Research and Scholarly Work

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After locating Saund’s speech, John accessed dozens of books, archival and historical documents, political records, news stories and more to be able to prepare a comprehensive historical contextualization.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.

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?

The University of Maryland’s National Foreign Language Center (UMD-NFLC) is proud to  announce that we have become a DLNSEO funded Language Training Center (LTC) which will  provide language courses in Korean, Russian, and Ukrainian beginning this fall.  

Additionally, UMD-NFLC’s existing Title VI Language Resource Center (LRC) has been  renewed for funding for another four years, 2022-2026.  

Please see information about each center below.  

LTC Background  

With decades of experience supporting government partners and developing courses, learning  materials, and assessments in over 100 languages, the LTC will provide language courses  specifically tailored to the government’s needs.  

In order to support government and military linguists to carry out their missions UMD-NFLC  will offer courses centered on current, relevant, and authentic curriculum which will be taught in  carefully sequenced thematic units that integrate culture, area studies, and language.  

UMD-NFLC offers five-week hybrid and online language courses, providing 150 hours of direct  instruction with an additional 50 hours of guided practice in the form of graded homework,  online assessments, and online learning modules. Students also have access to the UMD-NFLC’s  Language Portal, an online collection of language learning materials and assessments, and they  can earn ten Continuing Education Units for completing the course.  

Korean; Blended (classroom and online); Incoming ILR 2 Course pre-requisites

Russian; Blended (classroom and online); Incoming ILR 2 Course pre-requisites

Ukrainian; Online; Incoming ILR 2 Course pre-requisites

Pedagogical Approach  

UMD-NFLC’s courses are designed around its research-based principles of effective language  teaching, which maximize students’ proficiency gains:  

• Implementing a standards-based and thematically organized curriculum  • Integrating culture, content, and language in the classroom
• Adapting and using expertly-leveled, authentic materials 
• Using the target language and providing comprehensible input 
• Facilitating a learner-centered classroom 
• Conducting performance-based assessments  

Institution Website: https://nflc.umd.edu/LTC  

LRC Background  

Professionals in Education Advancing Research and Language Learning (PEARLL) at the  University of Maryland promotes a multifaced, research-based program for excellence in  language instruction. PEARLL offers a common vision for high-quality language learning and  provides materials and models of professional learning for language educators, with a special  focus on the needs of instructors at community colleges, historically Black colleges and  universities (HBCUs), and of less commonly taught languages (LCTLs). PEARLL’s goals for  the 2022-2026 LRC grant period take a comprehensive view of the knowledge and skills world  language educators need to prepare students to thrive in an increasingly interconnected world,  particularly in light of post-pandemic teacher needs.  

1. To promote models of educator effectiveness for language learning, PEARLL will  increase the reach of the Teacher Effectiveness for Language Learning (TELL)  Framework, develop and pilot model curricula for courses at community colleges and  HBCUs, and identify a network of model classrooms that serve as regional hubs for  professional learning. 
2. PEARLL seeks to facilitate reflective practice for language educators by continuing to  contribute to the development of Catalyst, an online portfolio for language educators;  maintaining communities of practice; publishing a guide to action research for language  educators; and supporting an educator in resident who will contribute to PEARLL  projects.
3. Recognizing the importance for language teachers of having knowledgeable and skilled  supervisors and teacher leaders, PEARLL will help leaders develop leadership skills to  support teacher effectiveness through a guide to effective world language programs, a  leadership certificate, a summer leadership academy, and research on how program  leaders adapt to and implement their learning.
4. To connect language teacher educators and classroom practitioners, PEARLL will  support and host the International Language Teacher Education Conference and identify  how the TELL Framework can facilitate the transition from being a student teacher to a  classroom teacher by examining how the TELL Framework is used in language teacher  training. 
5. Building on PEARLL’s experience offering in-person and virtual professional learning,  PEARLL will continue to provide professional learning opportunities for language  educators, including a hybrid summit focused on LCTL educators and a series of annual  summer institutes for classroom teachers. These activities will be supported by two  research projects, one to understand language teachers’ needs for professional learning,  and a second to identify whether there is a relationship between professional learning  offered by PEARLL and participating educators’ teaching practices.  

PEARLL’s projects will draw on PEARLL’s and UMD-NFLC’s expertise and experience in  offering high-quality professional learning opportunities; developing resources such as model  curricula; and collaborating with teachers, schools and districts, and colleges and universities  around the country.  

Institution Website: https://pearll.nflc.umd.edu  

The Soldier's Opinion premiered in Jerusalem's Film Festival generated much interest.

Photo credit, Tom Weintraub Louk (Shay Hazkani signing film Hebrew Poster above)

Shay Hazkani with Director, Assaf Banitt and Producer, Shahar Ben-Hur.

The Soldier's Opinion, is based on Dr. Shay Hazkani's research and book, Dear Palestine.  Hazkani is credited as a co-creator and script writer.  The film was was directed by Assaf Banitt and was produced for Israel's main cable network, Hot Telecommunication and will air on Israeli TV in November.  Screening is expected in the U.S. as well. 

The Soldier's Opinion

Israel 2022 | 55 minutes | Hebrew | English subtitles

Over the span of fifty years, the Israeli military censorship secretly copied soldiers' personal letters, extracting their views on the most contentious issues facing Israeli society. The findings were presented to leaders in a top-secret report identified as “The Soldier’s Opinion.”

Shay Hazkani with film Director, Producer, and Sound Designer, Erez Eyni Shavit. Photo credit Ben Tofach

By Kimmy Yam

As the midterm elections draw closer, a new survey shows a more complicated picture of the Asian American and Pacific Islander electorate than political parties have portrayed in the past. 

The Asian American Voter Survey, released Monday, examined Asian Americans’ and Pacific Islanders’ attitudes about key issues leading up to the elections in November. It found that while hate crimes and education continue to be significant to Asian Americans, the group’s priorities also lie in issues like health insurance, the economy and the environment. 

In the past, political parties haven’t sufficiently appealed to the electorate across all those issues, said Janelle Wong, a co-director of AAPI Data, the research organization that conducted the survey. And there’s still plenty of opportunity to activate Asian American voters. 

“Most of Asian American politics covers two topics: hate crimes and affirmative action,” Wong said. “Many people, including candidates, think about Asian Americans as very single-dimensional or dual-dimension, but they don’t think about these complexities and how to really appeal to the broader Asian American agenda.”

For the survey, which was released as a joint effort of the organizations APIAVote, AAPI Data and Asian Americans Advancing Justice — researchers for Asian Americans Advancing Justice polled more than 1,610 registered Asian American voters across six of the largest Asian American ethnicities, in four languages. Similar to years past, respondents leaned left, with 54% reporting that they would vote for Democrats in both Senate and House races. 

Asian Americans also showed consistency on major issues. The survey found that 88% of Asian American respondents ranked health care as “extremely important” or “very important” in deciding their votes in November. Jobs and the economy came in second, at 86% of the electorate, and crime came in third, at 85%. Gun control and the environment were also critical topics. 

“What that tells me is that there are some enduring trends in this community,” Wong said. “People care about health care and the economy as much as they do about crime.”

However, outreach to and understanding of the group remain severely limited, Wong said. The survey found that while about two-thirds of registered voters say they plan to vote, the majority haven’t heard from either party. Fifty-two percent of Asian Americans had had no contact from the Democratic Party, and 60% had had no contact from Republicans.

“Asian American communities, despite the progress we have made and increasing political power, are still being ignored by many politicians, to their detriment,” Christine Chen, the executive director of APIAVote, wrote about the survey in a statement.

Nainoa Johsens, Republican National Committee spokesperson and director of APA Media, its AAPI communications arm, told NBC News they’ve engaged with AAPI voters through a number of avenues.

“Under the leadership of Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, the RNC has been on the ground months before Democrats to engage with the Asian American community through our Asian Pacific American community centers and engaging with AAPI voters with events like dance classes, karate lessons, game nights, and potlucks," Johsens said.

Eric Salcedo, director of AAPI outreach at the Democratic National Committee, said that the party has invested "significantly" in outreach.

“Asian Americans are the fastest-growing coalition group, and communicating to these voters is central to Democrats’ efforts to protect and expand our majority," Salcedo said. "The DNC has made significant investments in multi-platform outreach to Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities to reach these voters where they are ahead of the midterm election.”

The president of the Association for Asian American Studies, Pawan Dhingra, a professor of sociology and American studies at Amherst College, said the parties have flattened the concerns of the Asian American electorate. 

It’s as if they talked to Latinx and only talked about immigration, when in fact other issues matter as much or more,” he said. The economy and issues facing small-business owners, reproductive rights and inflation are all also Asian American and Pacific Islander issues, Dhingra said, and they need to be seen as such. And to further activate the electorate, politicians will have to demonstrate that they understand how the population actually experiences those issues “whether by being local in their approach, using non-English languages, recognizing the histories of immigrant groups, et cetera,” Dhingra said. 

“Anti-Asian hate crimes are part of the puzzle but not all of it,” he said.

Hate crimes do continue to be a concern for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Wong said. Those who worry “very often” about hate crimes plan to support Democrats over Republican House candidates by a 3-to-1 ratio. 

However, opinions around the issue are complicated, Wong said. According to the survey results, respondents were more divided in their assessment of the two parties’ handling of crime, indicating that they don’t view the topic as a partisan one, she said. Wong also said their views don’t necessarily match an aggressive push for carceral solutions that some activists have perpetuated. 

“Political power is really about who is organized and which voices are aligning with broader narratives and how are those outside of the Asian American community who have political power framing these issues,” Wong said. “There is a divide between mass public opinion, the beliefs of everyday Asian Americans, because this survey captures everyday registered voters’ rights versus activists.”

The survey found that 50% of respondents agreed with shifting spending from law enforcement to “programs that address economic and social issues for minorities.” About half of that percentage, 24%, disagreed with such a shift. Wong also said that Asian American voters showed concern for racism against communities of color more broadly and that 73% supported including Asian American and nonwhite history in public school curriculums. 

“There is, and always has been, this willingness to join in the broader coalition of people of color when it comes to racial equity, despite the headlines that we still see,” Wong said. 

She added, “We’re not seeing your typical, reactionary response, that being fearful or worried or concerned about crime means that people want to take up an aggressive stance either with regard to law enforcement or with regard to guns.”  

A separate study released last week by the organization Stop AAPI Hate similarly found that 53% of Asian Americans and 58% of Pacific Islanders said education was the most effective response to hate crimes.  Community-based solutions and civil rights legislation and enforcement were also highly favored. A minority of respondents, on the other hand, saw more law enforcement as an effective solution, at 30% of Asian Americans and 21% of Pacific Islanders. 

The Asian American perspective on education also continues to be misunderstood, Wong said. While Asian Americans are often cast as opponents of race-conscious admissions, with candidates often trying to appeal to the group through that perspective, the survey found that the majority of respondents support affirmative action programs. The hyperfocus on affirmative action and hate crimes, Wong added, could also come from a long-standing perpetuation of both model minority and perpetual foreigner stereotypes.  

But across many issues, Asian Americans have exhibited consistencies that point to stronger support for more government and a more cohesive political identity. For example, the vast majority of the electorate supports stricter gun laws, a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and legislation to reduce climate change. 

“There is a foundation to build on,” Wong said. “What is still uncertain is how, and to what extent, will activists be able to really capture the attention of Asian Americans around these issues?”