RESEARCH, SCHOLARSHIP & CREATIVITY

PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS

ARHU faculty maintain close relationships and hold leadership positions with:

Northeast Victorian Studies Association: Jason Rudy, president

Labor and Working Class History Association: Julie Greene, president

Linguistic Society of America: Colin Phillips, fellow

Royal Society of the Netherlands, Evert Willem Beth Foundation: John F. Horty, board member

STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS

With a grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation and led by Ruth E. Zambrana, professor and interim chair of women’s studies and director of the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity, the consortium will collaborate with the University of Pennsylvania on a national summit on fostering diversity and inclusion in higher education.

As part of “Enslaved: The People of the Historic Slave Trade,” a project led by Michigan State University and funded by a $1.47 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Daryle Williams, associate professor of history and ARHU associate dean for faculty affairs, is creating an open-access archive of documents relevant to enslaved people and free Africans in Louisiana and Brazil.

UMD students now have access to a broad range of courses on Islam and the Muslim world through the Digital Studies Islamic Curriculum, which uses new technology to bring together courses taught by faculty from over a dozen Big Ten Academic Alliance member universities, including Peter Wein, associate professor of history and UMD’s faculty liaison.

Supported by a grant from the Consortium for Applied Studies in Jewish Education, Avital Karpman, associate clinical professor of Hebrew and director of the Hebrew Program, will collaborate with Sharon Avni of the City University of New York, Borough of Manhattan Community College to study the growth of Hebrew language programs at charter schools and at public schools across the U.S.

SCHOLARSHIP

Associate Professor of American studies Jason Farman received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to complete “Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World,” a book about how communication technologies such as instant messages have changed how we experience waiting and time.

Renée Ater, associate professor emerita of art history and archaeology, researched the design, construction and changing meaning of contemporary monuments acknowledging the legacy of slavery with the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Funded by a $2.2 million grant from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, Xiaoli Nan, professor of communication, is leading a team of researchers from University of Maryland, College Park and University of Maryland, Baltimore, to improve cancer prevention among medically underserved African Americans in Baltimore.

Valerie Anishchenkova, associate professor of Arabic studies, is leading an initiative funded by the Institute of International Education to pioneer an open-access curriculum to foster cultural knowledge and awareness of stereotypes and bias.

VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS

Funded by a $600,000, two-year Arts in Education Research Grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, Kenneth Elpus, associate professor of music, is using a combination of new and publically-available datasets to study the relationship between K-12 arts education and student success in higher education. The University of Maryland Art Gallery’s exhibition, “Progress and Harmony for Mankind: Art and Technology Circa 1970” (in background), featured works that highlighted the relationships among American art, industry and technology in the 1970s.

Through the Artist Partner Program at The Clarice, Natalia Kaliada and Nikolai Khalezin, co-founders of the Belarus Free Theatre, led a playwriting workshop, hosted a community dialogue on free speech and creativity and presented their documentary at the National Press Club.

The “Portraits of Who We Are” exhibition (in background) at the David C. Driskell Center presented self-portraits by African-American artists and also included portraits of African-American artists created by their colleagues.

TEACHING

In Assistant Professor of Art History and Archaeology

Emily Egan’s course “Ancient Mediterranean

Portraiture,” students learn how to use digital tools that complement traditional humanities research to build online catalogues and 3D museum models.

Justin Lohr, senior lecturer in English, received the 2017-18 Professional Track Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Office of Faculty Affairs and the Provost.

Students fluent in either Arabic or Hebrew came together in Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies

Shay Hazkani’s class about the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict to read letters written by soldiers who fought in the conflict.

>> LOOKING FORWARD Merle Collins, professor of English, was named a 2018-19 Distinguished Scholar Teacher in recognition of her remarkable contributions to Anglophone Caribbean literature and culture, which have consistently included interdisciplinary work as well as mentoring that goes beyond the classroom.

VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS

Associate Professor of dance performance and scholarship and associate director of the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies Maura Keefe received a 2018 Research Communicator Impact Award from the UMD Division of Research for her work as a scholar in residence at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, where she interviews, writes about and lectures on dancers from around the world.