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8/17/22

By Karen Shih ’09

For Black Americans, the simple act of eating can be fraught. Gathering for a barbecue in a public park can lead to run-ins with the police. Dining on traditional dishes, developed through ingenuity and necessity out of generations of slavery and poverty, can lead to racist ridicule. In her latest book, “Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America,” which is available in print this week, American studies Professor Psyche Williams-Forson breaks down how unfair scrutiny of what Black Americans eat keeps society from addressing systemic inequities.

Why did you want to write this book?
Shaming Black people for what and where they eat is not new. It began during enslavement; the ways farms and plantations were set up were about surveilling Black bodies. And it’s moved straight into the contemporary moment, such as the (2018) arrest of the young Black men at a Starbucks in Philadelphia. People feel they’ve been given permission to overcorrect Black people’s lives, from music to clothing to language to food, because these things go against the grain of whiteness and “correctness.”

We all need to eat, so it’s easy to dismiss the unseen power dynamics around food. But if we are going to have conversations about people’s freedoms, we need to talk about food.

What’s an example of how Black Americans are food shamed?
My book opens with the D.C. Metro worker who was eating on the train in uniform, when a woman took her picture and blasted it on social media. The employee was literally going from one part of her job to the next, trying to fit in a meal. She knew Metro was no longer issuing fines for eating so she did so. Then she has her life exposed.

What are some food misconceptions that you address?
People like to criticize fast-food restaurants, but they are major gathering hubs for the elderly and other people who are alone. Farmers markets aren’t utopias. If you don’t set up in Black neighborhoods, offer food that’s culturally relevant and accept Black vendors, people won’t feel welcome. Also, dollar stores can be important sources of food. If you’re on a fixed income, and you can go in and buy 20 items with $20, that can make a difference in people’s lives.

How can the conversation about Black food culture be harmful?
We hear a lot about Black people and their diets, and how they’re unhealthy and obese because of soul food—but you can’t blame ill health squarely on food. Look at “the stroke belt,” which stretches across the South. These are states with repressive policies and laws. There’s a lot of wage inequality, people who are unhoused, people who are unemployed. Society wants food to do the heavy lifting because it takes our focus away from systemic inequalities that keep people mired in oppression, which contributes to psychological and physical disease.

4/20/22

By ARHU Staff 

Professor of Communication Linda Aldoory will be leaving her position as associate dean for faculty affairs and research and director of the Center for Humanities Research in the University of Maryland’s College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU) to become the dean of American University’s College of Arts and Sciences, the university’s largest school. Her appointment is effective July 1, 2022.

Aldoory joined the faculty of the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland in 1999 and has held a number of administrative roles since 2015. She previously served as associate dean for research and programming, diversity officer and equity administrator in ARHU, associate chair of the Department of Communication and founder and director of the Center for Health Risk and Communication, housed in the Department of Communication. She also served as endowed chair and director of the Herschel S. Horowitz Center for Health Literacy in the School of Public Health. 

Aldoory studies public relations, feminism and health communication, with much of her work focusing on the effects of media messages and campaigns on underserved health populations. She serves as vice president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) and is president elect for AEJMC. She holds affiliate appointments in the School of Medicine at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, UMD’s School of Public Health and the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her recent book, “The Future of Feminism in Public Relations and Strategic Communication,” co-authored with Elizabeth Toth, won the 2021 PRIDE Outstanding Book Award from the Public Relations Division of the National Communication Association.  

During her time in the ARHU Dean’s Office, Aldoory has strengthened the research mission of the college by broadening visibility and support for humanities research; led the college diversity committee and actively assessed the diversity strategic plan with an eye toward next steps; and spearheaded the college’s Campaign on Race, Equity and Justice, which has included a Committee on Race, Equity and Justice to advise the dean, a Dean’s Colloquium Series on Race, Equity and Justice, and enhanced curriculum and programming. She also played a key role in securing speakers for and organizing the Dean’s Lecture Series, which invites artists and public intellectuals to visit the college for timely dialogue. And she’s worked closely with the Office of Faculty Affairs to address a wide range of faculty concerns.

“Linda is an efficient and effective administrator whose skills and talents will be missed in ARHU but greatly valued, I’m sure, at American,” said ARHU Dean Bonnie Thornton Dill. “Her passionate and upbeat approach to finding solutions for challenging problems will serve her well in the new role and I wish her continued success.”

Effective July 1, 2022, Professor of Communication Trevor Parry-Giles, will step away from his current role as associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), to serve a two-year term as the associate dean for faculty affairs and research to provide continuity for the new ARHU dean. Parry-Giles has taught communication at the University of Maryland since 1999. In ARHU, Parry-Giles has served on the Graduate Fellowships Committee for six years and has chaired and served on numerous selection and award committees for the Graduate School. He has served on seven faculty search committees and the search committee for the dean of the School of Journalism in 2011–12. He was also chair of the Department of Communication’s Appointment, Promotion and Tenure (APT) committee and Professional Track Faculty Promotion committee, and served on the ARHU APT committee. He was recently named a 2022 community fellow with the Humane Metrics in the Humanities and Social Sciences initiative.

The Office of the Dean looks forward to announcing an interim appointment for DEI soon.

2/8/23

Faculty members are invited to nominate candidates for the 2022-23 Undergraduate Researchers of the Year awards ($1,000 prize), presented annually in conjunction with Maryland’s Undergraduate Research Day (April 26, 2023). Nominations are due by Sunday, March 26, 2023.

PLEASE NOTE: Eligibility is limited to SENIORS (may be graduating in May 2023, Summer 2023, or have graduated in December 2022). A maximum of ONE (1) student nomination per faculty member can be accepted.

This award recognizes individual undergraduates (not teams) who have distinguished themselves exceptionally - **above and beyond expectations** - in research activities over the span of their time at the University. Nominated students should exemplify excellence in undergraduate research and show great promise for further accomplishment. 

Up to 6 awards, with prizes of $1000 each, will be presented in conjunction with Undergraduate Research Day (April 26, 2023).

ELIGIBILITY: Nominees must be SENIORS graduating in May 2023 or Summer 2023, or be alumni who began the 2022 academic year as SENIORS but who graduated in December 2022. Please note: a maximum of ONE (1) student nomination per faculty member can be accepted.

DEADLINE: Nominations should be sent to ugresearch@umd.edu no later than SUNDAY, MARCH 26, 2023 and should include: 

  1. student’s name and email address;
  2. a statement of nomination highlighting what is especially notable and exciting about the student’s accomplishment(s) – if you have recently written a recommendation letter for this student that effectively describes their research accomplishments, you may submit that as your nomination statement.

We welcome any additional information, hyperlinks, etc., that would help illuminate your nominee’s accomplishments. 

**Nominated students will be asked to provide a research resume or CV, copies of relevant presentations/papers, and a personal reflection on their research activities.**

Questions? Contact Francis DuVinage, Director, National Scholarships Office and Maryland Center for Undergraduate Research (duvinage@umd.edu). 

12/6/22

By Chris Carroll 

 

In the University of Maryland's new $30 million Grand Challenges Grants program, more potentially world-changing ideas will now get the chance to thrive.

 

Besides awarding three major institutional grants to UMD researchers (who will receive 100% matches from their academic units) to work toward establishing new research institutes, centers or academic units, university leaders have decided to grab the opportunity to fund other semifinalists in the category as well.

 

Jennifer King Rice speaks at podiumPhoto by Stephanie S. Cordle

“We have nine semifinalists, and we have to narrow it down to three—but we don’t want to lose any of these incredibly promising, compelling ideas for addressing the world’s biggest challenges,” Senior Vice President and Provost Jennifer King Rice said.

The new Grand Challenge Impact Awards—up to $200,000 per year for two years with some additional matching from colleges—will be announced along with institutional and project grants (both individual and team-based) near the start of the Spring 2023 semester.

To address the world’s top challenges, from racial equity to pandemic preparedness to climate change, the university will invest up to $30 million in the grant program: Institutional winners will be awarded a total of $3 million over three years, including the college or school match, with up to 10 team project grants and 50 individual project grants each receiving total amounts of $1.5 million and $150,000, respectively.

Rice spoke to Maryland Today to provide an update on the selection process and explain how the program will strengthen research in every UMD college and school—and potentially benefit all of humanity.

What’s the status of the winner selection process?
We received 24 submissions for institutional grants by the deadline in July, and in September we narrowed that down to nine. In early November, those project teams made presentations to campus leaders including President (Darryll J.) Pines, myself and a number of key administrators at the university who could both help inform the decision on the finalists and also be instrumental in helping find additional sources of revenue for the projects, whether it’s from state or federal agencies, or from foundations and philanthropic sources. Now we’re in the process of narrowing this down to three winners. The other six projects will be offered Grand Challenge Impact Awards.

There were also 111 team and individual investigator project grant proposals submitted by the deadline in early October. At the end of January, we’ll announce the final awardees in all the categories.

What has most impressed you when you look at the full scope of the proposals?
Scope is exactly what I was going to say; I was impressed and fascinated by the range of topics covered. The president and I anticipated climate change-related proposals and projects addressing pandemic preparedness, but there were other compelling topics that we didn’t expect, like one addressing literacy and equity, and another focused on values-centered artificial intelligence.

This range of “big ideas” really underscores the importance of using this sort of crowdsourcing approach to accelerating solutions to the grand challenges of our time, which is a key element of the university’s new strategic plan.

How is this grant program unique?
Other universities that have introduced grand challenge initiatives have tended to focus on priorities identified by the administration, rather than leveraging the creativity and innovation in the academic community. Our approach that held multiple levels of grant competitions provided a mechanism for members of the community to bring their biggest and best ideas forward. The ideas all come from the faculty and staff, and all of our colleges and schools are represented. If you look at some of the institutional grant finalists, they’re representing upward of six or seven different colleges. That’s very powerful and reflects the type of interdisciplinary collaboration required to address these complex and enduring challenges.

We purposefully put an emphasis on working across disciplines and bringing people together to break down the silos that can develop at any institution. We also prioritized projects that provide innovative and new opportunities for students’ learning. After all, education is our core mission, and we want to prepare the next generation of leaders who will continue to take on complex and pressing problems.

The Grand Challenge Grants program was designed to advance key elements of our university strategic plan, Fearlessly Forward, which calls for investing in faculty, students, staff, alumni and partner capacity to work across disciplines to take on these enduring challenges and contribute in meaningful ways to the public good.

What’s the committee looking for? What sets a proposal apart?
Impact. The whole idea of these Grand Challenge Grants is to create meaningful, tangible, real-world impact on our communities and our society. One of the questions that we asked all of our groups was, “If this project is successful, in 10 years, what will have changed in our communities and in our world as a result of the work that this team is doing?”

We want to leverage the incredible contributions and expertise of our faculty, and enable that to be the building blocks for accelerating transformative change.

How might this transform things at UMD?
These projects—the institutional grants, the impact awards and the project grants—will advance UMD as a leader among universities committed to advancing the public good through our work. These grants will foster collaborations that build on all the important foundational science and humanistic work already taking place on campus to amplify our impact on the world.

 

Ground Works, a2ru's peer-reviewed platform for arts-integrated research, announces a call for submissions to a special themed issue entitled Creating Knowledge in Common. With this issue, we seek to lift up university-community partnered research and inquiry that center the arts. We invite submissions that deepen our understanding of how the structures, processes, and outcomes of such partnerships result in reciprocal relationships that advance new knowledge. In addition, submissions should make clear how the shared work benefits both the academic and the community partners. 

Ground Works encourages a wide array of submission types that incorporate multimedia to tell the story of creating knowledge in common. All submissions must be received and flagged for consideration in this special issue by January 31, 2023. Read the full call for submissions, and contact a2ru-editorgw@umich.edu with any questions.

 

A Message from Stephen Kidd, Executive Director, National Humanities Alliance:

 

 

Dear Friend,

Last Friday afternoon, President Biden—following presidents before him—welcomed October as National Arts and Humanities Month. 

With the announcement, President Biden issued an Executive Order on Promoting the Arts, Humanities, and Museum and Library Services that does two noteworthy things. The executive order:

  1. Re-constitutes the President’s Committee on Arts and Humanities, which was disbanded during the Trump administration after all its members resigned in protest of the administration’s reaction to the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. The newly constituted committee is charged with raising the visibility of and building public support for the arts and humanities as well as museums and libraries. The committee will also serve in an advisory capacity to the president as well as to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
  2. Recognizes the essential role that the arts and humanities as well as museums and libraries can play in addressing the administration’s broader policy goals, particularly economic development, building resilience in historically underserved communities, tackling the climate crisis, preserving cultural heritage, and lifting up more and diverse voices. What’s more, the executive order urges coordination with the NEA, NEH, and IMLS across all federal agencies with the goal of advancing these broader policy goals. 

As NEH Chair Shelley Lowe (Navajo) has noted, “We are thrilled that the Biden-Harris Administration has chosen to recognize the essential importance of the humanities to the health and success of our nation and communities by designating this month of observation and reconvening a presidential committee to augment NEH’s efforts to reach all Americans.”

We look forward to learning about the president’s appointments to the newly reconstituted committee, and we are hopeful that it will help raise the visibility of humanities work unfolding across the country. We are also eager to see the committee join the broader humanities community in its efforts to harness the power of the humanities to support communities across the country in confronting their most pressing challenges.

Best regards,

Stephen Kidd
Executive Director, National Humanities Alliance

http://www.nhalliance.org/

 

9/1/22

Webinar Workshop dates:  
PLEASE ONLY SIGN UP FOR ONE!!

  • Wednesday 9/14 1:30pm - 2:30pm 
  • Monday 9/26 10am – 11am
  • Tuesday 10/25 1:30pm - 2:30pm
  • Wednesday 11/9 11am – 12pm

Where:    Online – at your desk
With:        Bill DeCocco, InfoEd

RSVP to: https://forms.gle/MD59SNpvXu4xNBiY9

Harness the power of SPINPlus – the funding search database available to all UMD faculty, staff and students, free of charge.  The system provides a modern full-text search which is run against the company’s proprietary database. 

Highlights include:

  • Public (government – Federal and State) and private (foundations) funding opportunities
  • Results are returned to the user in relevancy ranked format, and can be further sorted, grouped, or filtered
  • Searches/funding profiles can be saved for future use
  • Search results can be set up to send daily or weekly notification alerts
  • Basic training video tutorials are available on the site

This webinar will cover basic login, searches, and notifications from the system. There is a limit of 150 individual log-ins to the webinar on each date, therefore RSVPs to https://forms.gle/MD59SNpvXu4xNBiY9 will be taken on a first-come, first-served basis.

If you have any questions, please contact Hana Kabashi.

8/25/22

UMD COLLEGE PARK COHORT

 

 

 

 
DR. GERSHUN AVILEZ, Associate Dean for Diversity, Equality and InclusionDr. GerShun Avilez is a cultural studies scholar who specializes in contemporary African American and Black Diasporic literatures and visual cultures. His scholarship explores how questions of gender and sexuality inform artistic production. In addition, he works in the fields of political radicalism, spatial theory, gender studies, and medical humanities. He has published several books, and is currently working on a third project, which focuses on documenting queer history.

Throughout his work and teaching, Dr. Avilez is committed to studying a wide variety of art forms, including, drama, fiction, non-fiction, film, poetry, visual and performance art among others. He was the recipient of the Poorvu Award for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Teaching in 2011 (Yale University).

GerShun received his PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania, where he also earned a Graduate Certificate in Africana Studies. Dr. Avilez has held professorships at Yale University, UNC Chapel Hill, and a post-doctorate Fellowship at the University of Rochester.

You can learn more about Prof. Avilez here: https://umcp.academia.edu/GerShunAvilez


Crystal U. Davis, Assistant Professor
Dance, Performance and Scholarship
Head of MFA Dance Program
School of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies

Crystal U. Davis is a dancer, movement analyst, and critical race theorist.  As a performer her work spans an array of genres from modern dance companies including Notes in Motion to East Indian dance companies including Nayikas Dance Theater Company to her own postmodern choreography at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival and Dance New Amsterdam.

Her creative work centers around the incongruities present between our daily behaviors and belief systems. She has conducted ethnographic research in Rajasthan, India on the relationship between religious beliefs and both creative and pedestrian movement. Her current research explores implicit bias in dance through a critical theory lens and how identity politics of privilege manifest in the body. Some of her recent publications include “Tendus and Tenancy: Black Dancers and the White Landscape of Dance Education” in the Palgrave Handbook of Race and Arts in Education and “Laying New Ground: Uprooting White Privilege and Planting Seeds of Equity and Inclusion” in Dance Education and Responsible Citizenship: Promoting Civic Engagement through Effective Dance Pedagogies.

You can learn more about Prof. Davis here: https://tdps.umd.edu/directory/crystal-davis


Dr. Sahar Khamis, Associate Professor
Communication

Dr. Sahar Khamis is an expert on Arab and Muslim media, and the former Head of the Mass Communication and Information Science Department in Qatar University. She is a former Mellon Islamic Studies Initiative Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago.

She is the co-author of the books: Islam Dot Com: Contemporary Islamic Discourses in Cyberspace(Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Egyptian Revolution 2.0: Political Blogging, Civic Engagement and Citizen Journalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and the co-editor of Arab Women’s Activism and Socio-Political Transformation: Unfinished Gendered Revolutions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Additionally, she authored and co-authored numerous book chapters, journal articles and conference papers, regionally and internationally.

Dr. Khamis is a media commentator and analyst, a public speaker, a human rights commissioner in the Human Rights Commission in Montgomery County, Maryland, and a radio host, who presents a monthly radio show on “U.S. Arab Radio” (the first Arab-American radio station broadcasting in the U.S. and Canada).

You can learn more about Dr. Khamis at: https://communication.umd.edu/directory/sahar-khamis
https://saharkhamis.wordpress.com/

 
Dr. Nancy Mirabal, Associate Professor
American Studies

Nancy Raquel Mirabal is Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies and Director of the U.S. Latina/o Studies Program. Mirabal is an historian who has published widely in the fields of  Afro-diasporic, gentrification, and spatial studies. She is the author of Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823-1957 (NYU Press, 2017) and co-editor of Keywords for Latina/o Studies (NYU Press, 2017), winner of a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. She is currently working on two projects: Whiteness as Gentrification and a Radical Lens: Visual Culture and the Racial Politics of Place in Washington DC1973-1999.

She is a recipient of several grants and awards, including a Scholar in Residence Fellowship, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, University Chancellor Postdoctoral Fellowship, U.C. Berkeley; Social Science Research Council International Migration Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities Grant, and Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. In 2021 Mirabal was named a University of Maryland Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year.

You can learn more about Dr. Mirabal here: https://amst.umd.edu/directory/nancy-mirabal

 
Dr. Catherine Steele, Associate Professor
Communication

Dr. Catherine Knight Steele is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland – College Park and was the Founding Director of the African American Digital Humanities Initiative (AADHum). She now directs the Black Communication and Technology lab as a part of the Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, & Optimism Network. Dr. Steele also serves as the Director of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities.

Her research focuses on race, gender, and media, with a specific emphasis on African American culture and discourse and new media. Dr. Steele’s research on the Black blogosphere, digital discourses of resistance and joy, and digital Black feminism has been published in such journals as Social Media + Society, Feminist Media Studies, and Television and New Media. Her book Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press), examines the relationship between Black women and technology, and was the 2022 recipient of the Association of Internet Research 2022 Nancy Baym Book Award.

You can learn more about Dr. Steele here: http://www.catherineknightsteele.com

 

9/15/22

Hallie Liberto's book is about permissive consent—the moral tool we use to give another person permission to do what would otherwise be forbidden. For instance, consent to enter my home gives you permission to do what would otherwise be trespass. This transformation is the very thing that philosophers identify as consent—which is why we call it a normative power. It is something individuals can do, by choice, to change the moral or legal world. But what human acts or attitudes render consent? When do coercive threats, offers, or lies undermine the transformative power of consent? What intentions or conventions are necessary to render consent meaningful?

This book develops a novel theory that explains the moral features of consent in some of the most central domains of human life—but that also serves as a study in how to theorize normative power. It argues that consent is a moral mechanism with exactly the set of features that, when triggered, prevents another person's behavior from constituting a certain kind of wrongdoing. What kind of wrongdoing? It depends on what sort of permission is being granted. Sometimes consent permits others to enter, occupy, or act within some bounded domain wherein the consent-giver holds moral authority. In these cases, consent operates to prevent what the book calls: Invasive Wrongdoing. By identifying the moral features that underlie this special wrongdoing, we can learn what it takes to render consent.

8/22/22

What we see through our windshields reflects ideas about our national identity, consumerism, and infrastructure.

For better or worse, windshields have become a major frame for viewing the nonhuman world. The view from the road is one of the main ways in which we experience our environments. These vistas are the result of deliberate historical forces, and humans have shaped them as they simultaneously sought to be transformed by them. In Consuming Landscapes, Thomas Zeller explores how what we see while driving reflects how we view our societies and ourselves, the role that consumerism plays in our infrastructure, and ideas about reshaping the environment in the twentieth century.

Zeller breaks new ground by comparing the driving experience and the history of landscaped roads in the United States and Germany, two major automotive countries. He focuses specifically on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the United States and the German Alpine Road as case studies. When the automobile was still young, an early twentieth-century group of designers—landscape architects, civil engineers, and planners—sought to build scenic infrastructures, or roads that would immerse drivers in the landscapes that they were traversing. As more Americans and Europeans owned cars and drove them, however, they became less interested in enchanted views; safety became more important than beauty.

Clashes between designers and drivers resulted in different visions of landscapes made for automobiles. As strange as it may seem to twenty-first-century readers, many professionals in the early twentieth century envisioned cars and roads, if properly managed, as saviors of the environment. Consuming Landscapes illustrates how the meaning of infrastructures changed as a result of use and consumption. Such changes indicate a deep ambivalence toward the automobile and roads, prompting the question: can cars and roads bring us closer to nature while deeply altering it at the same time?

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