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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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Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction

Never has the Victorian novel appeared so perverse as it does in these pages—and never his its perversity seemed so fundamental to its accomplishment.

English

Author/Lead: William A. Cohen
Dates:
Publisher: Duke University Press
Whether discussing George Eliot’s lesbian readers, Anthony Trollope’s whorish heroines, or Charles Dickens’s masturbating characters, William A. Cohen’s study explodes the decorum of mainstream nineteenth-century fiction. By viewing this fiction alongside the most alarming public scandals of the day, Cohen exposes both the scandalousness of this literature and its sexiness. Scandal, then as now, makes public the secret indiscretions of prominent people, engrossing its audience in salacious details that violate the very code of propriety it aims to enforce. In narratives ranging from Great Expectations to the Boulton and Park sodomy scandal of 1870–71, from Eliot’s and Trollope’s novels about scandalous women to Oscar Wilde’s writing and his trials for homosexuality, Cohen shows how, in each instance, sexuality appears couched in coded terms. He identifies an assortment of cunning narrative techniques used to insinuate sex into Victorian writing, demonstrating that even as such narratives air the scandalous subject, they emphasize its unspeakable nature.

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Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act

Caramello argues that James and Stein performed biographical acts in two sense of the phrase: they wrote biography, but as a cover for autobiography.

English

Author/Lead: Charles Caramello
Dates:
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press

In this study of realist and modernist life writing, Caramello offers extended close readings of four biographical works by James and Stein: “acts” that served their authors primarily as “covers” for autobiography. Exploring themes of artistry and influence and experimenting with original forms of biographical portraiture, James and Stein used their biographical portraits of precursors and contemporaries to portray themselves as exemplary modern artists and, in the process, also constructed ideal literary genealogies for themselves.

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The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces

This groundbreaking Norton Anthology offers the best of the literatures of India, China, Japan, the Middle East, Africa, and native America alongside the masterpieces of the Western tradition.

English

Author/Lead: Maynard (Sandy) Mack
Dates:
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
(Expanded Edition) (Vol. One-Volume)

Milton's Teeth and Ovid's Umbrella: Curiouser and Curiouser Adventures in History

We've all been taught that history is the story of great events and important people—but is it, really?

English

Author/Lead: Michael Olmert
Dates:
Publisher: Touchstone Publishing
In this illuminating collection of essays, Michael Olmert explores how the most ordinary artifacts of everyday life can reveal a huge amount information about how history actually works.

The War Within: A Portrait of Virginia Woolf

International Documentary Association Feature Award and Golden Apple of the National Educational Media Network.

English

Author/Lead: John Fuegi
Dates:
Named one of the four best documentaries in the world by IDA in 1996.

Everybody's Shakespeare: Reflections Chiefly on Tragedies

Everybody’s Shakespeare brings the insights and wisdom of one of the finest Shakespearean scholars of our century to the task of surveying why the Bard continues to flourish in modern times. Mack treats individually seven plays.

English

Author/Lead: Maynard (Sandy) Mack
Dates:
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Cesar, and Antony and Cleopatra—and demonstrates in each case how the play has retained its vitality, complexity, and appeal.

Red Ruth: That Deadly Longing

(A Portrait of Ruth Berlau), 1992.

English

Author/Lead: John Fuegi
Dates:
Winner of the Danish Oscar and the Silver Diploma of the Prix Futura, Berlin.

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Resident Fellow

Virginia Center for Creative Arts

English

Author/Lead: David Todd
Dates: -

Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), one of the leading artists communities in the world with
locations in Amherst, Virginia, and Auvillar, France, hosts more than 400 visual artists, writers, and
composers each year. The artists who come to VCCA, whether emerging or established, are selected by peer review on the basis of the important or innovative work they are doing in their respective fields.

Individual Artist Fellowship

South Carolina Arts Commission

English

Author/Lead: David Todd
Dates: -

Fellowships recognize and reward the artistic achievements of South Carolina’s exceptional individual artists and are made through a highly competitive process.

Regional Gold, Silver and Bronze Quill Award

International Association of Business Communicators

English

Author/Lead: David Todd
Dates: -

These awards, recognizing exceptional communication works’ strategic relevance, timeliness and
innovation, further raise the bar and grow the body of work of our profession.