Seven ARHU Faculty Awarded 2025–26 Faculty-Student Research Awards

Faculty-led research explores diverse topics—from Indigenous queer history to climate narratives in Ghana—advancing scholarship and graduate research across the humanities.

By ARHU Staff 

The University of Maryland Graduate School has announced the recipients of the 2025–26 Faculty-Student Research Awards (FSRAs), which support faculty-led projects that directly involve graduate students. Each award provides $15,000 to fund collaborative research, scholarship or creative work. 

Seven faculty members from the College of Arts and Humanities were selected for their compelling proposals. 

Holly Brewer, Associate Professor of History
Graduate Student: Dylan Bails, History and Library & Information Science (HiLS)
Brewer’s project, part of the Slavery, Law, and Power project, investigates how debates over racial slavery and power shaped justice in early America and the British Empire. It emphasizes the legal and political structures that enabled or resisted slavery and draws on new manuscript materials to expand access to historical sources.

Valentine Hacquard, Professor of Linguistics
Graduate Students: Elizabeth Swanson and William Zumchak, linguistics
This project explores how children learn words like “think” and “want,” which express abstract mental states. Through a series of experiments, it examines whether children rely on temporal cues—such as the future orientation of desire verbs—to acquire the meaning of these words.

Chad Infante, Assistant Professor of English 
Graduate Student: Rashi Maheshwari, English
Infante’s project traces the racial and social history of children’s television from the 1920s to the present, examining how race and gender have shaped animated and educational programming—from early minstrel caricatures to “Sesame Street.” Maheshwari will assist with archival research in UMD’s Children’s Television Workshop collection, home to the first 20 years of “Sesame Street.” 

Sahar Khamis, Associate Professor of Communication 
Graduate Student: Felicity Sena Dogbatse, communication
Khamis’ study analyzes how feminist activists in Egypt and Ghana use digital platforms to combat sexual harassment. By examining the framing and delivery of online messages, the project explores what makes these campaigns effective in raising awareness and mobilizing support.

Nana Kwame Osei Fordjour, Assistant Professor of Communication 
Graduate Student: Anani Yao Kuwornu, communication 
This research investigates how Ghanaian media have covered flooding over the past decade. Using machine learning and agenda-setting theory, the project analyzes the emotional and thematic elements of disaster narratives to better understand their role in public awareness and disaster response.

Bayley Marquez, Assistant Professor of American Studies 
Graduate Student: Devin "Vy" Grace Thompson-Elutrio, American studies
Marquez examines mid-20th-century federal policy to terminate tribal status and its intersection with the civil rights movement. The project situates Indigenous termination policies alongside concurrent struggles for Black integration, revealing racialized narratives of citizenship and equality.

Shelbi Meissner, Assistant Professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Graduate Student: Britney Bibeault, College of Information
Hosted by UMD’s Indigenous Futures Lab, this project will create a digital archive of regalia, zines, oral histories and other artifacts from Indigenous queer communities. The archive challenges erasure and centers Indigenous queer people as curators of their own histories, grounded in community consent and lived experience.

Photo by John T. Consoli