Grant News

Gao Hong Dice (Music) received a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant to work on Chinese Temple Music in Beijing and Henan. Additionally, over the last six months, Gao received awards from the American Composers Forum Encore program providing support for performing a concerto for pipa by Changjun Xu, and from their Essentially Choral Program for a choral music composition entitled “Coming of Spring.” She won a Meet the Composer Creative Connections grant for composing and outreach, and a Minnesota State Arts Board Cultural Community Partnership Grant for composing music for Choral. For more information on Gao’s work and upcoming performances, visit Gao’s personal website.

In May 2007, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations awarded a $200,000 grant to Carleton for use in planning the College’s new arts center, which will occupy the old Northfield Middle School. The College will use the funds in selecting an architect for the center and developing initial plans for the project.

Prof. Melissa Eblen-Zayas (Physics & Astronomy) won a substantial and prestigious Cottrell College Science Award from the Research Corporation, an important supporter of scientific research and development. The award will facilitate Prof. Eblen-Zayas’ research on a magnetic semiconductor, and provide four summer stipends for undergraduate researchers in her lab. Read more on recent grants.

This spring, Stephen Mohring (Art & Art History) received two residential awards to support his work as a studio artist. A generous stipend allowed Prof. Mohring (and his wife, freelance writer Joanna Rawson) to spend May at the Can Serrat International Art Center, near Barcelona, Spain. A second grant, an “Emerging Artists Fellowship” from the Jerome Foundation, will enable Prof. Mohring to spend time at the Blacklock Nature Center in northern Minnesota this fall. These two grants follow on the unusual recent donation to Prof. Mohring of a portable sawmill which he will use in projects and courses that involve the use of wood harvested from the Arboretum (especially invasive species and windfall timber). Read more on recent grants.

In April, Mark Hansell (Asian Languages & Literatures) received a Blakemore Freeman Fellowship to support a year’s study of Japanese at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama, Japan. The fellowship will help Prof. Hansell, a long-time instructor of Chinese at Carleton, to expand his scholarly and teaching activities. Read more on 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.