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.