic Preservation)

Embodied Afterlives: Performing Love Suicide in Early Modern Japan
Jyana Browne, Assistant Professor (ARHU-SLLC)

Selective: Data, Power, and the Fight over Fit in Organizational Life
Daniel Greene, Assistant Professor (INFO)

Sensing God: Embodied Poetics and Somatic Epistemology in Medieval Persian Sufi Literature
Matthew Miller, Assistant Professor (ARHU-Persian/SLLC)

Korean Immigrant Pioneers and Intergenerational Mobility Prospects in the DC Region 
Julie Park, Associate Professor (BSOS-Sociology and Asian American Studies)

Cool Fratricide: Murder and Metaphysics in Black and Indigenous U.S. Literature 
Chad Infante, Assistant Professor (ARHU-English)

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Barbara Haggh-Huglo, professor of musicology in the University of Maryland School of Music, was elected an honorary member of the American Musicological Society (AMS), the largest musicological organization in the world. Honorary members are those scholars “who have made outstanding contributions to furthering its stated object and whom the Society wishes to honor.” The award is the highest honor of the AMS, reserved for the most esteemed of scholars.
 
Haggh-Huglo, who specializes in medieval and Renaissance music, has conducted extensive research in libraries and archives across Europe and the British Isles, as well as in the United States and Mexico, and has published widely on the music and musicians of northwest Europe from 800–1600. The AMS called Haggh-Huglo “a committed pedagogue.”
 
The “author of over 100 articles and chapters, Dr. Haggh-Huglo is a reservoir of knowledge on medieval and Renaissance music whose expertise has made for a significant international presence and enduring impact at her institution,” the AMS statement said.
 
Haggh-Huglo became immersed in the history of medieval music thanks in large part to her multilingual upbringing; by the time she was 20, she read English, French and German and had taken lessons in Dutch. During her doctoral research at the University of Illinois, she took several research trips to Europe and began working with early archives.
 
In Lille, France, Haggh-Huglo found documents to prove that Guillaume Du Fay, considered by many the greatest composer of the 15th century, composed a day’s worth of plainchant, or music with a single melodic line.
 
“No one had known about it and still, to this day, it is an exception in the history of music because we don’t know of any well-known composer of choral music who also composed chant,” Haggh-Huglo said.
 
She went on to write the first histories of music in the cities of late medieval Brussels and Ghent in her dissertation and articles, and later became known for her editions and studies of pre-modern plainchant offices, which were sung from one evening to the next in churches and told the lives of patron saints. During her research on offices, she rediscovered a lost 15th-century office used by the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece.
 
Haggh-Huglo has also published articles on topics ranging from Old Hispanic and Irish chant to German radio dramas of the 1950s and 1960s.
 
She has been at the University of Maryland since 2000, where she has taught courses on early music, notation and theory, research methods, and the survey of music history. She will teach a course on music, art and architecture from Vitruvius to the present for the first time in Spring 2022.
 
Her forthcoming three-volume book is “Recollecting the Virgin Mary with Music: Guillaume Du Fay's Chant across Five Centuries.” She will lecture about the book to the Belgian Academy of Sciences next spring.
 
“This was very unexpected and I am deeply honored,” Haggh-Huglo said about the award. “I have dedicated my life to this scholarship and this puts me in the company of a very elite group of people in the field. I hope this distinction will help me to continue and encourage others to pursue this research.”

BY ROBERT S. LEVINE

Robert S. Levine is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, available now from W. W. Norton & Company.

On Jan. 3, 1867, nearly two years after the end of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass stood before a full house of hundreds of African Americans at Philadelphia’s National Hall. He had been invited to speak in a Black lecture series organized by William Still, famous for his work on the Underground Railroad. As recounted by the Philadelphia Daily Evening Telegraph, the celebrated African American singer Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield performed several arias before Douglass’s introduction. Douglass then took the stage to speak on the “Sources of Danger to the Republic.” The Telegraph reported that he “was frequently interrupted by applause, and evidently made the best effort of his life.”

“Sources of Danger to the Republic” is indeed one of Douglass’s greatest speeches, and it deserves to be better known for its ruminations on the precarious state of democracy in post-Civil War America. Douglass delivered the speech in the midst of the battle over civil rights for Black people, addressing the threat posed to the nation by a racist President who refused to give them the full rights of citizenship. Douglass’s warning about antidemocratic authoritarianism during the early years of Reconstruction resonates in our own time as well.

The “Sources of Danger” speech was prompted by the reactionary policies of Andrew Johnson, who assumed the presidency on April 15, 1865, after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Shortly after taking office, Johnson pardoned former Confederate leaders, and over the four years of his presidency he vetoed all legislation that sought to expand the rights of African Americans. (Many of those vetoes were overturned by the Radical Republicans and their allies.) In particular, Johnson opposed measures that granted African Americans the right to vote. His reactionary policies contributed to massacres of Black people in Memphis and New Orleans during the spring and summer of 1866. Appalled by the killing of over 100 Black people in those cities, Douglass linked the murders to the disempowerment promoted by Johnson. “Disenfranchisement means New Orleans; it means Memphis,” he said. In this way Douglass called attention to the always simmering possibilities for violence that accompanied the suppression of voting rights.

But Douglass was also angry at the Radical Republicans, who claimed to support African Americans, but attempted to stop Douglass from attending a public meeting of Republicans in September 1866 because they didn’t want their party to be perceived as “Black.” Douglass was also distraught that the Republicans’ proposed Fourteenth Amendment, which gave Blacks birthright citizenship, failed to include the right to vote. Without the vote, Douglass bitterly remarked, “my citizenship is but an empty name.”

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