Three Arhu Faculty Among 2015-16 Advance Seed Grantees

Faculty members are either direct recipients of the prestigious awards or co-investigators.

The College of Arts and Humanities would like to congratulate three faculty members whose projects are either the direct beneficiary of a 2015-16 ADVANCE Program for Inclusive Excellence Seed Grant or who are working on behalf of one.

This ADVANCE program provides 15 annual seed grants of $20,000 to small groups of researchers who are involved in interdisciplinary and engaged research. Each project is led by a female principal investigator. The University of Maryland’s overall ADVANCE program, which is supported by the National Science Foundation, focuses on improving work environments, retention and advancement of tenured and tenure track female faculty to improve the culture for all faculty.

This year’s recipients include Ruth Zambrana, professor in the Department of Women’s Studies, who will participate as a co-investigator on a project called “Subclinical Level Anxiety, Depression Symptoms and the Stigma of Aging Single Among Middle Class Black Women.” The principal investigator of the project is Kris Marsh, associate professor in the College of Behavioral and Social Science’s Department of Sociology.

Associate Professor of Design Audra Buck-Coleman, from the department of art, will use her grant to work on “Sticks and Stones at UMD,” a workshop that will run in a first year-level course. Buck-Coleman said students will create art and discuss diversity in the workshop that she plans to track through the length of those students’ college career with additional grant money. The goal is gauge how students’ initial dialogues and activities influence a reconsideration of stereotypes, she said.

“It’s about combining artistic-making and creating dialogue about diversity to create cross-cultural dialogues about stereotype awareness and a reconsideration of stereotypes,” she said.

BSOS Associate Professor of Sociology Rashawn Ray is a co-investigator on Sticks and Stones.

English Professor Jonathan Auerbach will assist as a co-investigator on “Writing on Duty: A Textual and Historical Analysis of American World War I Nurses’ Diaries.” The project is led by Marian Moser Jones, assistant professor of family science in the School of Public Health. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Department of History.

Auerbach said his role in the project will be to help provide an analysis of the dozens of diaries found in archival searches across the country kept by women who worked on the front lines of WWI. The diaries must be digitized and transcribed, he said. Auerbach said they will be looking for examples of working conditions and experiences of the many female American nurses who volunteered to help. Many of the diaries have never been analyzed. Auerbach said he expects some will include intimate portraits of life. WWI was also the first major conflict that Americans—male and female—left en masse to help serve. The experiences of female nurses are often overlooked in the overall discussion of war, he added.

The diaries will “shed light on these exceptional women who volunteered to be on the front lines in Europe,” Auerbach said.

For a full list of all UMD ADVANCE Seed Grant winners, click here.