By Jessica Weiss ’05

As an Indian American, Joshua John has long sought to know more about other South Asian figures in U.S. history and politics. So John, a rising junior and double major in economics and Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE), decided to focus a research project this summer on former U.S. Representative Dalip Singh Saund, the first-ever Indian American in Congress.

John scoured the archives of the Congressional Record to locate a 1957 speech given by Saund on the House floor advocating for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In it, Saund cited his own experience as an immigrant as he underscored the absurdity of denying Black Americans voting rights. 

John is now preparing an entry about that speech to appear on the website of the “Recovering Democracy Archives” (RDA), a project sponsored by the Rosenker Center for Political Communication & Civic Leadership in the Department of Communication that seeks to create a digital archive of lesser-known but important public speeches throughout U.S. history. The entry will include the transcribed and authenticated speech, a heavily researched “contextualization” paper, photos and more. 

John was among the researchers in the seven-week residential Big Ten Academic Alliance Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP), which seeks to increase the number of underrepresented students who pursue graduate study and research careers through intensive research experiences with faculty mentors and enrichment activities. A total of 10 undergraduates from across the country took part in the SROP at ARHU—three participated in the RDA project, while seven worked on “Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade,” a database containing records on hundreds of thousands of individuals living in the era of the historical slave trade, led in part by UMD researchers. 

“This has been an incredible opportunity,” John said. “Learning to do historical research, making a strong historical argument with clear writing—these are new challenges that I have not approached in my academic experience until now and I can feel myself growing through this experience.” 

After locating Saund’s speech, John accessed dozens of books, archival and historical documents, political records, news stories and more to be able to prepare a comprehensive historical contextualization. John tells of Saund’s immigration story, the trajectory of his political career and the importance of the speech, as well as a number of personal details about Saund’s life. His research is currently being peer-reviewed before publication on the RDA website. 

John’s research mentor Shawn Parry-Giles, professor and chair in the Department of Communication and co-editor of the RDA project, said the three students working on the RDA project “showed great tenacity in deepening their archival research skills.” The two other students focused on speeches delivered by women's rights activist Emma Guffey Miller promoting the Equal Rights Amendment and by American Indian activist Ruth Muskrat Bronson opposing fishing and timber industries exploiting indigenous land in Alaska.  

The students “recovered speeches by people who advanced civil rights for all Americans,” Parry-Giles said. “Most importantly, they experienced the excitement that can come from researching topics they care deeply about.” 

Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the open-access site Enslaved.org is led by faculty at UMD, Michigan State University and the University of California, Riverside. It links data collections drawn from multiple universities, archives, museums and family history centers to reconstruct stories and biographies of the lives of the enslaved and their families and communities.

The seven undergraduates who worked on the project this summer developed a dataset of a "slaves for hire" list belonging to the estate of Thomas Cramphin, a wealthy Maryland planter, judge and relative by marriage to the Calvert family. The document—the original which is on loan at the Riversdale House Museum in Riverdale, Maryland—is a record of 32 enslaved persons believed to have been owned and hired out to other individuals by Cramphin or his estate executors after his death. 

Using a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including census documents, ancestry records, newspaper articles, historical maps and images and more, they sought to tell the untold stories of the lives of the enslaved individuals. 

Ousmane Diop, a Senegalese first-generation American and rising senior at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, double majoring in history and political science with a minor in Africana studies, said the SROP experience underscored the importance of uplifting the stories of the enslaved, who are sometimes forgotten or ignored.  

“Our goal was to decenter the Cramphins and other enslavers while centering the lives of the enslaved individuals in Maryland,” he said. “History is supposed to be diverse and inclusive.” 

A data article outlining the students’ research and methodology has been submitted for peer review and publication in the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation.

Co-Principal Investigator Kristina Poznan, assistant clinical professor in the Department of History, said the students “worked collaboratively and expanded their skills in historical detective work and in using data and digital tools in the humanities.” 

Diop added that the SROP affirmed his desire to continue doing research post-graduation: “As an undergraduate, to have your name out there in the ‘dataverse’ where people can see you was really unique and gave me and my peers a lot of momentum,” he said. 

Top image: Martenet and Bond's map of Montgomery County, Maryland [1865]. Learn more.

By Jessica Weiss ’05

The University of Maryland has received a nearly $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation that will support efforts to improve the way handwritten documents from the premodern Islamicate world—primarily in Persian and Arabic—are turned into machine-readable text for use by academics or the public. 

Assistant Professor Matthew Thomas Miller and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Jonathan Parkes Allen, both of the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, will work with researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), led by computer scientist Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, on the innovative humanities-computer science collaboration. UCSD received its own $300,000 award.    

Over three years, the researchers will work in the domain of handwritten text recognition, which are methods designed to automatically read a diversity of human handwriting types with high levels of accuracy. 

“This work has the potential to remove substantial roadblocks for digital study of the premodern Islamicate written tradition and would be really transformative for future studies of these manuscripts,” Miller said. “We are very grateful to the NSF for its support.” 

This latest research proposal builds on a number of ongoing efforts to develop open-source technology to expand digital access to manuscripts and books from the premodern Islamicate world in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and Urdu; Miller currently leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers on a $1.75 million grant from the Mellon Foundation as well as a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

There are hundreds of thousands—perhaps even millions—of premodern Islamicate books and manuscripts spanning over 1,500 years, from the 7th–19th centuries, forming perhaps the largest archive of cultural production of the premodern world. Scanning and digitization efforts over the last decade have made images of Islamicate manuscripts in a large number of collections available to the public. However, they remain mostly “locked” for digital search and manipulation because the text has not been transcribed into digital text.  

The task is made more difficult by the diversity and intricacy of many Arabic manuscripts, said Allen, who is a historian of early modern Ottoman religious and cultural history. They may be written alongside diagonal notes, annotations and corrections, in multiple colors and “hands.” 

Under the NSF grant, researchers will develop new techniques that remove the need for extensive manual—or human—labor, a method known as “unsupervised” transcription. Eventually, the tools under development will produce models that will be able to automatically transcribe large quantities of Persian and Arabic script in a multitude of different styles with substantially higher degrees of accuracy than is currently possible.

“The Arabic script tradition is so extensive and so broad,” Allen said. “People need to be able to read these manuscripts, search within them, and integrate them into their research.” 

Image: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Ms. or. oct. 3759

Call for UMD Breaking the M.O.L.D, Inaugural Cohort 2022-23

Deadline, Wednesday, May 4, 2022

Please send all materials to: arhu-breakingthemoldumd@umd.edu

In these difficult  times, colleges and universities need to transform themselves as they seek to have an impact on society’s contemporary challenges. Arts and Humanities scholars bring distinct knowledge, skills, orientations, and awareness of possibility as higher education designs next steps. As humanists and artists, we are highly prepared to make significant contributions as leaders in higher education by virtue of our scholarly worldviews, training, and modes of inquiry and analysis. We bring historical, humanistic, interpretive, or ethnographic approaches; explore aesthetic, ethical, and/or cultural values and our roles in society; and conduct critical and rhetorical analyses, all modes of analysis/integration that are both directly and indirectly applicable (and often lacking) in higher education leadership roles. Recognizing this dearth of faculty from these disciplines, and especially women from underrepresented minority groups, serving in leadership positions across higher education, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is generously supporting a collaborative, multi-year project between Morgan State University (MSU), University of Maryland-College Park (UMD), and University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), to create a pipeline to senior leadership in higher education for faculty members of color and women from the Arts and Humanities.

Breaking the M.O.L.D. (Mellon/Maryland Opportunities for Leadership Development) for Arts and Humanities Faculty, breaks new ground by creating possibilities for leadership by intentionally investing in the development of a diverse set of leaders from ARHU disciplines at mid-career; and, by creating a rich partnership between three very different public institutions in one state. By the end of the project, cohort participants will be versed in the ways each institution grows and develops its leaders and better prepared to enter leadership roles at different kinds of higher education institutions.

Application Process

Breaking the M.O.L.D-UMD is pleased to accept applications from faculty in the Arts and Humanities as well as the humanistic Social Sciences for the inaugural 2022–2023 academic year cohort. The fellowship is intended for faculty at the associate and full professor level from historically disadvantaged racial groups and women. Faculty with prior leadership experience, (e.g., chairing a department, overseeing a tenure review, running a faculty search, organizing major conferences, serving in leadership in professional organizations and/or with stated interest in campus leadership) are especially encouraged to apply.

To receive full consideration please complete the application by providing a statement of interest in the program that includes your understanding of impediments to success for faculty of color and women in leadership positions on UMD’s campus and strategies for addressing these (2 pages max); a one-page description of your current research; an endorsement letter from your chairperson/director; and a short CV (3 pages max.). Deadline, Wednesday, May 4, 2022.

Fellow Incentives

Breaking the M.O.L.D Fellows will receive:

• a stipend of research/scholarship support ($10,000) to be allocated to their specific needs, including  but not limited to course releases, summer stipends, subvention grants, or writing workshops;
• support for travel and attendance at administrative conferences as a means for participants to develop networks and enhance their understanding of leadership roles;
• the opportunity to apply for a competitive award of up to $50,000 (up to 6 faculty participants per cohort) to cover a teaching release or course buyout, travel expenses, research-related expenses, and/or hourly Graduate Student assistance, to help participants advance their research and  scholarship. (Faculty cohort members could receive up to two course releases during their participation through the research/scholarship support and the research award).
• access to senior faculty administrative leaders who will be responsible for facilitating key workshop sessions and providing one-on-one mentoring and coaching support to participants throughout the project.
• participation in a learning cohort of up to 8-10 faculty members composed of faculty from each institution. (All program activities will take place at and rotate among the three campuses however the locations are still to be determined.) 

About Cohort Activities

Program Duration. Fellows will participate in a 15-month program, from August 2022 - August 2024.  

Summer meeting (2022). The summer period will allow faculty participants to spend dedicated time attending skill building seminars, learning from experts who hold senior leadership positions at various types of universities, and participating in mentored applied leadership experiences. (All program activities will take place at and rotate among the three campuses.)

Monthly Meetings. These half-day monthly meetings will provide opportunities for faculty to learn the different organizational and governance structures of each campus (Morgan State and UMBC) and develop cross-institutional peer and mentoring networks. Topics will range from, “Developing and Honing Your Individual Leadership Style,” to “Understanding the University-wide Academic Enterprise.” Some sessions will focus on topics that pertain specifically to the participating university contexts.

A Shadowing Experience. In the final summer of your cohort experience, project leaders and faculty participants will identify a project for each faculty member that will provide them direct leadership experience in creating and implementing an initiative for their campus. Options may range from joining a search committee for an executive position to shadowing a senior-level administrator at key meetings on and off campus.

For questions or information about the initiative, please contact: Prof Psyche Williams-Forson or Dean Bonnie Thornton Dill at arhu-breakingthemoldumd@umd.edu. 

https://arhu.umd.edu/news/3m-grant-prepare-underrepresented-arts-and-hum...

Michigan State University has received a $650,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to continue the work being done by the Humane Metrics for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HuMetricsHSS) initiative, an international partnership committed to establishing more humane indicators of excellence in academia with a particular focus on the humanities and social sciences.  

The goal of the HuMetricsHSS initiative is to empower people at all levels of academic institutions by identifying core values and aligning reward mechanisms in every area — from grades and funding to promotion and tenure — with those values. 

The initiative is led by an international group of co-PIs from the academic and nonprofit sectors including Christopher Long, Michigan State University, Dean of College of Arts & Letters and Dean of the Honors College; Nicky Agate, University of Pennsylvania, Snyder-Granader Assistant University Librarian for Research Data and Digital Scholarship; Rebecca Kennison, K|N Consultants, Executive Director and Principal; Jason Rhody, Social Science Research Council, Program Director;  Simone Sacchi, European University Institute, Open Science Librarian; Bonnie Thornton Dill, University of Maryland, College Park, Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities and Professor in The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Penny Weber, Social Science Research Council Digital Culture Program, Projects Coordinator, and HuMetricsHSS Project Manager; and Bonnie Russell, Michigan State University, MESH Research and HuMetricsHSS Assistant Project Manager. 

Established in 2016, the HuMetricsHSS initiative arose from a growing sense that the work by faculty and staff of academic institutions was increasingly driven by opaque and limited assessment mechanisms that reward a narrow scope of activities and fail to recognize the wide array of publicly focused, socially oriented scholarship that motivates faculty, staff, students, and administrators.  

The initiative began working with academic institutions to create a values-enacted approach for recognizing labor that is often invisible, underappreciated, and unrewarded and that supports engaged and socially responsible scholarship and scholarly practice by aligning the values that animate that work with the activities that bring it to life.  

This is the third grant the HuMetricsHSS initiative has received from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The first, awarded in 2017 for $309,000, allowed for a series of workshops that identified values and practices to enrich scholarship in an effort to better recognize, promote, and nurture scholarly practices. The second Mellon grant, awarded in 2019 for $695,000, funded the first implementation round of the initiative.  

“We stand at an inflection point of transformative change in higher education,” Long said. “There is an openness to new approaches and an appreciation of the action-oriented examples the HuMetricsHSS initiative offers.”  

The world has changed dramatically since the initial two grants were awarded.   

“The systemic inequities that were already obvious to many have come to the fore in the last year with the COVID-19 pandemic and the reckoning with racism with which we are grappling,” Thornton Dill said. “Within the academy, hierarchical inequities that undervalue teaching, which is central to the academic endeavor, have now become undeniably evident, as have issues of social and economic precarity among student populations, many of whom are now grappling not only with increased debt or financial burdens but also with the challenges of studying and learning in home environments that may not be safe or supportive for them.”  

Similar levels of precarity, driven by the economic uncertainties of tuition-driven revenue, are keenly felt by contingent faculty and hourly waged staff, many of whom are recent graduate students who may carry considerable debt load.  

“As we have learned through discussions with faculty and administrators in our workshops and through the research interviews facilitated by Foundation funding, inequalities and inequities appear to be growing rather than shrinking,” Kennison said. “Faculty, staff, and administrators are urgently searching for values-enacted evaluation frameworks that enable them to reshape the culture of higher education so that the academy is more humane, supportive, open, and just.” 

Under this latest Mellon grant, over the next 18 months, the HuMetricsHSS initiative will: 

• provide models of institutional transformation to demonstrate the potential of values frameworks in applied settings while fostering greater engagement in additional institutions;  
• scale-up training and infrastructure to support the use of values frameworks through developing train-the-trainer workshops and by enhancing the HuMetricsHSS toolkit;  
• build and expand communities of practice by fostering engaged, cross-pollinating networks through regular communication, facilitating collaboration through knowledge sharing and transparent idea generation, and coordinating with aligned initiatives on messaging and amplification of the work.  

“For the next phase of HuMetricsHSS work, we envision operating on several axes that focus on engagement, implementation, scalability, and sustainability,” Rhody said. “Each of these efforts sets the framework for institutional transformation, building toward the long-term goal for HuMetricsHSS to support widespread transformation across a supported, funded institutional cohort.” 

By Jessica Weiss ’05

A $790,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will fund the creation of a new sculpture at the University of Maryland’s David C. Driskell Center and the identification, cataloging, preservation and digitization of prominent archives in the field of African American art.
 
The sculpture commemorating Driskell, a legendary artist, art historian and UMD distinguished university professor emeritus who died in 2020 at age 88, will be created by well-known African American artist Melvin “Mel” Edwards, a longtime friend. The stainless steel abstract artwork—tentatively measuring 12 feet long, 12 feet wide and 20 feet high—will be erected outside Cole Field House, home of the Driskell Center, by the end of the three-year grant.
 
The Dr. Tritobia Hayes-Benjamin Archive, a gift to the Driskell Center from the late art historian’s estate, will be the first collection made accessible by the grant. It includes thousands of primary source materials related to African American art, including photographic prints and contact sheets of works by major African American female artists, artist biographies written on index cards and a collection of 35 mm slides of artworks previously unknown to researchers. A longtime faculty member at Howard University, Hayes-Benjamin Ph.D. ’91 was Driskell’s first doctoral student in art history at UMD.
 
Professor Curlee R. Holton, director of the Driskell Center, said the grant exemplifies the center’s commitment both to advancing appreciation of African American art and creating a home for artists and scholars.
 
“Driskell impacted and transformed the American art canon by bringing African American art to the forefront,” Holton said. “Our mission is to continue that goal and to enhance and expand on it. We’re overjoyed at the opportunity to do so and honored to receive this major grant.”
 
Driskell, best known for his groundbreaking exhibition “Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750-1950,” joined the faculty of the Department of Art at Maryland in 1977 and served as its chair from 1978-83. The Driskell Center was established in 2001 to exhibit the work of African American artists at all stages of their careers and to house Driskell’s extensive archive: a public collection of his letters, photos, handwritten notes and catalogs.
 
The grant dedicates $500,000 to supporting the center’s work to expand on its collection by cataloguing and preserving additional archives.
 
Hayes-Benjamin (1944-2014), who concentrated her Ph.D. studies at UMD on African American art, went on to serve at Howard as professor of art history, associate dean of the College of Fine Arts and director of the Howard University Gallery of Art.
 
“The university is committed to maintaining and building upon David’s dedication to develop future generations of Black artists and students of African American and African diasporic art,” said Bonnie Thornton Dill, dean of the College of Arts and Humanities. “This grant helps us continue the important work of extending the research capacity and impact of the center by digitizing materials and making them accessible and available worldwide to scholars, researchers and all those interested in African American art.”
 
The award from the Mellon Foundation will support a full-time archivist position and a graduate student and other expenses to inventory, catalog and digitize the 75 linear feet of materials from the Hayes-Benjamin Archive, estimated to contain some 20,000-25,000 items. The center’s staff will also identify and acquire additional archives for the center’s archive.
 
At the Driskell Center, Holton said, the archives will be “cared for and respected.”
 
“An archive is full of assets, full of jewels, and we are the caretaker of that,” he said. “This validates our history and our commitment.”