Research

Writing Australian History On-screen: Television and Film Period Dramas "Down Under" reveals the depths of Australian history from convict times to the present day. The essays in this book are thematically driven and take a rounded historical-cultural-sociological-psychological approach in analyzing the various selected productions. In their analyses and interpretations of the topic, the contributors interrogate the intricacies in Australian history as represented in Australian filmic period drama, taken from an Australian perspective. Individually, and together as a body of authors, they highlight past issues that, despite the society’s changing attitudes over time, still have relevance for the Australia of today. In speaking to the subject, the contributing writers show a keen awareness that addressing new areas arising from the humanities is key to learning; and hence to developing an understanding of the Australian culture, the society, and sense of the ever-unfurling flag of an Australian something that is not yet a national identity.

Siv B. Lie (ethnomusicology) won the 2022 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology from the Society for the Anthropology of Europe for her book "Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France" (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Fernando Rios (ethnomusicology) presented his paper “Escuchen Nuestras Voces (Hear Our Voices): Salvadoran Refugee Songs and the Challenge of Using ‘The Music of the People’ in Social Justice Movements” at the 2022 Annual National Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in New Orleans in November 2022, where he also served as chair and organizer of a panel titled “Transnational Solidarity in Latinx and Latin American Social Justice Movements in the US.”

Andrea Brown (conducting and ensembles) was a 2022 recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro College of Visual and Performing Arts.

Jessica Grimmer (musicology) received the Best Paper award for her presentation of “Community-Centered Sustainability: A Case Study of the Music Encoding Initiative” at the Music Encoding Conference in May 2022. Co-authored with UMD iSchool assistant professor Katrina Fenlon, the paper is a part of the ongoing Sustaining Digital Community Collections project, which has received funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

An exploration of how film has made legible the Italian long ’68 as a moment of crisis and transition



Traditionally, the definition of political cinema assumes a relationship between cinema and politics. In contrast to this view, author Mauro Resmini sees this relationship as an impasse. To illustrate this theory, Resmini turns to Italian cinema to explore how films have reinvented the link between popular art and radical politics in Italy from 1968 to the early 1980s, a period of intense political and cultural struggles also known as the long ’68.



Italian Political Cinema conjures a multifaceted, complex portrayal of Italian society. Centered on emblematic figures in Italian cinema, it maps the currents of antagonism and repression that defined this period in the country’s history. Resmini explores how film imagined the possibilities, obstacles, and pitfalls that characterized the Italian long ’68 as a moment of crisis and transition. From workerism to autonomist Marxism to feminism, this book further expands the debate on political cinema with a critical interpretation of influential texts, some of which are currently only available in Italian.



A comprehensive and novel redefinition of political film, Italian Political Cinema introduces its audience to lesser-known directors alongside greats such as Pasolini, Bertolucci, Antonioni, and Bellocchio. Resmini offers access to untranslated work in Italian philosophy, political theory, and film theory, and forcefully advocates for the continued artistic and political relevance of these films in our time.

Jason Max Ferdinand's book Teaching With Heart is the first book to directly help us address the societal issues in our choral rehearsals. Not attempting to separate the music from social issues, this new tool in the classroom uses musical examples to address uncomfortable topics and hopefully 'open minds and hearts.' Built to ask singers to read, watch, listen and then to respond and discuss, this resource has been developed with the help of nine outstanding contributors and ten composers and arrangers. I strongly urge you to take a look at this new resource for your classroom.



—Jo-Michael Scheibe, D.M.A.

Professor, Department of Choral and Sacred Music

Conductor, University of Southern California Thornton Chamber Singers



Teaching With Heart is a timely and relevant resource that offers a well-crafted, research-based approach to choral music education. Students will learn how diverse choral repertoire can be used as a tool to not only advance musicianship, but also as an access point for critical thinking and the enhancement of social emotional learning skills.



—Rollo A. Dilworth, D.Mus.

Vice Dean and Professor of Choral Music Education

Center for the Performing and Cinematic Arts, Temple University



Through valuable repertoire suggestions, listening examples, video interviews, quotes, and teaching activities, this resource provides designed lessons helping students apply, synthesize, evaluate, and comprehend music from an artistic perspective and, more importantly, a human perspective.



—Brandon Boyd, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor Choral Conducting, Choral Music Education

University of Missouri



'How would you suggest a Caucasian teacher talk about social justice issues with students of color?' a student from Georgia Southern University asked via ZOOM. Dr. Ferdinand responded by quoting from Teaching With Heart, specifically sharing inspiration from the module titled 'Justice, or Just Us?' Powerful conversation ensued and our future educators were immediately on fire to get ahold of these teaching tools! We are so grateful for Dr. Ferdinand's generous leadership and his extremely well-timed Choral Conductor's Compendium to help guide us through current times and into the future.



—Shannon Jeffreys, D.M.A.

Director of Choral Activities

Georgia Southern University

Employing social science research, this book details how bias affects the brain, perception and decision-making, identifying how these factors manifest in the field of dance. Centering the author’s experience as a researcher, educator and lifelong dancer, it applies social psychology to the events, communities, and teaching strategies in dance classrooms of all sizes and age ranges.



Using critical theory as a framework, chapters define implicit biases and explore the power dynamics that shape interactions on and off the dance floor. Various examples of bias in dance education are examined in detail, as are the ramifications of prejudice and inequity. Finally, the book disseminates the mechanisms that both exacerbate and disrupt the effects of biases, ultimately exploring practiced solutions for addressing bias in the dance classroom. Unique in its narrow focus, this book inspires dance students, teachers, education administrators and arts stakeholders to begin new conversations that will allow dance classrooms to become more welcoming, inclusive spaces.

Around the world, hundreds of millions of labor migrants endure exploitation, lack of basic rights, and institutionalized discrimination and marginalization. What dynamics and drivers have created a world in which such a huge--and rapidly growing--group toils as marginalized men and women, existing as a lower caste institutionally and juridically? In what ways did labor migrants shape their living and working conditions in the past, and what opportunities exist for them today?

 

Global Labor Migration presents new multidisciplinary, transregional perspectives on issues surrounding global labor migration. The essays go beyond disciplinary boundaries, with sociologists, ethnographers, legal scholars, and historians contributing research that extends comparison among and within world regions. Looking at migrant workers from the late nineteenth century to the present day, the contributors illustrate the need for broader perspectives that study labor migration over longer timeframes and from wider geographic areas. The result is a unique, much-needed collection that delves into one of the world’s most pressing issues, generates scholarly dialogue, and proposes cutting-edge research agendas and methods.

Natural phenomena, including human language, are not just series of events but are organized quasi-periodically; sentences have structure, and that structure matters.



Howard Lasnik and Juan Uriagereka “were there” when generative grammar was being developed into the Minimalist Program. In this presentation of the universal aspects of human language as a cognitive phenomenon, they rationally reconstruct syntactic structure. In the process, they touch upon structure dependency and its consequences for learnability, nuanced arguments (including global ones) for structure presupposed in standard linguistic analyses, and a formalism to capture long-range correlations. For practitioners, the authors assess whether “all we need is Merge,” while for outsiders, they summarize what needs to be covered when attempting to have structure “emerge.”



Reconstructing the essential history of what is at stake when arguing for sentence scaffolding, the authors cover a range of larger issues, from the traditional computational notion of structure (the strong generative capacity of a system) and how far down into words it reaches to whether its variants, as evident across the world's languages, can arise from non-generative systems. While their perspective stems from Noam Chomsky's work, it does so critically, separating rhetoric from results. They consider what they do to be empirical, with the formalism being only a tool to guide their research (of course, they want sharp tools that can be falsified and have predictive power). Reaching out to skeptics, they invite potential collaborations that could arise from mutual examination of one another's work, as they attempt to establish a dialogue beyond generative grammar.