Steve Trombulak (Biology and Environmental Studies) has been awarded a fellowship from the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation for a project titled Enhancing the Quality of Instruction in Conservation  Biology. The grant will enable Steve to travel to Australia to work with the key developers of “systematic conversation planning” in order to incorporate this new perspective into the conversation biology course he teaches at Middlebury. While in Australia, he will visit the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, the first in the world designed using SCP principles and tools.

Jason Arndt (Psychology) was awarded funding through the National Science Foundation’s Research Opportunity Award program to enable him to spend part of his 2012-13 leave collaborating with a colleague at the Georgia Institute of Technology examining associative memory processes using Electroencephalography (EEG). Their research project is titled The influence of attention on associative memory in the young and old.

Su Lian Tan (Music) has received support from the New York Foundation for the Arts “Artspire” program for Lotus Lives, a  chamber opera that premiered as a concert at the Manhattan School of Music, NY, 2010 with a production premier here at Middlebury Oct.2011. Lotus Lives celebrates the lives of three generations of women, with classical, rap and pop music within a spectacular video set. Artspire support takes the form of fiscal sponsorship, enabling Tan and colleagues to further develop financial and production resources by supplying strategic guidance, website and clerical support. Tan is in discussion with several venues for future performances and DVD recording including WGBH Boston, efforts that will be a focus of her 2013-14 leave.

Rebecca Tiger (Sociology/Anthropology) has been awarded a fellowship from the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation for a project titled Public Sociology, Digital Media and Social Change. Rebecca’s goal for this project is to develop training in public sociology and the digital media tools that are becoming central to the public dissemination of sociological knowledge in order to incorporate these approaches into her courses. The grant provides support for a one-month residency during the summer of 2013 at JustPublics@365, the recently established digital media and social justice center housed at The City University of New York’s Graduate Center and funded by the Ford Foundation.

James Fitzsimmons (Sociology and Anthropology) has been awarded a fellowship from the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation for a project titled Sacred Sites of the Andes and the Desert Coast. The goal of his project is to broaden his knowledge of archaeology and visual culture in the Americas beyond Mesoamerica to Andean South America in order to meet the demand of students for expanded course content. The grant will fund travel to three ancient pilgrimage centers in Peru and Bolivia that were used by the Inca and their predecessors in order to further develop his existing courses and to lay the groundwork for a class on the prehistory and religion of that region.

Armelle Crouzières-Ingenthron (French) has been awarded a fellowship from the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation for a project titled Beyond French in Action.  The grant provides support for a project she will undertake during her leave next year. She plans to travel to colleges in the northeastern United States and to the American University in Paris to learn how other institutions with strong French programs teach first-year French courses to English-speaking students. Her goal is to make  an informed decision about new methods she can incorporate into the first-year French courses she teaches, to augment or replace the longstanding program called French in Action.

John Bertolini (English and American Literatures) has been awarded a fellowship from the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation for a project titled Reading Classic American Dramas through Archival Videos. The grant will enable John to spend part of his Spring 2014 leave in New York City, at the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive (of the NY Public Library for the Performing Arts). He plans to study videos of NYC/Broadway productions of classic American drama (1930-1960) for what new insights they may offer to him about these plays that he can then relay to students in the courses he teaches on American drama. Study of these Broadway productions will also inform his ongoing scholarship on classic American drama.

Susan Burch (American Studies and Center for the Comparative Study of Race & Ethnicity) has been awarded a fellowship from the National Archives and Records Administrative through its 2013 Regional Residency Fellowship program for research at the National Archives regional facility at Fort Worth, Texas in connection with her book project titled, Dislocated:  Removals, Institutions and Community Lives in American History. This is one of six fellowships funded by the Foundation for the National Archives, one fellowship at each of six regional National Archive facilities.

Roberto Pareja (Spanish and Portuguese) has received a Department of Education Summer Library Research Fellowship in Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh for research during Summer 2013 on  political subjectivities in Bolivia during the 19^th century and beginning of the 20th century. He will be using the resources of the renowned Eduardo Lozano Latin American Library Collection as part of his 2013-14 leave project.

Svea Closser (Sociology and Anthropology) and a colleague from Oregon State University have been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled “Health volunteers in rural Ethiopia: Discourses and experiences of status, motivation, and wellbeing.” Svea’s portion of this grant was awarded through NSF’s Research in Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) activity, and she plans to involve 6-10 undergraduates in this research, four of whom will participate in fieldwork in Ethiopia. This project will explore the complex issues surrounding the use of low-paid and volunteer labor to deliver health interventions in rural Ethiopia.