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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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The Ghost Clause

National Book Award Finalist Howard Norman delivers another “provocative . . . haunting”* novel, this time set in a Vermont village and featuring a missing child, a newly married private detective, and a highly relatable ghost.

English

Author/Lead: Howard Norman
Dates:
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Simon Inescort is no longer bodily present in his marriage. It’s been several months since he keeled over the rail of a Nova Scotia–bound ferry, a massive heart attack to blame. Simon's widow, Lorca Pell, has sold their farmhouse to newlyweds Zachary and Muriel—after revealing that the deed contains a “ghost clause,” an actual legal clause, not unheard of in Vermont, allowing for reimbursement if a recently purchased home turns out to be haunted.

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“Masculinity, Vulnerability, and Consulting in Educational Development.”

This chapter explores how culturally masculine ways of thinking intersect with the femininely encoded skills of care and empathy that characterize the profession of educational development.

English

Author/Lead: Blake Wilder
Dates:
Educational Development: Identity and Diversity, special issue of New Directions for Teaching and Learning.

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“Vicious Pranks: Comedy and Cruelty in Rabelais and Shakespeare”

This essay juxtaposes vicious pranks in François Rabelais’s Pantagruel (1532) and William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601) in order to describe a form of comic violence that functions as a knowledge claim about its target.

English

Author/Lead: David Carroll Simon
Dates:
Publisher: Studies in Philology
In each case, the event of injury conveys an eager insistence on the truth of some taken-for-granted assertion about the injured party. I discuss the role of comic atmosphere in encouraging such performative incuriosity, and I describe those strategies by which cruel pranksters enlist the participation of readers and spectators. Ultimately, I show that Shakespeare parts ways with Rabelais by undermining epistemological security, the desire for which helps motivate both the prank and whatever affirmation it elicits from witnesses.

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Civitella Ranieri Foundation

Director’s Guest

English

Author/Lead: Gerard Passannante
Dates: -

Three-week residency, Summer 2019

“Queering the Black Arts Movement”

In 1970 Black Panther leader Huey Newton published a letter in The Black Panther newspaper about women’s liberation and gay liberation.

English

Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez
Dates:

Newton s statement made one year after Stonewall and the same month Newton was released from prison takes the unorthodox step of suggesting the importance of black radical organizations and collectives.

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English Department Teaching Excellence Award

The English department calls for nominations for its Teaching Excellence Award each spring.

English

Author/Lead: Blake Wilder
Dates:
Award Organization: University of Maryland
Nominees must be professional track faculty (lecturers, senior lecturers, or principal lecturers) who have taught in the English department for at least four consecutive semesters, inclusive of the current semester, with no minimum number of courses required

“Data First: Remodeling the Digital Humanities Center.”

DH centers themselves have had changing roles over the years in local community training.

English

Author/Lead: Neil Fraistat
Dates:
Publisher: PIIRUS Blog
Fraistat considers these changes in the context of the DH center as an institution.

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“Allegorical Consent: The Faerie Queene and the Politics of Erotic Subjection.”

This article examines The Faerie Queene’s use of erotic subjection as a political metaphor for theorizing the relation between conquest and consent.

English

Author/Lead: Jeffrey B. Griswold
Dates:
Publisher: Spenser Studies
In the Radigund episode of Book V, Spenser explores the gender dynamics of this trope, as the subjected body is male and the monarch, female. These scenes act as a powerful counter-narrative to the poem’s earlier representations of erotic subjection by showing that external obedience cannot be equated with consent. Radigund forces Artegall to wear women’s clothing and to do women’s work, but this submission constitutes nothing more than slavery. The narrative blends political domination with sexual conquest to demonstrate that compliance is not loyalty and violence cannot elicit love.

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“From Immaterial to Precarious Labor: Considering Restaurant Work in Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster.”

In the introduction to Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001), renowned journalist Barbara Ehrenreich explains how she came to write about the difficulties of making a living as a low-wage service industry worker.

English

Author/Lead: John MacIntosh
Dates:
Publisher: Studies in the Novel
Pitching potential articles to Harper's Magazine editor Lewis Lapham over "a $30 lunch at some understated French country-style place," Ehrenreich recalls the conversation shifting to how "women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform [were] going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour" (1). (1) Ehrenreich suggests that '"[s]omeone ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism--you know, go out there and try it for themselves.' I meant someone much younger than myself, some hungry neophyte journalist with time on her hands" (1-2). When Lapham insists that she investigate low-wage work herself, Ehrenreich admits misgivings about doing work she is positioned to avoid. Citing her successful career despite having grown up not far removed from "the low-wage way of life," Ehrenreich values her "gloriously autonomous, if not always well-paid, writing life" (2). Although she eventually agrees to take the assignment, Ehrenreich's ambivalence marks the difference between work as a writer and work as a service worker manipulating affect for a wage.

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“Macbeth’s Thick Night and the Political Ecology of a Dark Scotland.”

This article complicates scholarship on Macbeth that understands political attachment in terms of an autonomous subject and attributes Macbeth’s demise to an over-susceptibility to natural or supernatural forces.

English

Author/Lead: Jeffrey B. Griswold
Dates:
Publisher: Critical Survey
By putting early modern accounts of the humoral constitution of the night air in conversation with modern theories of apostrophe, I argue that the Macbeths’ experiences of night theorize political action as inseparable from the nonhuman forces in the play. Shakespeare reworks his source material to explore the borders of the human, imagining a more complex relationship between treasonous violence and the darkness that enshrouds Scotland.

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