Earlier I reported on initiatives and calls for proposals funded by Penny Edgell and Ana Paula Ferreira, Associate Dean for Social Sciences and then-Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities, respectively. Further results are now in, and the investments do a wonderful job advancing CLA Roadmap goals of research and creative excellence and diversity and inclusion, in particular.
Associate Dean Edgell in her first set of funding decisions provided support for three projects centered around diversity and inclusion: A"pipeline" project between Sociology, Political Science, and History to send faculty to historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to recruit graduate students and to bring faculty and advisors from HBCUs to campus; a project in Communications Studies to work with the Center for Urban Education to revise recruiting materials and related activities and get materials into the hands of people who may aid and influence recruitment, including representatives from HBCUs; and a project coordinated between Anthropology and Geography, Environment, and Society to recruit McNair Scholars, along with a linked retention across-the-college effort involving a year-long workshop on "Decolonizing the Curriculum." Associate Dean Edgell also provided funding for small seed grants for four projects: digitizing historical "vital records" for preparatory analysis that will form the basis of an NIH grant; collecting a small neuroscience dataset to help develop and test project management software; gathering learning data on a network of 42 genes implicated in autism, as pilot data for an NIH grant; and pilot data on how advertising content on e-cigarette packages influences the decisions young people make to buy or consume e-cigarettes, in preparation for an external grant.
As previously reported in the spring, Associate Dean Ferreira provided support for the Theoretical Humanities Collective (contact Professor Cesare Casarino, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature); and the Environmental Humanities Initiative (contact Professors Charlotte Melin, German, Scandinavian, and Dutch; Christine Marran, Asian Languages and Literatures; Dan Philippon, English). You can read more about those projects at the link above. Since that time, Associate Dean Ferreira provided support for two additional projects. The Middle East and Islamic Studies Collective (contact, Professor Sonali Pahwa, Theatre Arts and Dance), which will advance knowledge of the Middle East and Islamic Studies, including Arabic and the cultures and literatures of the region. A collaborative research initiative with the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change in “Race,” Coloniality, and the Global South" is designed to bring to our campus knowledge production from the non-Anglocentric Global South to shape thinking and research about the south (contact Professor Ana Paula Ferreira, ICGC Director Karen Brown).
The college has also launched its Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshops initiative, led by Steve Manson, Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs. The first set of mini-grant projects (up to $10,000) were announced in the spring for projects on embodied technology, musical performance as cultural research, and municipalism in America. The next deadline is October 13. Proposals are still being accepted for the first round of full grants (up to $100,000). The deadline for proposals is September 15. More information is available at the link above.
