Research & Innovation

Students may receive each award twice during their graduate education at UMD, once before the achievement of candidacy (including master’s students) and a second time after the achievement of candidacy.

While scholars have often looked to this period in order to narrate the triumph of methodical rigor as a quintessentially modern intellectual value, Simon describes the appeal of open-ended receptivity to the protagonists of the New Science. In straying from the work of self-possession and the duty to sift fact from fiction, early modern intellectuals discovered the cognitive advantages of the undisciplined mind.

Students may receive each award twice during their graduate education at UMD, once before the achievement of candidacy (including master’s students) and a second time after the achievement of candidacy.

Robert S. Levine challenges this assessment by exploring the conflicted, multiracial, and contingent dimensions present in the works of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American and African American writers. Conflict and uncertainty, not consensus, Levine argues, helped define American literary nationalism during this period.

Read more about Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies.

 

In this book, Sharada Balachandran Orihuela examines property ownership and its connections to citizenship, race and slavery, and piracy as seen through the lens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature. Balachandran Orihuela defines piracy expansively, from the familiar concept of nautical pirates and robbery in international waters to postrevolutionary counterfeiting, transnational slave escape, and the illegal trade of cotton across the Americas during the Civil War. Weaving together close readings of American, Chicano, and African American literature with political theory, the author shows that piracy, when represented through literature, has imagined more inclusive and democratic communities than were then possible in reality. The author shows that these subjects are not taking part in unlawful acts only for economic gain. Rather, Balachandran Orihuela argues that piracy might, surprisingly, have served as a public good, representing a form of transnational belonging that transcends membership in any one nation-state while also functioning as a surrogate to citizenship through the ownership of property. These transnational and transactional forms of social and economic life allow for a better understanding of the foundational importance of property ownership and its role in the creation of citizenship.

Winners receive a letter of recognition from the Provost and a $1,000 award in recognition of consistently excellent contributions in one of the three core areas of academic activity.

For an outstanding scholarly study of black American literature or culture.

They each highlight different aspects of what narrators and characters think and feel, and their explanatory grounds differ. An unnatural reading unearths the narrative features, such as literal mind reading, that cannot be reduced to real-world possibilities, whereas a cognitive approach may focus on what is analogous to real-world cognition, or it may explain how unusual fiction is made sense of in cognitive terms. This article offers a synthesis in which the contrast between the two is closely examined. Then the article makes a case for a dialectical approach in which readings move from one position to another in order to achieve a more rewarding and encompassing understanding of fictional minds in general and unnatural minds in particular. The argument is developed through a reading of Peter Verhelst’s The Man I Became and through a discussion of the case of mind reading.

After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, he left Greenwich Village and moved to Harlem to take up the work Malcolm had begun. Rejecting his bohemian past, he committed himself to black nationalism and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre­School to radicalize the poor through art.

Scholars have read this text as an expression of a "religious crisis," and they have described the event of its destruction as a critical turn both in Ficino's thought and in Renaissance intellectual history. This essay explores an alternative explanation for Ficino's early engagement with the poetry of the ancient atomist, revisiting a number of familiar problems in the scholarship, including the philosopher's ideas about the uses of poetry, the story of his intellectual development, and the influence of Lucretius in the Quattrocento. As Ficino sought to revive Plato in Latin, I argue, he may have been drawn to the author of De rerum natura as a model of philosophical and poetic transmission.