Research & Innovation

What was funny was that despite being a self-proclaimed visionary, a seer of fortune, an intuitivist at cards, Sam never could have anticipated when he returned home late from another shift at the tables that he’d find Lori locked inside the Honda and that this time he’d be unable to stop her from leaving, unable to open her bags and scatter her clothes or throw her keys into the woods or carry her over his shoulder back into the trailer.Not funny ha-ha, but funny in the sense that those used to be normal evenings. That that man used to be Jack’s father. Where now Jack attended dinner parties with people who’d studied at liberal arts schools, who’d grown up staring at Giacometti statues, who assumed the same about him. Funny how he’d grown up in a place so absurd and inconceivable that he’d tried to hide it. Funny that where Jack came from had actually been destroyed the instant he left. Funny that he didn’t even realize until twenty years later.

Read more of "As Far as You Can See"

(Virtual) May 19-23, 2021

(Virtual) April 8-11, 2021

Anniversary Snow by Yang Lian, translated from Chinese by by Brian Holton, has won the inaugural Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry In Translation. UMD English professor Joshua Weiner worked on the translation team with other leading English-language poets Pascale Petit, Fiona Sampson, W N Herbert and George Szirtes.

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Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning. In this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life―Twin Peaks, the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham―to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.

This central collection by the poet, dramatist, and Nobel laureate Nelly Sachs—newly translated from the German by Joshua Weiner (with Linda B. Parshall)—reveals the visionary poet’s remarkable power of creation and transformation.

Flight and Metamorphosis marks the culmination of Nelly Sachs’s development as a poet. Sachs, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, speaks from her own condition as a refugee from Nazi Germany—her loneliness while living in a small Stockholm flat with her elderly mother, her exile, her alienation, her feelings of romantic bereavement, and her search for the divine. Forced onto a journey of endless change, Sachs created her own path forward.

From these sublime poems, she emerges as a visionary, one who harnesses language’s essential power to create and transform our world. Joshua Weiner’s translations are the first in more than half a century to elucidate Sachs’s enduring poetic power and relevance.

(Virtual) March 11-14, 2021

The scholars in FEMINIST CIRCULATIONS: RHETORICAL EXPLORATIONS ACROSS SPACE AND TIME work at the nexus of gender, power, and movement to explore the rhetorical nature of circulation, especially considering how women from varying backgrounds and their rhetorics have moved and have been constrained across both space and time. Among the central characters studied in this collection are early modern laborers, letter writers, petitioners, and embroiderers; African American elocutionists, freedom singers, and bloggers; Muslim religious leaders; Quaker suffragists; South African filmmakers; nineteenth-century conduct book writers; and twenty-first-century pop stars. To generate their claims, contributors draw from and make use of a breadth of archival and primary documents: music videos, tweets, petitions, letters, embroidery work, speeches, memoirs, diaries, and made-for-television movies. Authors read these “texts” with scrutiny and imagination, adding distinction to their chapters’ arguments about circulation by zeroing in on specific rhetorical concepts that span from rhetorical agency, cultivation of ethos, and development of rhetorical education to capacities for social networking, collective and collaborative authorship, and kairotic interventions.

Read "Undisciplined": Early Modern Women's Writing and the Urgency of Scholarly Activism."

Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomic injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists’ work throughout the black diaspora. GerShun Avilez analyzes the work of diasporic artists who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice. He first focuses on how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether on the street or across borders. From there, he pivots to institutional spaces--specifically prisons and hospitals--and the ways such places seek to expose queer bodies in order to control them. Throughout, he reveals how desire and art open routes to black queer freedom when policy, the law, racism, and homophobia threaten physical safety, civil rights, and social mobility.

Learn more about Black Queer Freedom.