Elizabeth Morrison (Religion) has received an AAS-CIAC Small Grant from the China and Inner Asia Council of the Association of Asian Studies. This grant will help to fund a library trip to Beijing during her 2013-14 leave, thus providing support for her research project titled Finding One’s Place in a Story of Decline: Medieval and Early Modern Chinese Buddhist Narratives of the Deterioration and Death of the Buddhist Tradition.

Kathryn Morse (History and Environmental Studies) has been awarded a fellowship from the Charles Warren Center for American Studies at Harvard University that provides support for her 2013-14 leave. She will spend the year participating in the Center’s workshop on “The Environment and the American Past” and working on her book project titled The View from Here:  Picturing America’s Environmental Past. This project uses photographs and other visual sources to draw students and scholars into historical thinking about the environment, particularly but not exclusively with regard to social inequalities as revealed through close attention to human interactions with the material world. It builds from Morse’s years of teaching environmental history with images in the Middlebury classroom, and from her recent essay, published in the June 2012 Journal of American History, There Will Be Birds:  Images of Oil Disasters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

Peter Nelson (Geography) has received funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to develop a research partnership with HUD in conjunction with his ongoing cooperative research with the Economic Research Service of USDA. This expanded collaborative effort will use American Housing Survey Micro-Data to further analyze the geography of high cost lending in rural America during the Great Recession.

Edward Vazquez (History of Art & Architecture) has been awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) in support of his 2013-14 leave. He will spend the year in Germany completing a book project titled Aspects: Fred Sandback’s Sculpture. The book will be the first scholarly monograph on this modern artist who made dramatic, room-scaled installations crafted from individual strands of yarn stretched in simple geometric forms across gallery space. Dr. Vasquez also has been awarded a one-month residency at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England, a center for the study of modern sculpture, to facilitate work on the same project.

Bill Waldron (Religion) was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities that provides support for his 2012-13 leave and ongoing research. Titled An Introduction to the Yogacara School of Indian Buddhism, this book project aims to provide a useful and relatively accessible introduction to  one of the most influential yet complex schools of Indian Buddhist thought: Yogacara, or “Practitioners of Yoga.” This school argues that although we are usually caught up in the “theatre of our minds” it is possible, through the practice of yogic insight, to see through our own cognitive constructions and act more compassionately and wisely for the benefit of others.

Huda Fakhreddine (Arabic) has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities in support of her 2013-2014 leave for a project titled: A Study of Classic Arabic Poetry through the Lens of Metapoesis (Modern Critical Theory). The goal of this book project is to expand the study of metapoesis from the study of modern poetry in the twentieth century to using a “comparative modernism” approach to studying Arabic literature of the 8^th and 9th century. Not only does this approach emphasize the critical and poetic consciousness central to the poetry of that period, it also offers a new perspective on the relationship of the Abbasid modernists to their successors: the modernists of the twentieth century. This will be the only work in the field that treats both classical and modern Arabic poetry within a contemporary theoretical framework. It will also add a valuable non-western perspective to the field of World Literature.