Category: Stories

The U.S. Department of Education awarded a five-year, $1.4 million TRIO/Student Support Services (SSS) grant to Carleton College. The new award will help Carleton support 140 students who come from low-income backgrounds (as defined by federal guidelines), who are the first in their family to attend college, or who have a documented disability. The grant will enable Carleton’s TRIO staff to continue providing individualized advising and other proven tools of success to program participants. It will also guide efforts to increase retention, persistence, and graduation rates through innovative collaborative efforts with campus partners, including the Career Center and the Quantitative Resource Center. The renewal of Carleton’s TRIO/SSS program—which has been continuously funded by the Department of Education since 1981—ensures a new generation of Carls have the support necessary to achieve their academic, personal, and career goals.

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.

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.

Gao Hong, Director of the Chinese Music Ensemble and Senior Lecturer in Chinese Musical Instruments, is the recipient of two grants:

• Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation USArtists International (USAI) grant in support of performances at the Harbin Summer Music Festival in China, as a duo with Linda Chatterton. USAI grants, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, encourage international cultural exchange and enhance the creative and professional development of U.S. based artists by providing connections with presenters, curators, and artists around the world. (2/28/20, $4,890)
• Ordway Knight Foundation Cultural Opportunity Fund that provides artists with a subsidy towards renting the Ordway’s Concert Hall. The performance at the Ordway is made possible in part by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Thabiti Willis, Associate Professor of History and Director of Africana Studies, has been awarded the prestigious New Directions Fellowship from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Fellowship will support Willis’ three-year research project, “Slaves and Singers: Race, Work and Heritage in a Gulf Country.” The substantial fellowship, in the amount of $300,000, will enable Willis to address social, cultural, and historical factors that shaped the experiences of Africans and their descendants in the Indian Ocean World, and their place in contemporary public depictions of the history of the Gulf states. The funding primarily supports summer and sabbatical leave time, along with fellow’s training programs.

New Direction Fellowships are awarded to highly accomplished faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who seek to acquire systematic training outside their own areas of special interest. Since 2002, the program has enabled strong scholars to conduct serious cross-disciplinary research in an academic field other than their primary area of specialization. Among all grants available to humanities scholars, New Directions Fellowships are among the largest in size and longest in duration. Eligible candidates include faculty members who have been awarded a doctorate in the humanities or humanistic social sciences within the last six to twelve years. 

Project Pericles awarded “Up to Us Voting Modules” mini-grants to Jeff Snyder and Debby Walser-Kuntz that enabled them to incorporate discussions about pressing civic and economic issues and the importance of voting into their spring term 2020 courses:

Jeff Snyder, Associate Professor of Educational Studies, for the Educational Studies senior seminar, “Controversy, Politics and Intellectual Freedom in Schools, from Kindergarten to College” (EDUC 395)

Debby Walser-Kuntz, Herman and Gertrude Mosier Stark Professor of Biology and the Natural Sciences, for “Virology” (BIO 370)

Alex Knodell, Assistant Professor of Classics and Co-Director of Archaeology, is the recipient of two significant awards to support the Small Cycladic Islands Project (SCIP), a multidisciplinary archaeological survey of several small Aegean islands. The Loeb Classical Library Foundation and the Archaeological Institute of America’s AIA-NEH grants will support fieldwork in summer 2020 on currently uninhabited islets in the Cycladic archipelago.

While such places are currently devoid of much human activity or settlement, we know that such places served as cemeteries, sanctuaries, hideaways, pasturage, or stepping-stones to more sizable landforms at various points in the past. Dr. Knodell co-directs the project with colleagues from the Ephorate of Antiquities of the Cyclades and the Norwegian Institute at Athens. SCIP also provides an opportunity for Carleton students to participate in an international research project. More information can be found on the project website: www.smallcycladicislandsproject.org.

Wes Markofski, Assistant Professor of Sociology, has received a major grant for his new research project, “Protecting Sacred Waters: Mobilizing Indigenous and Western Meanings of Science and Spirituality in the Battle over Line 3.” The project is part of a re-granting initiative originating at Rice University (Elaine Howard Ecklund) and the University of California, San Diego (John H. Evans), “The Sociology of Science and Religion: Identity and Belief Formation,” funded by the Templeton Religion Trust.