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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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Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960

Concentrating on carefully chosen selections from ten writers, Mary Helen Washington explores the work, the realities, and the hopes of black women writers between 1860-1960.

English

Author/Lead: Mary Helen Washington
Dates:
Publisher: Doubleday/Anchor

Concentrating on carefully chosen selections from ten writers, Mary Helen Washington explores the work, the realities, and the hopes of black women writers between 1860-1960.

Reviewed by Henry-Louis Gates, New York Times Book Review, October 4, 1987 and by Jewell Gomez in The Nation,, April 30, 1987. In The New Yorker, August 5, 2002, writer Hilton Als called Invented Lives an invaluable study."

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Safe Passage

As the mother of seven boys, Mag Singer fears she will never have the career she dreams of. But she begins to re-evaluate her priorities after she learns that her troubled middle son is missing after the terrorist bombing of his Marine barracks in Beirut

English

Dates:
Publisher: Banks Channel Books

As the mother of seven boys, Mag Singer fears she will never have the career she dreams of. But she begins to re-evaluate her priorities after she learns that her troubled middle son is missing after the terrorist bombing of his Marine barracks in Beirut. For three days, as the family awaits word of his fate, they are forced to come to terms with themselves and each other, and to rediscover the deep reservoir of love they once shared.

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The Phallacy of Genesis: A Feminist-Psychoanalytic Approach

Overlaying feminist psychoanalytic Freudian theory and a version of reader-response criticism, Ilona Rashkow in the role of the reader/analyst offers readings/ interpretations of Genesis passages as psychoanalytic processes.

English

Dates:
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
PLACE HOLDER TEXT

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The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603-1613

In this highly original and energetic study, Theodore B. Leinwand views Jacobean theater—particularly Jacobean city comedy—as a measure of the way Londoners of the time perceived each other.

English

Author/Lead: Theodore Leinwand
Dates:
Publisher: The University of Wisconsin Press

In this highly original and energetic study, Theodore B. Leinwand views Jacobean theater—particularly Jacobean city comedy—as a measure of the way Londoners of the time perceived each other. In forming a sophisticated view of the relations between Jacobean comedy and life, Leinwand makes a solid contribution not only to Jacobean theater, but, more broadly, to our understanding of the cultural, social, and political contexts within which all literature is produced.

Leinwand turns to the plays of Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, John Webster, George Chapman, John Fletcher, and Ben Jonson to see the ways in which Jacobean theater was bound up with contemporary social relations. He measures the attitudes implicit or expressed in the plays toward various London types of the day. These same figures appeared in the commentary of the time and Leinwand raises the question of how realistic stage portrayals were meant to be, and how they were likely to have been received by their audiences. He suggests that most sophisticated playwrights, by making their audiences aware of stereotype, urged them to think beyond it to a fuller sense of their own and other people's identities.

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Quantification and the Quest for Medical Certainty

Matthews discusses clinicians before the Parisian Academy of Medicine in 1837, the debate in the German physiological literature during the 1850s, and, the debate over the bacteriologist's diagnostic technique involving the "opsonic index."

English

Dates:
Publisher: Princeton University Press

Brief description:

Here Matthews addresses the problem arising when clinicians, physiologists, and bacteriologists all share an antipathy toward the clinical trial methods of the statistician. Viewing medical judgment as a form of "tacit knowledge," they downplayed the medical statistician's attempts to make medical inference into something explicit and quantitative. However, Matthews concludes that it is only when "medical decision-making" moves from the cloistered confines of professional medical expertise into open debate that the benefits of the medical statistician (and the clinical trial) are best revealed.

Flaubert and Joyce: The Rite of Fiction

Richard Cross assesses the French writer's impact on his Irish counterpart through a comparison of tone, theme, and technique in their major writings.

English

Author/Lead: Richard Cross
Dates:
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Richard Cross assesses the French writer's impact on his Irish counterpart through a comparison of tone, theme, and technique in their major writings. Juxtaposing passages from their novels, he reveals through textual analysis certain structural and thematic patterns.

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Beethoven and the Birds

There must be a dark the eyes/ have adjusted to, have gained/
employment within,/
measuring the values/
of copper canisters, the stain of a seventh red/
in the rhododendron on the sill./

English

Dates:
Publisher: Blue Begonia Press
PLACE HOLDER TEXT

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Sweetbrier

In Sweetbrier, the elegy is given new treatment. Aspects of physics and nature come together to prefigure loss and define its role as essential to transformation.

English

Dates:
Publisher: Blue Begonia Press

Out of print.

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Upon the Dark Places: Anti-Semitism and Sexism in English Renaissance Biblical Translation

Examines the ways in which 16th and early 17th century English translators of the Hebrew Bible adapted their text to suit their cultural background.

English

Dates:
Publisher: Sheffield Academic Press
PLACE HOLDER TEXT

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O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Willa Cather's second novel, O Pioneers! (1913) tells the story of Alexandra Bergson and her determination to save her immigrant family's Nebraska farm.

English

Author/Lead: Marilee Lindemann
Dates:
Publisher: Oxford University Press

Willa Cather's second novel, O Pioneers! (1913) tells the story of Alexandra Bergson and her determination to save her immigrant family's Nebraska farm. By placing a strong, self-reliant woman at the center of her tale, Cather gives the quintessentially American novel of the soil a radical cast. Yet, although influenced by the democratic utopianism of Walt Whitman and the serene regionalism of Sarah Orne Jewett, O Pioneers! is more than merely an elegy for the lost glories of America's pioneer past. In its rage for order and efficiency, the novel testifies to the cultural politics of the Progressive Era, the period of massive social and economic transformations that helped to modernize the United States in the years between the Civil War and World War.

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