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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.
“Defunct Words and Phrases Due to the Coronavirus Crisis"
McSweeney’s is an independent nonprofit publishing company based in San Francisco.
Author/Lead: Emily Flamm
Dates:
Publisher: McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
Publisher: McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
As well as operating a daily humor website, they also publish Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Illustoria and an ever-growing selection of books under various imprints.
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With the Fire on High
Elizabeth Acevedo ‘16 dazzles with her novel in prose about a girl with talent, pride, and a drive to feed the soul that keeps her fire burning bright.
Dates:
From the New York Times bestselling author of the National Book Award-winning title The Poet X comes a dazzling novel in prose about a girl with talent, pride and a drive to feed the soul that keeps her fire burning bright. Ever since she got pregnant freshman year, Emoni Santiago’s life has been about making the tough decisions – doing what has to be done for her daughter and her abuela. The one place she can let all that go is in the kitchen, where she adds a little something magical to everything she cooks, turning her food into straight-up goodness.
Even though she dreams of working as a chef after she graduates, Emoni knows that it’s not worth her time to pursue the impossible. Yet despite the rules she thinks she has to play by, once Emoni starts cooking, her only choice is to let her talent break free.
"Shakespeare’s Notation: Writing Sound in Much Ado About Nothing"
An essay on writing processes entwined with musical performance, in the Theories and Methodologies forum on “Aurality and Literacy."
Author/Lead: Scott Trudell
Dates:
PMLA 135, no. 2 (March 2020): 370–77, DOI: 10.1632/pmla.2020.135.2.370
“Skin Black and Wrinkled: The Toxic Ecology of the Sibyl’s Cave"
postmedieval 11, no. 1. March, 2020, pp. 91-101.
Author/Lead: Alan Montroso
Dates:
In Virgil’s Aeneid, the famous prophetess known as the Sibyl of Cumae is imagined as coextensive with her cavernous home, a porous volcanic cave that amplifies her voice. However, as the twelfth-century adaptors of the Aeneid reimagined the many-mouthed cavern of prophecy as the murky and blackened ecology at the entrance to the underworld, the Sibyl is similarly transformed into a withered and blackened witch in the Roman d’Eneas. This marginalized and racialized woman is poisoned by her environment, the ‘trans-corporeality’ of flesh and environ a harmful constellation of material and cultural factors. And yet the Sibyl survives, perhaps preserved by the toxic landscape and even granted specialized knowledge. A bit of moss growing from her ear in the German Eneit also suggests that mastery over nature is impossible, entanglement within the environment a kind of feminine resistance to masculine attempts at dominance over nature.
“Light Like Gunshots.”
The cops release me after they review the surveillance footage. I sign a paper that says I was treated with respect and dignity while incarcerated.
Author/Lead: Ross Angelella
Dates:
Publisher: Close to the Bone
Publisher: Close to the Bone
Annie picks me up from the police station. Jack and Nicole are both asleep in the back seat of the car. Annie turns the key in the engine.
“A Good Hour.”
While later in the day he’ll be let go from his job as a copywriter at an online men’s zine, Ransom spent his lunch break watching the destruction of a church.
Author/Lead: Ross Angelella
Dates:
Publisher: Failbetter
Publisher: Failbetter
His wife, Venus, watched too and said many things.
Dates:
A short-tempered business man, suffering a mid-life crisis, interviews a Christian grade school math teacher to be his nemesis.
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence.
Dates:
This remarkable reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning reveals the history of racist ideas in America, and inspires hope for an antiracist future. It takes you on a race journey from then to now, shows you why we feel how we feel, and why the poison of racism lingers. It also proves that while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited.
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“Reading Modernist-ly or Postmodernist-ly?: The Oblique Relations between the Prose and the Journal in Ann Quin’s Passages”
Presented in E- 6 Forms of Pomo Fiction.
Author/Lead: Tung-An Wei
Dates:
Publisher: Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900
Publisher: Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900
A paper presented at The 48th Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, Louisville, KY, February 20–22, 2020.
“The Contradictory Sense of Ending in Anna Kavan’s Ice”
Presented in the Narrative Temporality: Gaps, Closure, and PoydrasContradiction.
Author/Lead: Tung-An Wei
Dates:
Publisher: International Society for the Study of Narrative
Publisher: International Society for the Study of Narrative
Chair: Marina Ludwigs, Stockholm University
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