Skip to main content
Skip to main content

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.
Sorry, no events currently present.

Show activities matching...

filter by...

“The Phonetic and Spatial Effects of Discourse in Poetic Narratives: The Case of Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci.’”

The vast majority of recent narratological analyses of poetry focus on the ways in which the conventions of lyric, epic, and narrative intersect in individual poems.

English

Author/Lead: Lewis Gleich
Dates:
Publisher: Narrative
Although these studies are useful for explaining how these different genres work together or against one another, they do not help identify how narratives function differently when communicated through the medium of verse rather than prose. In this paper, I offer an alternative approach, one that expands on the work of several scholars.

Read More about “The Phonetic and Spatial Effects of Discourse in Poetic Narratives: The Case of Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci.’”

En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives

En-Gendering India offers an innovative interpretation of the role that gender played in defining the Indian state during both the colonial and postcolonial eras.

English

Author/Lead: Sangeeta Ray
Dates:
Publisher: Duke University Press
Focusing on both British and Indian literary texts—primarily novels—produced between 1857 and 1947, Sangeeta Ray examines representations of "native" Indian women and shows how these representations were deployed to advance notions of Indian self-rule as well as to defend British imperialism.

Read More about En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives

The Reef

Arnold's first book of poems documents her struggle with cancer.

English

Author/Lead: Elizabeth Arnold
Dates:
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
A book-length sequence of poems, The Reef rockets the reader through a Heraclitean chute of accelerated life experience by way of anecdote, satire, facts from medical science, and lyrical sweep. This multilayered work explores the depths of illness, investigating the way one's attitude toward it changes over time and how one gathers and processes information in order to make sense of it.

Read More about The Reef

Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England

This study examines emotional responses to socio-economic pressures in early modern England, as they are revealed in plays, historical narratives and biographical accounts of the period.

English

Author/Lead: Theodore Leinwand
Dates:
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
These texts yield fascinating insights into the various, often unpredictable, ways in which people coped with the exigencies of credit, debt, mortgaging and capital ventures. Leinwand's new readings of texts by and about Shakespeare, Jonson, Massinger, the Earl of Suffolk, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Gresham, James Burbage, and Lionel Cranfield reveal a blend of affect and cognition concerning finance that includes nostalgia, anger, contempt, embarrassment, tenacity, bravado and humility.

Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolarity Fiction

In Discourses of Desire Linda Kauffman gives us a comparative study of eight works spanning a period of about two thousand years, from Ovid's Heroides to The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters (1972).

English

Author/Lead: Linda Kauffman
Dates:
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
he common thread is that all these works are in—or can be slipped into—the category of letters from women to men who have abandoned or ignored them. Such real or feigned love letters (Kauffman insists on calling them "amorous epistolary discourse") form a coherent body of literature that is here profitably analyzed, though a reader may well feel that the sample is not only small, but also skewed. Kauffman subscribes so thoroughly to the current doctrine that literature grows out of other literature and has nothing to do with life that once, when she kicks over the traces a bit, she feels called on to defend herself against an assumed charge of "naive mimeticism."

Read More about Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolarity Fiction

Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction

Though letter writing is almost a lost art, twentieth-century writers have mimed the epistolary mode as a means of reevaluating the theme of love.

English

Author/Lead: Linda Kauffman
Dates:
Publisher: Chicago Press
In Special Delivery, Linda S. Kauffman places the narrative treatment of love in historical context, showing how politics, economics, and commodity culture have shaped the meaning of desire.

Read More about Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction

Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture

Linda S. Kauffman turns the pornography debate on its head with this audacious analysis of recent taboo-shattering fiction, film, and performance art.

English

Author/Lead: Linda Kauffman
Dates:
Publisher: University of California Press
Investigating the role of fantasy in art, politics, and popular culture, she shows how technological advances in medicine and science (magnetic resonance imaging, computers, and telecommunications) have profoundly altered our concepts of the human body. Cyberspace is producing new forms of identity and subjectivity. The novelists, filmmakers, and performers in Bad Girls and Sick Boys are the interpreters of these brave new worlds, cartographers who are busy mapping the fin-de-millennium environment that already envelops us.

Read More about Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture

Official Guide to Colonial Williamsburg

This was the first Official Guide to Colonial Williamsburg in over 40 years; first published in 1985.

English

Author/Lead: Michael Olmert
Dates:
Publisher: Colonial Williamsburg
It covers all the buildings in the historic area, including the 88 original Williamsburg structures (which were carefully restored) plus those that were reconstructed, in many cases, on original foundation footprints. The text is illustrated with line drawings of every historic building and its relationship to other structures along the town's four chief streets. In addition to architectural history, the text attempts to place the material culture of the town into the historical context of the Revolution as well as the lives of the families that lived and died in them--and their many slaves. Census documents show that Williamsburg was more than 50 percent African-American at the time of the Revolution. Illustrations, maps , and color photographs.

Choice Magazine Outstanding Book

Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity

English

Author/Lead: Robert S. Levine
Dates:
Publisher: Choice Magazine
Levine's book Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity won an Outstanding Book Award from Choice magazine in 1997.

Male Call: Becoming Jack London

When Jack London died in 1916 at age forty, he was one of the most famous writers of his time.

English

Author/Lead: Jonathan Auerbach
Dates:
Publisher: Duke University Press
Eighty years later he remains one of the most widely read American authors in the world. The first major critical study of London to appear in a decade, Male Call analyzes the nature of his appeal by closely examining how the struggling young writer sought to promote himself in his early work as a sympathetic, romantic man of letters whose charismatic masculinity could carry more significance than his words themselves. Jonathan Auerbach shows that London’s personal identity was not a basis of his literary success, but rather a consequence of it. Unlike previous studies of London that are driven by the author’s biography, Male Call examines how London carefully invented a trademark “self” in order to gain access to a rapidly expanding popular magazine and book market that craved authenticity, celebrity, power, and personality. Auerbach demonstrates that only one fact of London’s life truly shaped his art: his passionate desire to become a successful author. Whether imagining himself in stories and novels as a white man on trail in the Yukon, a sled dog, a tramp, or a professor; or engaging questions of manhood and mastery in terms of work, race, politics, class, or sexuality, London created a public persona for the purpose of exploiting the conventions of the publishing world and marketplace.

Read More about Male Call: Becoming Jack London