Grant News

The Minnesota State Arts Board is seeking qualified reviewers from a variety of backgrounds to remotely read, score, and annotate grant applications through November 2020. To qualify, interested individuals must be a Minnesota resident, have access to the internet, and have a background in at least one art form or artistic tradition, or a knowledge of or experience with nonprofit organizations. Stipends will be provided for constructive feedback. More information and an interest form can be found on the MN State Arts Board website.

Amna Khalid, Associate Professor of History, has been awarded the inaugural John Stuart Mill Faculty Fellowship from the Heterodox Academy (HxA). Prof. Khalid’s year-long fellowship will enable her to give her undivided attention to issues that she is passionate about and that align with the mission of HxA: increasing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in higher education.

Ryan Terrien, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, is the recipient of an NSF award for his project “Collaborative Research: An Agile Electro-Optic Frequency Comb for Precision Near-Infrared Radial Velocity Spectroscopy with the Habitable Zone Planet Finder.” As part of collaborative research with partners at UC Boulder, U Arizona, Pennsylvania State U, the team will upgrade the Habitable Zone Planet Finder spectrograph with new functionality and improved performance that will accelerate US exoplanet science and astrophysics and demonstrate technology for the future generation of astronomical instruments.

Barbara Allen, James Woodward Strong Professor of Political Science and the Liberal Arts, has been named a Fulbright Scholar. As a Scholar at the University of Luxembourg (UL), Prof. Allen will work as a public diplomat to advance international understanding and cooperation. At UL, in addition to giving public lectures, she will teach courses on political theorists Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, and on comparative political communication.

Susannah Ottaway, Professor of History, will contribute to work funded by the NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grants, titled “Developing an Irish Castle in Virtual Reality.” With Thomas Herron at East Carolina University, the team will design and test teaching modules built in virtual reality for an existing 3-D digital model of Kilcolman Castle, Ireland, home of English poet Edmund Spencer.

Janet Lewis Muth, Director of Health Promotion, has been granted the 2020 Gallagher Koster Innovative Practices in College Health award from the American College Health Foundation. The award will support a collaborative campus project to teach faculty members how to incorporate well-being strategies into their courses during the 2020-21 academic year. Led by the Office of Health Promotion, this project will increase proactive approaches to well-being in academic environments. Carleton is only the fourth liberal arts college to receive this funding in the award’s 17-year history.

Charisse Burden-Stelly, Assistant Professor of African Studies and Political Science, has been awarded a postdoctoral scholarship for 2020-2021 in the Race and Capitalism Project and the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. The residential fellowship will support Prof. Burden-Stelly’s research and work on her book, “The Radical Horizon of Black Betrayal: Anticommunism and Racial Capitalism in the United States, 1917-1954.” This work theorizes anticommunism as a set of policies, practices, and discourses employed by the United States government to preserve and consolidate racial capitalism between the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) and the passage of the Communist Control Act (1954) – but also provides a framework for understanding the reactionary politics that shape our current moment. As a postdoctoral fellow, Prof. Burden-Stelly will participate in the scholarly activities centered in the Race and Capitalism Project.

Palmar Alvarez-Blanco, Professor of Spanish, has been selected to receive a grant through the Mellon Periclean Faculty Leadership Program in the Humanities. This award will support “Radio and News in Spanish,” an Academic Civic Engagement (ACE) course she co-teaches with community-partner Mar Valdecanto. In this course, students collaborate with “El Super Barrio Latino,” a radio program conducted by the Latinx community of Northfield. In each program, students explore international and domestic news and interview people in our community. As a Periclean Faculty Leader, Professor Alvarez-Blanco will join a community of scholars dedicated to incorporating civic engagement into the curriculum while empowering students to use their academic knowledge to tackle real-world problems. The funders of this project are Project Pericles, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Eugene M. Lang Foundation.

Sonja Anderson, Assistant Professor of Religion, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend for her project, “Idolatry and Biblical Religion.” During the summer of 2020, Professor Anderson will continue to research and write her first book, studying biblical, early Christian, and rabbinic texts to investigate the construction of idols and idolatry in the early Christian era, and the assumptions and discussions that surround them.

Catherine Licata, Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, received a Metro Regional Arts Council Next Step Grant for work that may eventually benefit her fictional film, The Lobby. The Next Step Fund, sponsored by the McKnight Foundation, provides project grants to professional artists in any discipline for the purpose of career development and artistic achievement. Professor Licata will use the award to conduct a workshop and further her directorial artistry. She was one of 72 finalists from a record-high 519 proposals.