Institutional Awards
Deutsches Literatur Archiv in Marbach. $3,000. (Sarah McGaughey, German Department) “Alltag, Schreiben und Wohnraum in den Briefen, Werken und Handschriften Hermann Brochs” (Daily Life, Writing, and Domestic Living Space in the Letters, Works, and Manuscripts of Hermann Broch). This award provides a two-month post-doctoral stipend for publication research during late spring or summer 2012.
The Center for Cultural Judaism/The Posen Foundation. $35,000. (Andrea Lieber/Judaic Studies) “Posen Project for the Study of Secular Jewish Culture.” This grant from the Posen Foundation will extend Dickinson's successful Posen Project in Secular Judaism. The grant is a one-year renewal of the project most recently funded in 2008. The next steps in our Secular Judaism initiative are designed to maintain the vibrancy of the intellectual community that has developed around our earlier Posen Foundation grants. Activities will include: 1) a new round of faculty seminars, geared especially toward engaging junior faculty and recent hires; 2) a day-long undergraduate conference for students at area colleges and universities; and 3) a series of programs open to the general public that treat the topic of secularism and secularization in a global context. Funding will also support one course development stipend for the development of a new course that will contribute to the program.
Margaret A. Cargill Foundation. $575,418. This grant will be used to establish an endowment to support the Kappa Delta Pi teacher incentive program at Dickinson.
U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service. $16,000. (Jenn Halpin, Dickinson College Farm) “Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agroforestry Program at Dickinson College.” Funding will be used to develop, plan, and begin to implement a demonstration site for key agroforestry practices at the Dickinson College Farm. Where these practices already exist, funds will be used to improve species diversity and function, and to introduce species that will complement the farm’s production goals. The Dickinson College Farm will host educational workshop/tours for landowners and natural resource professionals and will work with partners to develop a brief educational “case-study” publication about the project that could be posted as a resource model/template on various partner websites for other farmers, landowners and professionals. Both the educational programs and case-study publication will be done in conjunction with local agencies such as the DCNR Bureau of Forestry, NRCS, and the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay. In accordance with Federal law and U.S. Department of Agriculture policy, this institution is prohibited from discriminating on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability. (Not all prohibited bases apply to all programs.) To file a complaint of discrimination, write USDA, Director, Office of Civil Rights, Room 326-W, Whitten Building, 1400 Independence Avenue, SW, Washington, DC 20250-9410 or call (202) 720-5964 (voice and TDD). USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer.
Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES) Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) Program. (Gwen Moore, Global Ed). Funds will support an FLTA in Arabic at Dickinson College in academic year 2012.
Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES) Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) Program. (Gwen Moore, Global Ed). Funds will support an FLTA in Portuguese at Dickinson College in academic year 2012.
Faculty Awards
Harry Ransom Center – Research Fellowship. $3,000. (Siobhan Phillips, English). “Lorine Niedecker, Louis Zukofsky, and the Social Space of Letters,” chapter three of book-in-progress, A Corresponding Self: Poets and Letters in Post-War America. This award will support travel to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin to read correspondence by Lorine Niedecker and Louis Zukofsky in the Louis Zukofsky collection. This material will be used to analyze Niedecker’s epistolary poetics.
Consortium for Ocean Leadership – Post-Expedition Activity. $11,901. (Peter Sak, Earth Sciences) “Constraining the rates, timing, and magnitude of subduction erosion along the Middle American trench: IODP Expedition 334.” CRISP (Costa Rica Seismogenesis Project) is designed to understand the processes that control fault zone behavior during earthquake nucleation and rupture propagation at erosional subduction zones. Subduction erosion, or the removal of rock mass from the overriding plate of convergent margins, is a dominant process that influences the long-term evolution of continents and island arcs (von Huene and Scholl, 1991, 1993; Clift and Vannucchi, 2004). The primary goal of the first phase of CRISP focuses on the upper plate material, through sampling of sediments, fluids and crustal rocks, to fully characterize and quantify the material being involved in the plate boundary megathrust. Forearc subsidence is the best proxy to quantify subduction erosion. IODP Expedition 334 focused on a transect inboard of Cocos Ridge subduction. The benthic foraminifera data at Site 334-U1379 indicate a complex history of subsidence and uplift in this portion of the forearc slope basin (Figure 1). Onshore studies in the Costa Rica forearc (e.g., Gardner et al., 1992, 2001; Fisher et al., 1998; Marshall et al., 2000; Sak et al., 2004a; 2009; Morell, 2011) are based upon the observation that the distribution of faulting and uplift mimic the distribution of bathymetric features on the subducting Cocos plate outboard of the MAT. The forearc deformation is, therefore, interpreted as a signature of a single ongoing episode of rough crust subduction. This statement is challenged by the lowermost ~80m of cores of Hole U1379C which, although being part of the acoustically defined basement, do not convincingly correspond with accreted Cocos plate material, as the prevailing paradigm would suggest. With this expedition award, Prof. Sak will constrain the evolution of subduction erosion and investigate the nature of the recovered “basement” at Site U1379. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under a cooperative agreement with the Consortium for Ocean Leadership for a U.S. Science Support Program associated with the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program.
NEH Summer Stipend Program. $6,000. (Alyssa DeBlasio, Russian) “Russian Thought in the 21st Century.” DeBlasio’s book project is a study of Russian philosophical thought and its transition from the 1990s to the 2000s. During the project period of 1 June to 1 August 2012, she will complete the manuscript’s sixth and final chapter: an analysis of the work of philosopher Vladimir Bibler, whose late writing is seen as a transitional moment between these two decades, and whose 1990s writings on the role of Russian philosophy in the West both anticipated and informed similar debates in the 2000s. Having completed the writing of the first five chapters of the book, the project during summer 2012 will comprise two stages. The first will involve a two-week research trip to the archives of the Institute of Philosophy in Moscow, Russia, where Bibler’s unpublished late notebooks are held. Finally, DeBlasio will then spend the remaining seven weeks at Dickinson writing up the sixth chapter, thereby completing the manuscript in time for fall 2012 submission.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library – Donald Gallup Fellowship in American Literature. $4,000. (Wendy Moffat, English) “1917, Impossible Year.” This funding will support Professor Moffat’s plan to take a full-year research sabbatical to frame, undertake archival research in Britain and the United States, and begin writing her second book, four interlinked short biographies, tentatively entitled 1917, Impossible Year. Her subjects are four underappreciated writers, two men and two women, two British and two American, whose experience of 1917 catalyzed them into decisive action: Cicely Hamilton (1872-1952), Dr. Thomas Salmon (1876-1927), Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant (1881-1965).
Lion Feuchtwanger Memorial Library of the University of Southern California – Exile Studies Grant. $1,000. (Bev Eddy, German) This funding will support preliminary research for a book entitled Klaus and Erika Mann: Encounters with America.
American Holistic Nurses Association – Research Grant Program. $4,000. (David Sarcone, IB&M and Andy Skelton, Psychology). “Quality of life and life satisfaction in cancer survivors after completing a community-based Integrative Therapy Program: Partners in Wellness.” Partners in Wellness represents a community-based program designed to offer integrative therapies to individuals with cancer from diagnosis until 36 months post treatment designed to alleviate symptoms most commonly associated with cancer and its treatment. Partners in Wellness has tracked its performance using program evaluations and post-program evaluations (conducted immediately upon program completion). The evaluation results consistently document alleviation of symptoms and an improved quality of life when surveyed immediately after completing the program. Systematic monitoring of former participants’ status over time, however, has not yet been conducted. The purpose of this study is to explore how former participants’ current quality of life is related to time elapsed since completion of the community-based integrative therapy program. A better understanding of this relationship may serve to aid ongoing integrative therapy program development by providing knowledge and insight about those program elements which best create both short- and long-term participant benefits. It would also give credibility to this community-based model for other holistic health care practitioners to follow. This collaborative study is being led by Bonnie Berk, Inc.
Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies – Harry Starr Fellowship in Judaica. $50,000. (Amy Wlodarski, Music) “Musical Witness: Postwar Holocaust Representation.” This fellowship provides a year-long residency grant to study at Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies. This award allows for a year-long leave from Dickinson (2012-13) in order to complete scholarly work on two publication projects: 1) Completion of a book manuscript, “Musical Witness: Music, Memory, and Holocaust Representation” and 2) a commissioned chapter-essay for the forthcoming “Cambridge Companion to Jewish Music” (ed. Joshua Walden) on “Jewish Art Music in the Postwar Period.” The fellowship carries a stipend of $50,000 for the year and affiliation with Harvard University, including access to its resources and collections. The theme of this year’s residency is “Music in Jewish Life.”
Spalding Trust. $1,500. (Kim Rogers, History). “What Brought You Here? New Religions, Immigrants and Converts in New Mexico.” This project will require a year of field research plus a year of writing about the 100 narrators whom Rogers will interview in their home communities. Using life-history interviews, Rogers plans to study immigrant and convert Muslims (mainstream and Sufis), Sikhs, Buddhists, and Hindus who live between Taos in the north, and Las Cruces and Silver City in the southern part of the state. This project is a comparative study of some of the world’s great religions as they are expressed by immigrant and convert communities in what has been historically–since Spanish contact in the 1500s–a majority Christian and Native American state.
National Science Foundation Partnerships for Innovation (PFI) program, Innovation Transfer Network (ITN). $25,410. (Jon Page, Psychology; John MacCormick, Math & Computer Science). The overall goals of this pain research program are to develop a method of pain measurement that removes the subjectivity inherent in other assessment tools and to build a device that can be used in clinical settings to objectively assess pain. The general focus of this research is to reveal the functional aspects of the physiological mechanisms in the brain that underpin the subjective experience of pain. Based on several pilot studies, it seems reasonable to assume that these goals may eventually be reached by developing a methodology and device to measure brain activity related to pain. This is a multi-step process that requires proof of concept at several stages along the way.
Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs – Scholarship for Italian Citizens Living Abroad. $4,750. (Nicoletta Marini-Maio, French & Italian) “I Am Yours: Preserving Patriarchal Agendas through the HyperSexualization of Women in Italian Film and Media.” This grant will help support Nicoletta’s sabbatical research at the School of Superior Studies in the Humanities in Bologna. Her research focuses on the question of whether the progressive degradation of the female body as a sexual commodity in film and media had direct repercussions on the current socio-economic condition of women in Italian society.
National Science Foundation – Transforming Undergraduate Education in STEM Program (TUES). $370,282. (Priscilla Laws and David Jackson, Physics & Astronomy; Jim Hoefler, Political Science) “LivePhoto Physics Interactive Video Vignettes.” Members of the LivePhoto Physics group propose to create, test, and evaluate a series of short single concept video expositions for introductory students that incorporate video analysis activities. These activities will be designed for Web delivery and supplement textbook reading assignments. They will combine narration, real world video segments, and video analysis tools to enable students to master concepts by confirming evidence for accepted theories about physical phenomena. This collaborative project (w/ Rochester Institute of Technology) addresses several program components: Creating New Learning Materials and Strategies; Implementing New Instructional Strategies; Developing Faculty Expertise; and Research on Undergraduate STEM Education.