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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.
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Train your Brain for Job Search Success

As a recovering neuroscientist, I love applying research from cognitive science and neuroplasticity insights to help job seekers reach their goals faster.

English

Author/Lead: Mrim Boutla
Dates:
Publisher: LinkedIn
My passion is to do so with emerging leaders who want to secure jobs that blend financial rewards with social impact and environmental sustainability.

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What It Doesn’t Have to Do With

Lindsay Bernal’s What It Doesn’t Have to Do With explores through sculpture, painting, pornography, and performance art changing views on gender and sexuality.

English

Author/Lead: Lindsay Bernal
Dates:
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
The elegiac meditations throughout this collection link the objectification of women in art and life to personal narratives of heartbreak, urban estrangement, and suicide. Haunted by the notions of femininity and domesticity, the protagonist struggles to define the self in shifting cultural landscapes.

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Keywords for Today

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

English

Author/Lead: Kellie Robertson
Dates:

The book is authored by the Keywords Project, an independent group of scholars who, with the support of the University of Pittsburgh, Jesus College, Cambridge, and the academic journal Critical Quarterly, have spent more than a decade preparing Keywords for Today.

"Internet and Digital Textuality: A Deep Reading of 10:01.”

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature

English

Author/Lead: Mehdy Sedaghat Payam
Dates:

Ed. Joseph Tabbi. London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2018. (Winner of 2018 Katherine N. Hayles Prize for Critical Writing).

“Milton’s Panorama: Paradise Regained in the Age of Critique”

This essay begins with a discussion of recent debates about the value of “critique” and other forms of adversarial reading, arguing that influential proposals for “post-critical” alternatives have privileged the role of fixed psychic states in the practic

English

Author/Lead: David Carroll Simon
Dates:
Publisher: Criticism
Turning to Roland Barthes's 1977–78 lecture course at the Collège de France, an understudied precursor to post-critical agitation, I argue that he offers us concepts, “the neutral” and “the panorama,” that invite reflection on the affective conditions of reading. Yet here the “panorama” is no more than an intriguing sketch; Milton enriches our understanding of this concept by developing a detailed description of wayward visual attention. Exploring this dimension of Paradise Regained, I depart from the near-consensus view among scholars that the poem should be understood as a celebration of self-mastery. Ultimately, I show how Milton's account of the wandering eye both anticipates and challenges recent “post-critical” perspectives by modeling a knowingly unpredictable version of irenic reading.

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The Presence of Gatsby in the Absence of Towers: 9/11 Literature and the American Dream

In the nearly one hundred years since its publication, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has invariably changed the landscape of American literature.

English

Author/Lead: Talia Fishbine
Dates:
Publisher: Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies

With its poetic language and enduring themes, it is little wonder that the novel’s structural elements have been reimagined in various literary projects. Intriguingly, Fitzgerald’s work has lent itself especially well to the genre of 9/11 literature, particularly Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Despite their disparate temporal settings, the underlying economic framework that contributes to the historical context in which these 9/11 novels are situated makes the insertion of Gatsby not only more germane, but also more conducive to an expanded discourse on the relationship between financial success and the racial “other” as a literary trope and mode of characterization. With consideration to the conceptualization of the American Dream, the way in which Gatsby is re-envisioned and invoked in McCann’s and O’Neill’s works, it functions to critique the sustainability of the overarching narrative of American exceptionalism as well as the problematic positioning of immigrants and minorities within this narrative.

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Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime

A sweeping look at the lives and work of two important English Romantic painters, from a Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author.

English

Author/Lead: Stanley Plumly
Dates:
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Renowned poet Stanley Plumly, who has been praised for his “obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant” (Washington Post) nonfiction, explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. How is it that this disparate pair will come to be regarded as Britain’s supreme landscape painters, precursors to Impressionism and Modernism? How did each painter’s life influence his work?

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Witches & Tricksters: Feminine Forms of Resistance in Afro-Mexican Folklore

2020 NeMLA Caucus Essay Awards Winners

English

Author/Lead: Nancy Vera
Dates:
2020 Women’s & Gender Studies Caucus Essay Award “Witches & Tricksters: Feminine Forms of Resistance in Afro-Mexican Folklore”

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Everywoman Her Own Theology: On the Poetry of Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker’s artistic and intellectual productions as a poet, critic, and essayist over the past 50 years are protean and have been profoundly influential to generations of readers, writers, and critics.

English

Author/Lead: Martha Nell Smith
Dates:
Publisher: University of Michigan
In all her writings, both the feminist and the human engage fiercely with the material and metaphysical world. Ostriker is a poet concerned with questions of social justice, equality, religion, and how to live in a world marked by both beauty and tragedy.

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“Black Markets.”

"Black Markets" posit that the piratic, which refers broadly to possessory acts that exist outside the law.

English

Author/Lead: Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
Dates:
Publisher: Routledge
It constitutes both a poetics and a model for understanding how persons who have been left outside the restrictive and exclusive categories of citizen resist the regulatory powers of and demand redress from the liberal state. More specifically, "Black Markets" turns to John Brougham's burlesque Columbus, El Filibustero! and Eligio Ancona's El Filibustero: Novela Historica, texts that center on pirates and piracy, to signal the importance of the piratic in the creation of exceptional American property regimes. The language of piracy, in other words, permeates the play as colonization is reduced to low-investment/high-yield marketing, at best, and get-rich-quick schemes, at worst. The piratic serves as a model for understanding why certain forms of unlawful property ownership can become the vehicle for personhood and representation.

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