Jessica Teets and Orion Lewis (both Political Science) are part of a research team based at the University of Alberta that has received funding from the Social Science Research and Humanities Council of Canada for a project titled Policy Innovation and Institutional Change in China. This study uses an evolutionary approach to analyze how the interaction of policy ideas, individual preferences, and existing institutions in China create incentives for local officials to act as policy entrepreneurs in an authoritarian system. The grant provides travel funds for research in China and other project costs. At least two Middlebury undergraduate students will assist with this research.
All posts by Karen Bourque
Guntram Herb awarded grant to participate in NEH Summer Institute
Guntram Herb (Geography) was awarded a grant to participate in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute titled On Native Grounds: Studies of Native American Histories and the Land, which was sponsored by the Community College Humanities Association and was in residence at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC for three weeks this summer. This institute provided college and university faculty participants with the opportunity to engage in dialogue with leading scholars in Native American history and scholarship. While at the Institute, Guntram conceptualized a new research project on Native American tribes astride the US-Canada border.
Jeff Howarth awarded National Science Foundation IUSE grant
Jeff Howarth (Geography) and a colleague at University of California-Santa Barbara have been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation’s IUSE program (Improvement in Undergraduate STEM Education) for an interdisciplinary project titled Multimedia Learning Principles for Design-it Yourself Online Instruction of GIS Concepts. The theoretical goal of the project is to evaluate the generalizability of multimedia learning theory to the domain of solving spatial problems with computer-based geographic information systems. The practical goal of the project is to provide STEM educators with evidence-based guidance for presenting instruction online that can help them develop blended learning environments as an alternative to traditional lecture and lab classrooms. At least three undergraduate students will be involved with this project.
Amidon awarded grant from National Geographic Society
Will Amidon (Geology) has received a grant from the National Geographic Society for a project titled Finding Early Martian Landscapes in Idaho. The goal of this research is to understand the role of glacial outburst floods in forming amphitheater-headed canyons on the Snake River Plain of Idaho. This work should provide useful clues to how similar canyons formed on the surface of Mars. Two Middlebury undergraduates will be working with Will on this project.
Laurie Essig receives Fulbright Scholar award
Laurie Essig (Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies) has received a lecturing award from the Fulbright Scholar Program in support of her 2015-2016 leave. She will be working with the Gender Studies Program at the European University at St. Petersburg. While there Laurie will co-teach a graduate seminar in gender theory and continue in her role as advisor to graduate students in the program. She will also continue her research on the construction of the homosexual as foreign pollution within ideologies of Russian nationalism.
Aline Germain-Rutherford awarded grant from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Aline Germain-Rutherford (Linguistics) and colleagues from the University of Toronto and York University (in Canada) and University of Grenoble (France) have been awarded a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The University of Toronto is the lead institution on this collaborative project titled “LINguistic and Cultural DIversity REinvented (LINCDIRE): A digital environment to help learners navigate their trajectories.” The goal of this project is to create a partnership among institutions with expertise in different languages and cultures that will lead to development of a tool for language learners within the context of “plurilingualism” – a theory of language learning that stresses the value of interconnections and synergies of languages at the level of the individual.
Matthew Kimble awarded grant from NIMH
Matthew Kimble (Psychology) has been awarded a research grant from the National Institute of Mental Health through NIH’s R15 AREA program. The grant provides three years of funding to support a project titled Neurophysiological and Behavioral Studies of Expectancy Bias in Trauma Survivors, which will use electroencephalography and eye tracking technology to better understand how psychological trauma affects how individuals look at the world. The project will involve multiple students through the life of the grant as independent study students, thesis students, and summer and regular semester research assistants. This grant represents Matt Kimble’s third NIMH funded project in this research area.
Su Lian Tan awarded Discovery Grant from OPERA America
Su Lian Tan (Music) has received a Discovery Grant from the Opera Grants for Female Composers program to support development of her opera composition Lotus Lives. The grant was announced recently by OPERA America, the national service organization for opera, and was made possible through the generosity of The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. This project was one of seven selected from among 61 applicants.
Cynthia Packert awarded NEH Enduring Questions grant
Cynthia Packert (History of Art & Architecture) has been awarded an Enduring Questions grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support the development of a new course on the topic of “Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?” The proposed new course will consider selected Asian and Islamic artworks in the Middlebury College Museum of Art’s permanent collection to explore this fundamental question. Through an intensive combination of close looking, critical analysis, and comparative consideration of diverse artworks and aesthetic traditions, students will ask how the act of beholding is entwined with cultural assumptions and conditioning and address those preconceptions by focusing on specific Asian and Islamic works. The course will be offered twice during the next three years.
Anne Kelly Knowles awarded Guggenheim Foundation fellowship
Anne Kelly Knowles (Geography) has been awarded a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation for a project titled Telling the Spatial Story of the Holocaust. This project grew from her ongoing work with the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative, an international group of geographers and historians exploring the geographical dimensions of the Holocaust with spatial methods, notably GIS (geographic information systems). Knowles’ new project will incorporate corpus and computational linguistics as well as GIS, video, and manual methods of geovisualization to represent victims’ experiences of place and time during the Holocaust. Her research will take her to Poland, Lancaster University in the UK, Stanford, USC, and UCLA.