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Research and Scholarly Work

11/8/22

Jeffrey Herf's most recent book, lsrael's Moment; International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945-1949 (Cambridge University Press, 2022)  has received the Bernard Lewis Prize awarded annually by the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) .

According to the Award letter, the Bernard Lewis Prize recognizes the work of scholars engaged in the study of issues on antisemitism that were of great importance to ASMEA's founding chairman, Bernard Lewis. "While Christian antisemitism is well-studied, a stigma remains around addressing antisemitism in the Muslim world. Beyond this, relatively few scholars focus on the Middle Eastern dimensions of Christian antisemitism in religious and cultural terms, much less the political impact in the West. ASMEA was founded 15 years ago by the  historians Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, both of whom made major contributions to the scholarship on the modern Middle East."

Jeffrey Herf adds: "Israel's Moment is a history of how the governments of the United States, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and Soviet bloc reacted to the Zionist project in the crucial years of 1945 to 1949. It also addresses debates, especially in the United States, and at the United Nations, about Zionist aspirations, antisemitism, and the aftereffects of Nazism and the Holocaust. I am pleased that as a historian whose past work is on modern European history, my study of its aftereffects around the world and in the Middle East has received this acclaim among scholars of the Middle East as well." 

11/7/22

Dennis Winston, English Lecturer, contributed a chapter, “A History of African American Orature, the Badman Hero, and Gangster Rap,” to A Companion to African Rhetoric, published by Lexington Books, edited by Segun Ige, Gilbert Motsaathebe, and Omedi Ochieng. 

From the Publisher:

A Companion to African Rhetoric, edited by Segun Ige, Gilbert Motsaathebe, and Omedi Ochieng, presents the reader with different perspectives on African rhetoric mostly from Anglophone sub-Saharan Africa and the Diaspora. The African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American rhetorician contributors conceptualize African rhetoric, examine African political rhetoric, analyze African rhetoric in literature, and address the connection between rhetoric and religion in Africa. They argue for a holistic view of rhetoric on the continent.

11/10/22

By Tom Ventsias 

Mandated face coverings vs. no masking. Fourteen days of isolation or five. Online schooling or crowded classrooms. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic at times seems like a cacophony of mixed messaging from public health experts and government officials.

Much of this variance stems from the evolution and tenacity of the virus itself. Yet other factors—pandemic fatigue, physical location, demographics, politics, and the timing and tone of the messaging itself—have fueled varying levels of public skepticism and confusion.

To meet this challenge, University of Maryland researchers are developing sophisticated predictive models and best communication practices needed to combat future pandemics. They’re crunching voluminous data from the current pandemic—analyzing social media content, epidemiological statistics and public statements from officials—to build a seamless, end-to-end network that considers complex and interdependent biological, environmental and human factors.

Their work is funded by a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, part of the organization’s new Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention Program.

A main goal of the UMD project is to develop a digital platform, called PandEval (pandemic evaluation), that can zero in on specific locales, offering a level of detail not widely available during the current pandemic.

“What we’ve seen is a need to improve messaging and policymaking at the local scale,” said Neil Sehgal, an assistant professor of health policy and management in the School of Public Health. “Public acceptance for health-related mandates—things like a statewide shutdown of non-essential businesses—could look very different in Montgomery County than on the Lower Eastern Shore.”

Sehgal, whose work is focused on novel and emerging digital health technologies and their applicability to health care delivery and outcomes, is joined on the project by a multi-institutional team of computational social scientists and data scientists, public health experts, biostatisticians and epidemiologists.

It includes Louiqa Raschid, a dean’s professor of information systems in the Robert H. Smith School of Business who is principal investigator of the award; Vanessa Frias-Martinez, an associate professor in the College of Information Studies; Xiaoli Nan, a professor of communication in the College of Arts and Humanities; Kristina Lerman, a professor of computer science at the University of Southern California; and Eili Klein, M.D., an associate professor of emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins University.

Raschid and Frias-Martinez have joint appointments in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, which is providing administrative and technical support for the project.

To develop robust algorithms for the PandEval platform, the researchers are curating data that includes almost two billion Twitter posts since January 2020, social media captures from Facebook, GPS digital footprints from location intelligence companies, face masking statistics from a New York Times database and inoculation data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The team will use Twitter and Facebook posts to develop social media-based models of community beliefs and attitudes, offering a window into areas like science skepticism, concern about vaccine safety, a lack of trust in public officials or an unwillingness to contribute to the public good.

Nan and Sehgal are also developing digital tools to evaluate the effectiveness of public health messaging, with a focus on building models that help identify the best person or organization to deliver the right message at the right time.

Frias-Martinez will use her extensive experience in mobility tracking to analyze the GPS data, creating new models to guide safe behavior during pandemics. The software would track activities via smartphones or other mobile devices, and then match it to disease vector models, offering actionable data on whether people should work from home or use public transportation systems.

“We think the benefits of PandEval will be twofold: increasing trust and confidence in our public health infrastructure and giving decision makers epidemiological models that are customized to specific population segments,” said Raschid. “This can be invaluable for things like vaccine rollouts and health-related mandates.”

11/8/22

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Words of longing to distant lovers. Complaints about rotten food and ill health. Admissions of doubt about the motivations for war.

For soldiers fighting on the front lines across the world, letters have long been a way to share personal reflections with those back home.

But for five decades in Israel, it wasn’t just friends and loved ones who pored over soldiers’ most private writings. From 1948 to 1998, the top-secret Postal Censorship Bureau intercepted and copied soldiers’ outgoing personal letters and compiled the findings in biweekly briefings for the country’s military leadership.

That bureau’s work is the subject of a new documentary co-created by University of Maryland Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies Shay Hazkani. The 55-minute film, “The Soldier’s Opinion,” features both the letter writers and the former censors discussing the impact of the bureau’s intrusion—sometimes even face-to-face with each other. Directed by award-winning Israeli film director Assaf Banitt, the film will be screened at UMD tomorrow.

"The Soldier's Opinion" poster

“This unit was a control mechanism, part of a ‘Big Brother’ apparatus,” Hazkani said. “And as you can see when you watch the film, it can be difficult for people to grapple with the fact that this existed.”

In 2007, Hazkani was a TV journalist conducting research in the archives of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) when he noticed a reference to the views of rank-and-file soldiers included in an ongoing report called The Soldier’s Opinion. After learning the archived reports were classified, he embarked on what he describes as a “small crusade” to get access. A year—and extensive litigation—later, he received copies of several hundred letters. It would take six more years to get access to more of the trove, during which time he decided to pursue academia in the United States.

For 15 years, Hazkani has been endlessly fascinated by the tens of thousands of letters in the collection and the stories and voices they capture. The censorship unit, staffed mostly by female soldiers, flagged topics of interest to army commanders, like Israeli politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, homosexuality in the ranks and drug use. In the 1950s, more than 100,000 letters went through the IDF each month, all of which were first sent to censorship bases.

“I remember that first moment, how truly exciting it was to read not what a leader was saying in a very tailored speech, but rather, ordinary people with raw emotion,” Hazkani said. “Reading these letters I felt that dissenting voices were kind of kept from us—in the education system, in the history books—and so my larger goal has been to bring those voices forward.”

In 2013, after Hazkani wrote a story for Haaretz newspaper based on letters sent from soldiers during the Yom Kippur War 40 years earlier, Banitt approached him with interest in turning his academic research into a documentary. Throughout the nearly decade-long collaboration that followed, Hazkani and Banitt worked to transform the written letters into a visual story that could appeal to broad audiences. (Hazkani’s 2021 book “Dear Palestine” also used the letters to capture a range of previously untold Israeli and Arab perspectives of the 1948 War.)

In a review, the Israeli news website Walla lauded the film’s interviews and the way the filmmakers “manage to bring forward a few of the unit's veterans...[who] speak in a truthful and candid manner, aware of what they did and with a sense of self-criticism." The film, it said, “does not have a single boring moment.”

In one scene, Sinai Peter, who served in the army between 1971–74, cries as he reads one of his letters from the time contemplating the dehumanizing ways he saw Israeli soldiers treat Arabs they encountered. He admits in the letter that he’d considered fleeing, or worse—ending his own life.

In the next scene, Peter sits across from the former officer who read those words decades earlier, Adi Tal. She tells him how his letter was shared with leadership as an example of waning soldier morale.

“I was very curious to meet you,” he tells her, “since you rummaged through my innards.”

“I could never do a job like that,” he adds, creating an uncomfortable moment.

Tal admits her youth and naivete at the time, and how she now views the work as “invasive.” Ultimately, the two both express exasperation toward the government’s approach.

Hazkani, who came to UMD in 2016 after receiving his Ph.D. at NYU, said “The Soldier’s Opinion,” aside from being artistically compelling, invites new perspectives and nuance into modern Israeli history, including as it relates to ongoing war and conflict. And it underscores the persistent disconnect between the country’s leaders and its people. Except for a few minor examples, none of the letters ever changed policy.

“We learned this was not the purpose,” Hazkani said. “The idea of the bureau wasn’t to make society better or to solve anything. It was there just to make sure the pot doesn’t overflow. It can simmer, simmer, simmer—but it can’t overflow.” 

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"The Soldier's Opinion” will screen tomorrow at 5 p.m. at UMD in H.J. Patterson Hall followed by a panel discussion with the filmmakers. It will also be shown at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the JCC in Washington, D.C.

11/7/22

By: Ashawnta Jackson

In a recently released interactive project—the Timeline of African American Music—Carnegie Hall, in collaboration with ethnomusicologist Portia K. Maultsby, has charted the histories, traditions, sounds, and communities that have made Black music such a vital part of American culture. Charting movements from Afrofuturism to ragtime, funk to work songs, the project doesn’t just represent the history of the music, it also represents a coming together of some of nearly thirty notable scholars in music and cultural studies.

The timeline, according to the project’s website, “​​reveals the unique characteristics of each genre and style, while also offering in-depth studies of pioneering musicians who created some of America’s most timeless artistic expressions.” Those unique characteristics can be as familiar as the sounds of rock or blues or come from genres that reveal Black artists thriving and creating in spaces that, as musicologist Tammy Kernodle writes, “expand the palette for what has come to define sonic Blackness.”

In this series, we explore the work of some of the scholars involved in the project, highlighting their scholarship that can be found in the JSTOR archives.

Tammy Kernodle is a music professor at Miami University in Ohio, where she primarily focuses on African American music, American music, and gender studies. In an essay she contributed to the Timeline, Kernodle explores a genre of music that is often excluded from discussions of Black music—concert or classical music. Though the names of Black classical composers are not always part of the conversation, Kernodle argues that not only should they be, but that Black concert or Afro-classical music has a long tradition spanning from the Colonial Era (1619–1775) to the present day. Composers such as the formerly enslaved Newport Gardner or singer Matilda Sissieretta Jones weren’t just part of the genre; their work was an essential “form of resistance culture to notions of racial inferiority, and the marginalization of Black America,” Kernodle explains.

Continuing the theme of music as resistance is Stephanie Shonekan in an essay that charts the sounds of protest. An ethnomusicologist and Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland, Shonekan explores the intersections of music, culture, and identity. Music has shaped Black life from slavery to the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s, Shonekan writes, and “has served as the inspirational soundtrack of these movements, evolving from one era to another, and reflecting their revolutionary response to each new challenge for justice, progress, and equality.” Music, she argues, is a vital part of protest and “it is only when the world truly listens, commits to the work of change, that sustainable resolution is possible.”

Explore the work of both Tammy Kernodle and Stephanie Shonekan:

Tammy Kernodle

Stephanie Shonekan

Resources

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

Arias, Communists, and Conspiracies: The History of Still’s “Troubled Island”By: Tammy L. KernodleThe Musical Quarterly, Vol. 83, No. 4 (Winter 1999), pp. 487–508Oxford University Press

 This Is My Story, This Is My Song: The Historiography of Vatican II, Black Catholic Identity, Jazz, and the Religious Compositions of Mary Lou WilliamsBy: Tammy Lynn KernodleU.S. Catholic Historian, Vol. 19, No. 2, African American Spirituality and Liturgical Renewal (Spring 2001), pp. 83–94Catholic University of America Press

 Diggin’ You Like Those Ol’ Soul Records: Meshell Ndegeocello and the Expanding Definition of Funk in Postsoul AmericaBy: Tammy L. KernodleAmerican Studies, Vol. 52, No. 4, THE FUNK ISSUE (2013), pp. 181–204Mid-America American Studies Association

 Black Women Working Together: Jazz, Gender, and the Politics of ValidationBy: Tammy L. KernodleBlack Music Research Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring), pp. 27–55Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago and University of Illinois Press

 Fela’s Foundation: Examining the Revolutionary Songs of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and the Abeokuta Market Women’s Movement in 1940s Western NigeriaBy: Stephanie ShonekanBlack Music Research Journal, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 127–144Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago and University of Illinois Press

 Epilogue: “We People Who Are Darker than Blue”: Black Studies and the Mizzou MovementBy: Stephanie ShonekanThe Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 86, No. 3, Special Issue—When Voices Rise: Race, Resistance, and Campus Uprisings in the Information Age (Summer 2017), pp. 399–404Journal of Negro Education

11/4/22

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and French in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Caroline Eades has been awarded a prestigious Residency Fellowship at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. Eades will spend the Spring 2023 semester at Camargo working on a project that examines the contributions of Habib Benglia, the first actor of African origin in French cinema. 

Born in 1895 in Algeria, Benglia moved to Paris in 1912 and quickly started an acting career in theater and cinema that lasted until 1960. Though he played in approximately 40 films, 50 plays and 30 musical shows, he remains little known by scholars and the general public. Like many other Black actors of the time, Benglia was often relegated to secondary roles in French “colonial cinema” (films produced in France during the colonial era) and was the target of racism.   

“I am very honored to receive this fellowship and feel very encouraged to pursue this project,” said Eades. “This project aims to restore Habib Benglia's place in the history of French cinema [and] I intend to reconstruct Benglia’s career through the encounters, the choices and the difficulties he faced in the film industry.” 

Eades previously contributed to the rediscovery of Alice Guy-Blaché, the first woman film director in France. After Guy-Blaché’s work was the subject of a 2009 film retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York, Eades and Associate Professor of Russian and Film Studies Elizabeth Papazian organized a conference dedicated to her at the University of Maryland in conjunction with the National Gallery of Art. There have since been multiple publications, events and films about Guy-Blaché.  

Eades is beginning her research about Benglia this fall, visiting archives in Paris and Toulouse, France, as well as The Library of Congress, the National Archives and the archives of Twentieth Century Fox at UCLA to screen his films and access production documents, including scripts, production records and correspondence. At Camargo, she will be in residency with eight other fellows. She plans to devote time to writing a monograph on Benglia’s life and work.

Portrait of French-African actor Habib Benglia courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Design by Jaye Nelson.

11/7/22

The University of Maryland Strategic Partnership: MPowering the State on Friday announced the appointment of three professors from the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) and three from the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) as MPower Professors. The professorship recognizes, incentivizes and fosters collaborations between faculty who are working together on the most pressing issues of our time.

To be considered for the MPower Professorship, faculty must take on strategic research that would be unattainable or difficult to achieve by UMB or UMCP alone, and must embrace MPower’s mission to serve the state of Maryland and its citizens. Each professor will receive $150,000, allocated over three years, to apply to their salary or to support supplemental research activities.

“The MPower Professors have shown incredible dedication and commitment to collaboration, innovation and discovery. Their work to solve major challenges and positively impact the lives of others is bolstered by this investment,” said UMB President Bruce E. Jarrell, M.D.

“The six professors selected for this honor are each working across disciplines to address the most complex challenges facing society today, bridging research and scholarship between institutions to foster innovation that will impact citizens in Maryland, across the country and around the world,” said UMCP President Darryll J. Pines.

The 2022 MPower Professors are using the latest advancements in computer science, machine learning and augmented reality to revolutionize medical care, linguistics and neuroscience; developing enhanced understanding and treatment for a range of infections and diseases; investigating cutting-edge approaches and new materials to regenerate human tissue; and examining the relationship between agriculture, energy and water to create a safer and sustainable global food supply.

 

Philip S. Resnik

Philip S. Resnik is a professor of linguistics in the UMCP College of Arts and Humanities and holds a joint appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). He is also an affiliate professor in the Department of Computer Science in the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. Resnik's research focuses on computational modeling of language that brings together linguistic knowledge, domain expertise, and machine learning methods. His current work emphasizes applications in computational social science and scientific research questions in computational cognitive neuroscience. Resnik holds two patents and has authored or co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and conference papers. In 2020, he was named a fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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Click below to read the full annoucement with the other 2022 MPower Professors.

Dean Bonnie Thornton Dill kicked off the Colloquium Series in 2020 as part of the Campaign on Race, Equity and Justice, hosting a series of faculty experts from ARHU to discuss their scholarship and creative projects related to anti-racism and social justice.

This year, each session will include a mini-lecture and then a conversation with Dean Stephanie Shonekan, followed by Q and A from participants. Grab a cup of coffee and join the Dean for a conversation with some of ARHU’s leading experts in social justice and anti-racism.

2022-2023 COLLOQIUM SERIES:

September 28: Catherine Knight Steele, associate professor in the Department of Communication will present a talk titled "Toward a Digital Black Feminist Future". VIDEO

October 26: Michael Ross, professor in the Department of History will present a talk titled "The Supreme Court, Stare Decisis, and the Inapt Comparisons between the Dobbs decision and Brown v. Board of Education". VIDEO COMING SOON.

2021-2022 COLLOQIUM SERIES:

October. 27: Christopher Bonner, associate professor in the Department of History, whose talk is titled "Willis Hodges's Shield: The Meanings of Black Voters." VIDEO

November 19: Janelle Wong, professor in the Department of American Studies, whose talk is titled “At the Crossroad: Black and Asian American Relations in U.S. Politics Today.” VIDEO

December 9: Robert Levine, Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English, whose talk is titled “The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson.” VIDEO

February 17: Alexis Lothian, associate professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, whose talk is titled “Fan Fiction, Social Justice and the Politics of Fantasy.” VIDEO

March 16: Sahar Khamis, associate professor in the Department of Communication, whose talk is titled “Insights on Countering Islamophobia through Research, Activism and Media Outreach.” VIDEO

April 15: La Marr Jurelle Bruce, associate professor in the Department of American Studies, whose talk is titled “How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Toward a Mad Methodology.”

April 27: Shay Hazkani, assistant professor in the Department of History and Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Program and Center for Jewish Studies, title forthcoming. VIDEO

2020-2021 COLLOQUIUM SERIES:

Perla Guerrero, Associate Professor of American Studies

Topic: Latinxs on Both Sides of Inequality and Fighting for Justice
September 16, 9-10 am
VIDEO

Marisa Parham, Professor in English and Director of AADHum
Topic: Purpose, Frivolity, Futures: What, really, is inclusion?
October 6, 9-10am
VIDEO

Scot Reese, Professor in the School of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies
Topic: Racial "Battle Fatigue" in black theatre and culture
October 26, 9-10am
VIDEO

Julius Fleming, Jr., Assistant Professor in English
Topic: His book, “Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Refusal to Wait for Freedom”
November 6, 9-10am
VIDEO

Tamanika Ferguson, Presidential Post Doc in the Communication Department
Topic: Incarcerated women and media activism
November 17, 9-10 am
VIDEO

Richard Bell, Professor of History
Topic: African American political culture and his book: "Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home"
December 8, 9-10 am
VIDEO

Quincy Mills, Associate Professor of History
Topic: Movement Money: Crises, Relief, and Democratic Practice
February 17, 9-10 am
VIDEO

Mary Corbin Sies, Associate Professor of American Studies; Trevor Munoz, MITH Director; Maxine Gross, President of Lakeland Community Heritage Project; and Lakelands Project team members
Topic: The Lakeland Digital Archive: Toward an Equitable Community/University Collaboration
April 13, 9-10 am
VIDEO

Jessica Gatlin, Assistant Professor of Art
Topic: Interdisciplinary Forms of Resistance
April 29, 9-10 am
VIDEO

GerShun Avilez, Associate Professor in English
Topic: Black radicalism and his book, "Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire"
May 6, 9-10 am
VIDEO

Congratulations to our fall recipients of Faculty Funds awards:

 

 

 

 

Advancement Grants

  • Jennifer Barclay - TDPS
    New play: Murdered Men Do Drip and Bleed
  • Shannon Collis - ARTT
    Immersive Installation Project: Lake Mead/Lower Colorado River Basin
  • Bronson Hui - SLLC
    Why are audiobooks useful for vocabulary learning in a second language?
  • Cy Keener - ARTT
    Iceberg Portraiture and Sea Ice Daily Drawings Project

Special Purpose Advancement Grants

  • Charlotte Vaughn - MLSC
    Centering Social Justice Education in a Sociolinguistic Human Subjects Research Project

 Click here to see previous winners.

11/2/22

By Maria Herd M.A. ’19

 

Fitness trackers and smartwatches are widely used to monitor health, activity and exercise, but they’re pretty sedentary themselves. They stay strapped on your wrist or clipped to your clothing despite the fact it’s more effective to monitor different areas—your upper body for breathing, for example, or your wrist to track typing or writing.

Now, researchers at the University of Maryland are putting wearable sensors on track to do their best work—literally—with a miniature robotics system capable of traversing numerous locations on the human body.

Their device, called Calico, mimics a toy train by traveling on a cloth track that can run up and down users’ limbs and around their torso, operating independently of external guidance through the use of magnets, sensors and connectors. Their paper describing the project was recently published in the ACM Journal on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies and presented at UBICOMP, a conference on ubiquitous computing.

 

closeup of wearable sensor on wrist

“Our device is a fast, reliable and precise personal assistant that lays the groundwork for future systems,” said Anup Sathya M.S. ’21, who led Calico’s development for his master’s thesis in human-computer interaction. Sathya is now a first-year Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of Chicago.

Most wearable workout devices are limited in the type of exercises they can monitor, but Calico is versatile. For example, it can track running on a user's arm, move to the elbow to count push-ups, to the back for planks, and then to the knee to count squats.

And unlike other devices, Calico moves quickly and accurately without getting stuck on clothing or at awkward angles. “For the first time, a wearable can traverse the user’s clothing with no restrictions to their movement,” said Huaishu Peng, an assistant professor of computer science who was Sathya’s adviser at UMD.

Peng, who also has an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), sees a future in which mini wearable devices like Calico will seamlessly integrate with humans for interaction, actuation and sensing.

He recently took Calico in a creative direction by establishing a new collaboration with Jonathan David Martin, a lecturer in Immersive Media Design; and Adriane Fang, an associate professor at the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies.

The interdisciplinary team is combining dance, music, immersive media, robotics and wearable technology into a novel and compelling series of interactive dance performances that are choreographed in real time through Calico.

First, Peng’s research group programmed Calico to instruct a dancer to execute specific movements using motion and light. Then, using their smartphones, the audience gets to collectively vote on how Calico should instruct the dancer.

The project is being funded with a $15,000 award from the Arts for All initiative, which leverages the combined power of the arts, technology and social justice to make the University of Maryland a leader in addressing grand challenges.

“The idea is to explore the dynamics and connections between human plus robot and performer plus audience,” said Peng. “In this instance, Calico will and act as the ‘mediator’ to broadening art and tech participation and understanding.”

Calico’s original creators include Jiasheng Li, a second-year Ph.D. student in computer science; Ge Gao, an assistant professor in the College of Information Studies with an appointment in UMIACS; and Tauhidur Rahman, an assistant professor in data science at the University of California, San Diego.

VIDEO: Calico: Relocatable On-cloth Wearables with Fast, Reliable, and Precise Locomotion

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