Faculty awarded grants to support interdisciplinary teaching and research

Six faculty received grants through the College’s current award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which supports faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who seek to learn new skills to enhance their teaching and research.

Professor David Cook-Martin was awarded an Academic Enterprise Leave to study social networking analysis. He will incorporate this methodological approach into his research project on global networks of highly skilled workers; he also plans to teach it to students in his methods course.

Professor Stephen Andrews was awarded release time to take Professor Bill Ferguson’s Foundations of Policy Analysis course. He plans to eventually team-teach courses in the Policy Studies Concentration, adding a humanist’s perspective to its curriculum.

Professor Yvette Aparicio received funding to take a course on literary translation at the University of Iowa; this course will help her begin a new project of creating a critical bilingual anthology of contemporary Central American poetry. She also plans to develop one or more courses on translation.

Professor Edward Cohn received funding to take a Lithuanian language course at Vilnius University. This course will help him pursue his research program and develop courses for the Russian, Central and Eastern European Studies and history curricula.

Professor Susan Ireland was awarded a course release to take Professor Caleb Elfenbein’s Gender and Islam course. She plans to use this experience to develop her short course on Middle Eastern and North African film into a regular interdisciplinary class.

Professor Deborah Michaels was awarded a course release to take Professor Astrid Henry’s Introduction to Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies course. She intends to use this course to inform the content of her education courses; it will also prove useful to her as she begins a new research project on teaching LGBTQ civil rights issues in US history classes at the secondary school level.

The next call for proposals for faculty awards through the Mellon grant has just been released; proposals for Academic Enterprise leaves will be due August 15, and proposals for Bridging Projects will be due September 1. Please contact the Grants Office if you would like to learn more about these opportunities.