Research and Innovation

Classifying the Unseen examines “epistemic” literature, including medical texts, encyclopedias, almanacs, and guidebooks that describe or hint at early scientific inquiry; local and court histories, gazetteers, and newspapers that recorded natural disasters, omens and unexplained phenomena; and “entertainment” literature – novels, anecdotes, and jottings created primarily to amuse and beguile but which also conveyed information. Existing histories of Chinese science concern themselves primarily with officials at court and their response to western science. Classifying the Unseen expands on these histories by examining debates on the margins of that elite discourse, often found in commentary, appendices, sequels, and supplements. By drawing previously unexplored connections between epistemic and entertainment texts, elite and more marginal literature including newspapers, medical manuscripts, coroner’s manuals and family instructions, this work advances a more robust understanding of how an increasingly literate early modern China perceived and experienced the natural world. Classifying the Unseen examines the curious in context – revealing fears of people and practices (magical poison, secret medical practices) along the borders of an expanding empire, and foreign curiosities that penetrated its urban centers. It also seeks to understand how things were investigated and envisioned when they lacked visual context – either because they were everywhere (water, wind, life) or nowhere (dragons, the future).

“When the Tout-Monde is not one: Maryse Condé’s Problematic ‘World-in-Motion’ in Les belles ténébreuses (2008) and Le fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana (2017)”, in Chronotropics: Caribbean Women Writing Spacetime. Eds. Odile Ferly and Zimmerman (2023): 139-156.

Peer reviewed article: “Women Filmmakers, War, Violence and Healing on the Algerian Screen: Mounia Meddour’s Papicha (2019)”. Expressions maghrébines. Vol title : « Théories voyageuses » féministes en territoires littéraires et artistiques maghrébins

"Moroccan Film: Documenting Women’s Resistance of the ‘Everyday’ in Nabil Ayouch’s Much Loved (2015)" is one of the three Keynote lectures Valerie Orlando gave in Morocco in December 2023.

The two other Keynote lectures in December in Morocco were titled "Filming and Documenting Changing Climates in Morocco: The Socio-politically Committed Documentary" MA Lecture Series, Intercultural Communication Studies Program, Department of English, Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, Université Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah de Fès, Fès, Morocco (December 12, 2023). 

The third Keynote lecture is “Post Covid? Of pens and paper and “taking the time you need”: the joy of exploring francophone literature through slowness and thoughtfulness (without technology)”. This was a conference on The Post-Pandemic and the digital turn in Higher Education: the fate of the humanities, hosted by the “Identity and Difference Research Group” in collaboration with “Strategies of Cultural Industries, Communication and Social Research Lab”.

Jon Malone, Takehiro Iizuka and Zhiyan Deng have been awarded a total of seven dissertation grants, totaling more than $25,000. 

Malone received the prestigious Language Learning Dissertation Grant, the TIRF Doctoral Dissertation Grant and the Duolingo Dissertation Award. His dissertation project uses eye-tracking technology to investigate how second language learners acquire vocabulary through reading while listening. 

Iizuka, supported by the TOEFL Grant for Doctoral Research in Language Assessment and the Duolingo Doctoral Dissertation Award, examines the extent to which spoken and written vocabulary can be distinguished from each other from a measurement point of view, as well as their role in predicting listening and reading comprehension performance, respectively.

Deng was awarded both the TOEFL Grant for Doctoral Research in Language Assessment and the Duolingo Doctoral Dissertation Award. 

All three students are using the support for their research expenses.

Dr. Cae Joseph-Masséna, an assistant professor of French Language and Literatures in the Michele Bowman Underwood Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences and University of Maryland alumni, has won a Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW).

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the figuration of migratory movement in A Seventh Man (1975), a photo-essay reportage produced by the writer John Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr, and Transit (2018), a film by the German director Christian Petzold. It seeks to make sense of the curious figure of the migrant one finds in Petzold’s film (based loosely on Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel by the same name about World War II refugees). As a close reading of the film shows, Transit rejects the coherence of the history or period film genre, plays with multiple generic forms, uses incongruous modes of narration, and introduces a protagonist who pretends to be someone else and whose time is therefore someone else’s time. In these ways, the film ties the figure of the migrant to an experience of time that is essentially one of discontinuity and crisis—time as a superimposition of discordant temporalities. To set in relief the historical novelty of such a migratory figure, the chapter approaches Transit through a reading of A Seventh Man, a text that relates the temporal discord of migratory movement to the Marxist historical schema of combined and uneven development. What is new about Transit, and what the film offers as a distinct problem for the figuration of migration in our own situation, is precisely the waning or even the absence of any such historical schema or shared temporal horizon. Based on this diagnosis, the chapter argues, the task of the figuration of migratory movement today lies in reinventing a shared sense of temporal existence, a collective time that would allow the figure of the migrant to not only inscribe the crises of our present moment but also prefigure future forms of emancipation.

Jonathan Malone is the Interim Director of Maryland English Institute at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Ph.D. candidate in Second Language Acquisition. His dissertation research utilizes eye-tracking methodology to improve our understanding of how listening while reading impacts vocabulary learning, both in processing and learning new information.  

TIRF Research Topic Investigated: Digital Technology in Language Education

Project Title: Toward a Theory-based Account of the Vocabulary Processing and Learning Benefits of Reading While Listening

In Haitian Creole, bay lodyans means to tell stories to an audience, and more generally, to entertain. This book is the first to analyze popular contemporary Haitian films, looking especially at how they respond to the needs and desires of Haitian audiences in and beyond Haiti. Produced between 2000 and 2018 and largely shot with digital cameras and sometimes cellphones, these films focus on the complexities of community, nostalgia, belonging, identity, and the emotional landscapes of exile and diaspora. They reflect sociopolitical and cultural issues related to family, language, im/migration, religion, gender, sexuality, and economic hardship. Using storytelling and other less traditionally "academic" techniques, Cécile Accilien advances Haitian epistemological frameworks. Bay Lodyans integrates terms and concepts from Haitian culture, such as jerans and kafou (derived from the French words for "to manage" and "crossroads," respectively) and includes interviews with Haitian filmmakers, actors, and scholars in order to challenge the dominance of Western theoretical approaches and perspectives.