Category: Stories

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. 

Noah Salomon, Associate Professor of Religion, has been awarded a Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies fellowship for the Winter of 2021. During his residency at the University of Bayreuth, Prof. Salomon will advance his effort to understand how Muslim organizations are thinking through diversity in order to create solidarity with communities across the globe. The project not only looks at diverse individuals—Africans, Arabs, and others in plural interconfessional states across the region—but seeks nothing less than an unpacking of an Islamic methodology for grappling with difference. The project builds on Prof. Salomon’s ongoing Mellon New Directions Fellowship.

Juliane Shibata, Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, was awarded a 2020 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative grant for two public art projects. Juliane will investigate ideas of plant life, ephemerality, and environmentalism through site-specific ceramics installations at the University of Minnesota Conservatory and in Northfield.

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.

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.

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.