INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH & INITIATIVES

Associate Professor of Communication Kang Namkoong is principal investigator on a $20,000 one-year pilot research grant from the National Children’s Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety to develop an innovative farm safety education program entitled “Augmented Reality Intervention for Safety Education (ARISE)” for farm parents and children.

Renowned digital humanities scholar Marisa Parham was named the director of ARHU’s African American History, Culture and Digital Humanities (AADHum) initiative, part of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. Funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, AADHum seeks to expand and institutionalize the field of Black digital humanities; it is an incubator for innovative scholarship and teaching and serves as an invaluable resource on African American history and culture in the United States. Associate Professor of Jewish Studies Matthew Suriano will collaborate with Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation Ming Hu to laser scan three monumental tombs in Jerusalem dating to the Iron Age—roughly 2600 to 2800 years ago—and create digital models of the structures within a virtual reality environment. Their proposal, “The Digital Survey of Monumental Tombs on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives,” was awarded $25,000 in the Fall 2020 round of the Maryland Catalyst Fund New Directions competition.

A special edition of the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, “What Can Animal Communication Teach Us About Human Language?” included contributions from William Idsardi, professor of linguistics and chair of the Department of Linguistics, along with researchers from the colleges of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences, from disciplines including biology, psychology, neuroscience and linguistics.