Paule Marshall: A Conversation with Mary Helen Washington
Literary scholar Mary Helen Washington reflects on the life and legacy of Paule Marshall with Yale University Press.
Research & Innovation
Research in the arts and humanities represents a range of disciplines and distinctive modes of knowledge and methods that result in articles and books, ideas, exhibitions, performances, artifacts and more. This deliberate and dedicated work generates deep insights into the multi-faceted people and cultures of the world, past and present.
Whether individual or collaborative, funded or unfunded, our faculty are leading national networks and conferences, providing research frameworks, engaging students, traversing international archives and making significant contributions to UMD's research enterprise.
Research Events
Sorry, no events currently present.
Writing Groups in the Writing Center: Negotiating Authority and Expertise in Collaborative Learning
An empirical, qualitative study that examines collaborative practices in multidisciplinary writing groups
Author/Lead: Sara Wilder
Dates:
"Writing Groups in the Writing Center" presents an empirical, qualitative study that examines collaborative practices in multidisciplinary writing groups, arguing that these collaborations offer rich expansions of writing center praxis. Using three case studies—undergraduate grant proposal writers, undergraduate thesis writers, and doctoral dissertation writers—the book explores how participants negotiate authority, navigate disciplinary boundaries, perform emotional labor, and develop expertise within writing center communities of practice.
As many higher education institutions strive to create spaces and systems that increase equity, accessibility, and diversity, they recognize the need for improved mentorship across academic levels. This book analyzes the significant benefits as well as the challenges faced by writing groups in providing such support. Wilder presents a nuanced account of how facilitators scaffold group practice, how members use and build genre knowledge across disciplines, and how institutional contexts shape emotional labor requirements.
For educators and tutors, the book provides an in-depth examination of the facilitator role, describing essential logistical, emotional, and intellectual practices, and addresses common conflicts and challenges. Administrators can find valuable material for training tutor-facilitators and frameworks for conceptualizing writing group functions on campus. For researchers, the book extends scholarship on writing groups, writing transfer, and collaborative learning, bridging writing center and broader writing studies research.
In an era of concern about generative AI’s role in writing education, "Writing Groups in the Writing Center" extends research on group facilitation, collaborative learning, and authority negotiation in writing center communities of practice and emphasizes the human connections that make collaborative writing meaningful and valuable for student writers.
The ebook edition will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open, a program developed to bring about equitable access and impact for the entire scholarly community, including authors, researchers, libraries, and university presses around the world.
Thornton Wilder: New Perspectives
The essays in Thornton Wilder: New Perspectives constitute a comprehensive critical reassessment at a time of renewed interest in the writer.
Author/Lead: Jackson Bryer
Dates:
Wilder is best known for "Our Town" and "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," both winners of a Pulitzer Prize, making Wilder still the only writer to be so honored for both drama and fiction. His other fiction, in particular, is far less familiar to a wider readership. The authors of these essays aim to contextualize Wilder’s work historically and to show that Wilder’s handling of questions of religion, American identity, gender, and ethics should vault him into the ranks of major American novelists. Specifically, this anthology includes groundbreaking work on the application of queer theory to "Our Town;" on Wilder’s screenplay for the Alfred Hitchcock film Shadow of a Doubt; and on Wilder’s adaptations of Ibsen’s "A Doll’s House," Farquhar’s "The Beaux’ Stratagem," and his own "The Long Christmas Dinner."
Dates:
Both homage and interrogation, Ernst Jandl’s "der gewöhnliche rilke" (written in the early 1980s) comically subverts the metaphysics of the great German-language poet, returning him to his ordinary existence while also acknowledging Rilke’s centrality to European modernism.
The mythic aura of Rilke is destroyed; what emerges is the Rilke of everyday life; what we discover is a new illumination, a new pathos for Rilke himself, in all the simple difficulty of being a body in space and time.
Jandl’s German original and Weiner’s English translation appear en face.
Is social media a promising global health center for the concussed? A scoping review of concussion coverage across social media
This review specifically focused on identifying concussion-related information accessed by different audiences on a range of social media platforms.
Author/Lead: Aysha Jawed
Dates:
This review specifically focused on identifying concussion-related information accessed by different audiences on a range of social media platforms. The goals of this review were to synthesize the existing state of concussion coverage across social media platforms from all published studies to date as the basis to inform directions for patient and family education, clinical practice and future research on improving concussion care and treatment.