MITH

By ARHU Staff

Maria Beliaeva Solomon, assistant professor of French in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, has been awarded two fellowships to support her research on the Revue des Colonies, a French abolitionist journal published between 1834 and 1842.

Beginning in the fall, Beliaeva Solomon will be a scholar-in-residence at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the “preeminent repository for materials related to the history and cultures of peoples of African descent.” She will have access to the research collections and resources of the Schomburg, with assistance of its curatorial and reference staff. Through 2023, she will continue to conduct research at the Schomburg Center and other New York area libraries as a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), which supports “outstanding scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.”

The award will support Beliaeva Solomon’s efforts—with the help of graduate students in the French program and faculty at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)—to create an open-access digital scholarly edition of the Revue, including the full text of its print run, with annotations, and, eventually, English translations.

“I’m so honored that this project was selected for an ACLS fellowship and for the Schomburg Scholars-in-Residence Program,” said Beliaeva Solomon, a scholar of 19th-century French and Francophone literature and media focusing on questions of circulation and translation. “This will give me the time necessary to research and properly contextualize this invaluable archive.”

Printed in Paris by a self-identified “society of men of color,” the Revue was the first French periodical for and by people of color, reporting on politics, economics and society in the French colonies and beyond. It also circulated and promoted the advancement of Black literature globally. In 1837, the Revue published the first known work of fiction by an identified African American author (in French), New Orleanian Victor Séjour's “Le Mulâtre” ("The Mulatto"). Throughout its print run, the Revue also featured French translations of major Black American and British authors such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano.

The Schomburg Center is one of only a few libraries in the world to hold a large quantity of original prints of the Revue. Currently, only a select set of issues are publicly available through the online collections of the French National Library, with more preserved in microform at various libraries across Europe and North America. Beliaeva Solomon said her project will build on the research of a number of scholars who have done essential work on the Revue despite the difficulty of access.

She will begin her work this summer with two graduate students, thanks to a Faculty-Student Research Award from the UMD Graduate School. The team will work with Research Programmer Raffaele Viglianti of MITH to develop a website to host the digital edition, which Beliaeva Solomon hopes will become a widely used resource for interdisciplinary work.

“As we seek to make marginalized perspectives, voices and texts part of our cultural record, the Revue is an incredibly valuable contribution,” Beliaeva Solomon said. “The goal is to give people access to a resource that is invisibilized.”

Beliaeva Solomon added that she is grateful to the College of Arts and Humanities for its “support and consistent commitment to faculty research in the humanities.”

Image credits: Headshot courtesy of Beliaeva Solomon. Page 1 of Issue 1 of the Revue des Colonies courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

By Jessica Weiss ’05

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $1.4 million to expand the reach of Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (Enslaved.org), a database containing records on hundreds of thousands of individuals living in the era of the historical slave trade—including enslaved peoples as well as enslavers. Headquartered at Michigan State University, the project is co-led by University of Maryland Associate Professor of History Daryle Williams.

Enslaved.org, which formally launched December 1, 2020, links data collections drawn from multiple universities, archives, museums and family history centers. The new grant will see the addition of at least 60 additional datasets, totaling hundreds of thousands of records of individuals. That data can be used to reconstruct stories and biographies of the lives of the enslaved and their families and communities.

“Even in dealing with systems organized around violence and the commodification of bodies, the records can be used to understand people and families and aspirations and frustrations,” Williams said. “We can connect to the emotive pieces of these stories as well. There is so much that is important and knowable about these lives.”

The Mellon Foundation funded the initial two phases of Enslaved.org—the first beginning in 2018 and the second in 2020—which provided support for both proof-of-concept and implementation. Phase II also saw the launch of the project’s peer-reviewed Journal of Slavery & Data Preservation (JSDP). The JSDP and the wider Enslaved.org site are already being used by scholars, as well as by family historians, genealogists, K-12 teachers and more.

The third phase of funding, which will run through March 2023, will refine the site’s data infrastructure, ensure a dedicated team and continue partnerships with scholars, heritage and cultural organizations and the public.

Phase III is a collaborative effort between MSU’s Matrix: Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences; the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland; the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University; the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture; and the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at Kansas State University.

The grant also strengthens a commitment to the inclusion of underrepresented voices in humanities scholarship, through funding new hires and a summer research pilot program, which will support four graduate students—from MSU, UMD and the College of William & Mary—from underrepresented groups to work on the project.

This new round of funding is the latest in a series of Mellon investments into research projects at the University of Maryland or involving Maryland researchers.

Since 2016, the foundation has provided over $3 million to fund the African American Digital Humanities (AADHUM) initiative at Maryland.

Another $800,000 is supporting the development of user-friendly, open-source software capable of creating digital texts from Persian and Arabic books.

Bonnie Thornton Dill, dean of the College of Arts and Humanities and professor of women’s studies, is among researchers on a $695,000 grant from the foundation to fund the Humane Metrics for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HuMetricsHSS) initiative.

A $1.2 million grant currently supports Phase 2 of Documenting the Now, led by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH).

And a recently announced $4.8 million grant will fund the Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, & Optimism (DISCO) network, which includes UMD Assistant Professor of Communication Catherine Knight Steele.

Photo info: "Plantation Settlement, Surinam, ca. 1860", Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed May 3, 2021, http://www.slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1396