Category: Recent Grants

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $1.5 million matching grant to Carleton College that will support endowed fellowships in the humanities and social sciences. The Mellon challenge grant requires Carleton to raise $2 million ($1 million towards each fellowship) within a three year period, with the endowment fully in place by 2011. The Mellon Foundation has generously suggested that if a single donor provides the matching funds, the endowed fellowship position may be named in honor of that donor, with no formal acknowledgment of the Mellon Foundation.

The Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) awarded two Faculty Career Enhancement grants to Prof. Elizabeth McKinsey (English) and Prof. Scott Carpenter (French).

In December 2006, Prof. Elizabeth McKinsey (English) received a FaCE grant to further a research project on the sublime in American art and literature. Prof. McKinsey will use the grant to support travel to see key paintings held by museums in New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston; this travel is one phase of the project, which will ultimately result in a book.

In March 2007, Prof. Scott Carpenter (French) received a FaCE grant to support a research trip to Paris, where he will conduct archival research for his current study of counterfeits and frauds in French art and literature.

Read more on recent grants.

In March, the Luce Foundation awarded Carleton College a major grant to support a new initiative in the Environmental and Technology Studies concentration. Led by Prof. Tsegaye Nega (Environmental and Technology Studies), the initiative will seek to expand faculty members’ and students’ use of geographic information systems, which are tools for understanding and visualizing quantitative data about environment. Prof. Nega will lead faculty workshops on the use of GIS in classes and research, help award sub-grants to faculty who want to develop GIS assignments for their courses, and further collaborative research by students and faculty on topics which might benefit from GIS tools. In this last category, ENTS faculty-student research will focus initially on problems arising from the interaction of transportation networks, urban growth, and land use in the greater Twin Cities metropolitan region.

Kelly Connole (Art & Art History) received an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. The award will help Prof. Connole create ceramics work for a major exhibition, entitled “Where the Sky Meets the Earth,” which will be staged at Augsburg College in February 2008. Read more on recent grants.

The Science Education Resource Center (SERC), directed by Cathy Manduca, received a $52,500 subaward from a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to TERC, a non-profit organization committed to the improvement of teaching and learning in mathematics and science. The project is titled “Expanding the Data Cycle: Empowering Middle Level Teachers and Students to Integrate Information Technology, Data Skills, and Science Content.” Read more on recent grants.

Carleton’s Science Education Resource Center (SERC), directed by Cathy Manduca, accepted two subawards from large consortial projects. SERC will use a $108,218 subaward from the National Science Foundation to collaborate with the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center at Northwestern University. With a $56,000 subaward from a Department of Education grant to the MERLOT humanities project and the California State University System, SERC will assist in the development of ELIXR, an online faculty-development resource hosted by Cal State. Read more on recent grants.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation made two awards at the beginning of Carleton’s academic year: $50,000 for the planning of an Arabic Language Initiative by Carleton, Macalester, and Grinnell, and $265,000 for the joint Carleton-St. Olaf Library Consortium Collections Development Project.

The Carleton Summer Math Program for Women received an award of $599,170 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Mathematics Sciences to continue to offer the popular and effective Summer Mathematics Program for Women at Carleton. Read more on recent grants.

Andrew Fisher (History) accepted two grants to support his research on a new book on borderlands history.

The Science Education Center (SERC) received two subawards as part of National Science Foundation (NSF) projects being run at other schools.