Category: Recent Grants

Cecelia Cornejo, Instructor in Cinema and Media Studies, is one of just two inaugural recipients of the 2020 McKnight Fellowship for Community-Engaged Artists. Funded by a grant from the McKnight Foundation and administered by the Pillsbury House Theatre, this fellowship provides a generous stipend, public recognition, professional development, one-on-one mentorship, and participation in a public discussion about artistic practices that engage relationships aimed at producing social transformation. In work such as her documentary Ways of Being Home and her multidisciplinary, multi-media project The Wandering House, Prof. Cornejo examines notions of belonging and the immigrant experience while exploring the traces of historical trauma on people and places.

The Carleton College Summer Liberal Arts Institute (SLAI) is the recipient of a $66,660 contract from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation that will enable participants in the Jack Kent Cooke Young Scholars Program to attend liberal arts summer programs at Carleton. Read more in this Carleton Now article.

Two Carleton faculty have been accepted to the Mellon Periclean Faculty Leadership (PFL) Program in the Humanities. Mellon PFLs will design new courses across the humanities that incorporate community-based projects addressing the grant challenges of climate change, education access, immigration, mass incarceration, race and inequality, and voter engagement. With this support

Laska Jimsen, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, will revise her Nonfiction Media Production course’s ACE community video project to foreground civil dialogue and nurture long-term community relationships.

Andrea Mazzariello, Assistant Professor of Music, will teach a new ACE co-creative composition course, facilitating collaborative music-making partnerships with youth at The Key in downtown Northfield.

The funders of these projects are Project Pericles, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Eugene M. Lang Foundation.

Dan Maxbauer, Assistant Professor of Geology, has been awarded a grant from the Engeseth-Rinde Restoration Fund of Northfield SHARES to investigate carbon cycle processes in restored agricultural soils and wetlands in the Prairie Creek Wildlife Management Area. The research will be carried out during 2020-2021 by Carleton students in Environmental Studies and Geology courses and by a Geo major as part of their senior comps project. This work will benefit landscape restoration in Rice County.

Catherine Licata, Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, is one of five recipients of the 2019 Jerome Foundation Minnesota Film, Video and Digital Production Grant which will support her new short film, The Lobby. The grant program supports production and post-production costs of new works in film, video, or digital formats by early career filmmakers in Minnesota. Prof. Licata’s short character-driven drama entwines the issues of economic and class mobility with the contemporary immigrant experience, addressing structural inequalities beyond any one person’s control and playing with audience expectations on class and societal roles.

Gao Hong, Director of the Chinese Music Ensemble and Senior Lecturer in Chinese Musical Instruments, was awarded two grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board.

A 2020 Artist Initiative grant in Music funds Gao to write the first double concerto for pipa (Chinese lute) and bassoon with symphony orchestra that will be performed by Hong on pipa, Ye Yu on bassoon, and the Kenwood Symphony Orchestra conducted by Yuri Ivan.

A 2020 Arts Tour Minnesota grant enables Gao to tour small and midsize Minnesota towns, offering a choice of two new pipa music programs.

Ahmed Ibrahim, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, is the recipient of a London School of Economics and Political Science Conflict Research Fellowship (CRF) for his project, “The Somali diaspora as agents of state building.” This fellowship supports three months of research in Kenya and Somalia; and examines how different interventions affect violent conflict and/or the risk of renewed violent conflict; analyses “what works” to counter drivers of conflict; and explores the contextual factors that affect the efficacy of such interventions.

Rika Anderson, Assistant Professor of Biology, has received support for no-cost gene-sequencing of microbial and viral fluid samples by the US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute (JGI) in Walnut Creek, California. In her project “Microbial and viral mediation of biogeochemical cycles from source to sink in hydrothermal vent systems,” Prof. Anderson investigates how microbes and viruses are involved in the cycling of nutrients that are produced by deep-sea hydrothermal vents and released into the broader biosphere. As lead investigator, Prof. Anderson will work with Karthik Anantharaman (Assistant Professor of Bacteriology, University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Elizabeth Trembath-Reichert (Assistant Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University) on the project.

Gao Hong, Director of the Chinese Music Ensemble and Senior Lecturer in Chinese Musical Instruments, was awarded a 2020 Folk and Traditional Arts grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. She will teach traditional Chinese music and ensemble playing in three Twin Cities locations, culminating in final performances by the three ensembles.

Ahmed Ibrahim, Assistant Professor of Sociology, has been selected as a Visiting Fellow by the 2019 Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). CODESRIA’s “African Academic Diaspora Support to African Universities Programme” (supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York) aids African academics in the Diaspora to undertake activities aimed at strengthening teaching and research in the social sciences, humanities, and higher education studies at universities throughout Africa. During fall 2019, Professor Ibrahim’s fellowship at the University of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania will enable him to work with Department of Sociology colleagues in reviewing the curriculum as well as deliver lectures and supervise post graduate students.