College of Arts and Humanities

TDPS

Congratulations to Professor Karen Bradley and TDPS students Christina Banalopoulou (Ph.D. student), Drew Barker (M.A. Theatre '13), and Kate Spanos (Ph.D. candidate), along with Sargoon Nepaul (dance and neuroscience undergraduate major) and Emma Sessions (kinesiology undergraduate major) on being awarded a Future of Information Alliance (FIA) - Deutsch seed grant for their project entitled "Re-imaging and Re-imagining Choreometrics."

Their interdisciplinary project is a collaboration between TDPS, Kinesiology, Neuroscience, and Library Sciences that will create a data set of dance videos from cultures and communities all over the world that were collected by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. These clips are now buried in the Library of Congress, and the team will partner with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and the Association for Cultural Equity in New York to access the films. Their goal is to digitize the video and then make it widely available to scholars and communities around the world through an online collaborative Wiki.

The team was awarded $25,000 to complete the first three months of groundwork for the project, which will feed into and enable them to meet their long-term goals. The project meets the priorities that are valued by the FIA-Deutsch program, including information equity, information literacy, culture, collaboration, information transfer and emergence.

by Karen Shih '09, Between The Columns

From writing to directing to acting, women are underrepresented in every area of theater production. A new initiative from the Big Ten Theatre Chairs aims to change that by commissioning, producing and publicizing up to five new women-written plays over the next five years.

“This is a very unique initiative. It’s about raising consciousness in order to represent the student population as well as the audience, both of which are mostly female,” says Leigh Wilson Smiley, director of the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and a new member of the theatre chairs group. “We need to start to get the female voice 
out there.” 

The plays will not only be written by women but also feature substantial female roles. Naomi Iizuka of the University of San Diego, known for works reflecting her multicultural background, has been commissioned to write the first one. It will be ready for the 2014–15 season, and each Big Ten university will have the opportunity to perform it on a 
main stage or do a staged reading. It’s one way Maryland’s Big Ten membership is helping 
areas beyond athletics.

 “I’ll have partners across the country,” Smiley says. “This is a chance to influence the national conversation.”   

The University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU) would like to congratulate the inaugural recipients of the Foxworth Creative Enterprise Initiative (Foxworth Initiative), including Psyche Williams-Forson, associate professor in the Department of American Studies; Ana Patricia Rodriguez, associate professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; and Leigh Wilson Smiley, associate professor of theatre and director of the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies.

“We are excited and proud to announce our first cohort of Foxworth Creative Enterprise Initiative recipients and courses,” said Bonnie Thornton Dill, dean for the College of Arts and Humanities. "Funding from the Foxworths will enable faculty to further engage students in the lived experiences of people from diverse heritages, traditions and histories, and facilitate their reflections upon the role of the humanities in promoting civic values within the contemporary United States.”

This year’s Foxworth Initiative funds the development of three arts and humanities courses to support advanced teaching and engaged research by scholars whose interests examine community defined issues and whose products and documentation appropriately assess student learning and community engagement.

Courses include a variety of topics like Food, Trauma, and Sustainability; Latina/o Transmigration and Transnationalism; and Community Partnership for the Performing Arts. The Foxworth Initiative also partners each course or “Creative Enterprise Team” with community partners like Prince George’s County Food Equity Council and Casa De Maryland to encourage the inclusion of the arts and humanities disciplines in the application of solutions to pressing issues like food insecurity, climate change, immigration, poverty and racism.

This initiative is made possible by the generosity of two college alumni, Domonique and Ashley Foxworth; Domonique ’04 is a graduate of American Studies, and Ashley ’06 is a proud English alumna. Ultimately the Foxworth Initiative is intended to enrich arts and humanities education and scholarship, and support projects that address enduring or emerging themes central to the arts and humanities or questions arising from other disciplines to which the arts and humanities might speak. For more information, visit www.arhu.umd.edu/foxworth.

INAGURAL FOXWORTH FACULTY COHORT:
 

Faculty Lead: Psyche Williams-Forson, Department of American Studies

Course: AMST 418G: Food, Trauma, and Sustainability

Social Issue: Food insecurity

Approach: Students will work with community partners like the Prince George’s County Food Equity Council to help reduce food vulnerabilities in the county.

Interdisciplinary in focus, students will draw from the fields of American Studies, anthropology, cultural studies and women’s studies to explore issues of food insecurity and urban food deserts. The project will engage these issues in the context of Prince George’s County (e.g. Sheridan Community Garden, Prince George’s County Food Equity Council), and in addition to their hands-on engagement students will learn about issues of food economies, acquisition and distribution circuits.

Community benefit: Communities made up of elderly and migrant populations, identified by partnering organizations like Casa De Maryland, will benefit from food delivery, work in community gardens and will be able to share their life stories with students.

Faculty Lead: Ana Patricia Rodriguez, Department of Spanish and Portuguese 

Course: SPAN 408i: Latina/o Transmigration and Transnationalism

Social Issue: Invisibility of Salvadorian migrant communities

Approach: The Salvadorian diaspora makes up the third largest Latino migrant community in the United States, many of whom reside in the Washington, D.C. metro area. SPAN 408i will bring students into conversation with this community to build and archive a digital storytelling project.  The course will explore the complex migration factors that lead to the Salvadorian diaspora.  Students will interact with non-English speakers to understand Latin American migration patterns with the members of the community, drawing on the powerful narrative tradition of testimonio, will have an opportunity to challenge their social and political invisibility through these documentation practices. At the end of the course, students and community members will present aspects of this digital storytelling project at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

Community benefit: UMD students in SPAN 408i will work with alongside the Latino Resource and Justice Center (CARECEN) in their community outreach to members of the Salvadorian diaspora. Together they will build a digital archive of Salvadorian migration, experiences of civil war and unrest, to form part of a larger archive in San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and El Salvador.

Faculty Lead: Leigh Wilson Smiley, School of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies

Course: TDPS358P Community Partnership for the Performing Arts

Social Issue: Racism, immigration and adolescent identity

Approach: Students from UMD and the Latin American Youth Center will work together to learn and apply performance skills of listening, voice and working in front of an audience. They will apply these techniques as they collaboratively build a performance piece, which they will use to explore and express a range of social issues that affect them as adolescents and young adults.  Inspired by the work of Jerzy Grotowski, Augusto Boal and James Gilligan, among others, they will develop storytelling skills as a means of expression, empowerment and imagination. 

Community benefit: Students explore and develop community partnership skills to become trained cultural field workers who will do transformative community based work. Latin American Youth Center.