Speakers of African American Language (AAL) are often made to doubt the value of the way they learned to speak and write. College of Education Assistant Professor Shenika Hankerson (below) works to help students gain respect for the unique structure and history the language while gaining fluency in writing in academic English, and to influence teachers not to impose dominant English varieties to the exclusion of AAL. (Illustration by iStock)

Preserving African American visual art by providing a platform to make the Driskell Papers accessible.

Dr. Quynh Nguyen, an assistant professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, has received a $3.3 million RO1 grant from the National Institutes of Health for the project Risk and Strength: Determining the Impact of Area-Level Racial Bias and Protective Factors on Birth Outcomes. Nguyen, who is a co-investigator on the project led by Dr. Thu Nguyen, said the grant will use data from Twitter to characterize the racial climate across the United States.

Through her teaching, research and beyond, Jordana Moore Saggese is working to undo the ‘colonialist and white supremacist logic’ that has pervaded the field of art history. When Jordana Moore Saggese was growing up in Nashville, Tennessee, there was no art museum in town. So, until high school, Saggese, associate professor and associate chair of Maryland’s Department of Art History & Archaeology, connected art with the paintings she saw during a visit to former president Andrew Jackson’s home, The Hermitage.

A disturbing trend of increased discrimination and violence against Asians and Asian Americans hit a terrifying new level in the United States last week with the shooting deaths of eight people, including six Asian women, at three Georgia spas.

A boy walks along the temporary fence installed around the parking lot of a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colo., where 10 people were killed in a mass shooting on Monday. A School of Public Health professor of the practice and pediatrician says policy approaches to save lives from the dangers of vehicle accidents and smoking could also be applied to gun ownership.(Photo by AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

African American students demonstrate against the Vietnam War on the steps of the Main Administration Building in the early 1970s. A new grant will help the University of Maryland and other institutions digitally archive documentation of student activism by people of color.(Photo courtesy of University Archives)

A new lab at the University of Maryland will create a space for enhanced research and scholarship on race and technology and develop a pipeline program to introduce undergraduates and those in the wider community to the field of Black digital studies.

Sociology Professor Rashawn Ray and colleagues at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill recently received a $160,000 Russell Sage Foundation grant to study the impact of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement on policing reform in the United States.

Anti-racist rhetoric, student activism and Shakespeare in the age of COVID-19 are among the themes that will appear in three edited publications produced in collaboration with the Department of English’s Center for Literary and Comparative Studies (CLCS).