Grant News

In January 2010, Gao Hong Dice, Lecturer in Chinese Musical Instruments, and three Carleton students received a $23,589 fellowship from the ASIANetwork’s Freeman Student-Faculty Program to travel to Japan, China, and Tibet to research and preserve temple music. Read more on recent grants.

In December 2009, Greg Smith, the Lloyd P. Johnson-Norwest Professor of English and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College, won a Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The award is Smith’s second NEA fellowship, as he earned one shortly after coming to Carleton in 1998. Read more on recent grants.

In December 2009, four Carleton faculty members received Faculty Career Enhancement (FaCE) grants from the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) to support collaborative faculty workshops.

·         Cam Davidson, Professor of Geology at Carleton, and collaborators at Luther College and in Italy, will offer a workshop that will bring together ACM faculty from a variety of science disciplines to explore the possibility of a off-campus studies program on earth and environmental science.

·         Michael Flynn, Professor of Linguistics at Carleton, and collaborators at Lawrence University, Ripon College, and Luther College, will conduct a workshop on the best design for an undergraduate linguistics major.

·         Ken Abrams, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Carleton, with a colleague at St. Olaf, will organize and host a two-day conference in 2011 to assess means of internationalizing undergraduate psychology education.

·         Mary Savina, Charles L. Denison Professor of Geology at Carleton, and collaborators at Luther, Macalester, and St. Olaf Colleges, will work together on integrating environmental sustainability into the undergraduate curriculum.

Read more on recent grants.

In September 2009, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) awarded $10,000 to the Carleton Department of Music, chaired by Hector Valdiva, to support concert performances by the Takács Quartet in January 2010 and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in April 2010. Read more on recent grants.

Nelson Christensen (Physics) received a National Science Foundation (NSF) award of $186,504 for a three-year project that continues his work with LIGO (Laser Interferometric Gravitational-Wave Observatory). With this grant, Nelson and international collaborators will analyze data collected by LIGO, which they hope will detect gravitational radiation signals. Events seen by LIGO produce a wealth of astrophysical information, requiring advanced techniques in data analysis, parameter estimation, and statistics that provide scientists with confidence in the quality of the data and the performance of the detectors. Through the grant, two undergraduate student researchers will work with Nelson, and high school students and teachers will also learn about LIGO’s work. Read more on recent grants.

In July 2009, Matt McCright, adjunct instructor in piano, received $5,000 from the Aaron Copland Fund to support his recording of Gene Gutche’s piano music for Centaur Records. Read more on recent grants.

Laurence Cooper (Political Science) received a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a new freshman seminar, “Cosmos or Chaos: Views of the World, Views of the Good Life,” which addresses the question of what it means to live well. Students in the course will consider some key visions of the character of the world and of how to live a good life. Read more on recent grants.

Jamie Monson (History) received a $145,000 award from the National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research program for a project on the history of work and technology transfer during the construction of the TAZARA railway in Tanzania and Zambia. Read more on recent grants.

The German-American Fulbright Commission awarded David Tompkins (History) a Fulbright award to lecture and research at the Social Science Research Center in Berlin in the fall of 2009. Read more on recent grants.

Cameron Davidson (Geology) will serve as the director of a Keck Geology Consortium undergraduate research project. The project, entitled “Exhumation of the Coast Mountains Batholith during the Greenhouse to Icehouse transition in Southeast Alaska,” will also involve two Carleton undergraduate researchers in summer 2009. Read more on recent grants.