From astronomy to creative writing, by way of biology, political science, and literary/cultural studies, ³Õºº¾ãÀÖ²¿ scholars from a variety of fields have been recognized through the award of research grants.
Political scientist Barbara Elias has been chosen by the Carnegie Foundation to join an ongoing, nationwide project to explore different aspects of polarization. Elias, who is the Sarah and James ³Õºº¾ãÀÖ²¿ Associate Professor of Government, is known for her insight into counterinsurgency warfare and US foreign policy.
She is one of twenty-six researchers honored earlier this year with an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship as part of a three-year, $18 million initiative to support interdisciplinary research into the causes of political polarization and ways to mitigate it.
Elias’s winning proposal—titled “The Unexpected Home Front: Roots of Domestic Radicalization in US Counterinsurgency Wars”—investigates how foreign military occupations affect domestic politics in democratic nations through a comparative examination of American and French counterinsurgent campaigns in Algeria, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
“Despite the US withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan for example,” says Elias, “I see that, in many ways, these wars are not over, as they continue to reverberate deeply within Iraqi, Afghan, and American politics.”
With the support of the fellowship, Elias plans to produce a series of articles and to engage broadly in discussions about lost wars and their consequences on current and emerging politics in the US. “The relationship between foreign counterinsurgency operations and domestic political radicalization is an unexplored area of study,” she adds.
Essayist and cultural reporter Jordan Kisner, an assistant professor of English, has earned a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellowship. The award is open to all independent scholars and creative writers, including academics. In addition to working on their own projects, the Fellows engage in an ongoing exchange of ideas within the Center and in public forums throughout the Library
As well as being a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Kisner, who teaches creative nonfiction, has also written for The Atlantic and been a columnist for the Paris Review Daily. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and was honored as a National Magazine Award finalist, among other achievements. Her fellowship will enable her to work on a book-length essay about Shakerism, one of the longest-running utopian experiments in America. It’s a subject Kisner has been exploring for several years. Founded in England nearly 280 years ago, the United Society of Believers, commonly called Shakers, relocated to America in the 1770s, setting up their community at Sabbathday Lake in Maine (about twenty-five miles west of the ³Õºº¾ãÀÖ²¿ campus) a few years later.
"I am thrilled to be given extended access to the research catalog at the New York Public Library, which houses an extensive collection of Shaker archival material,” says Kisner. “It's an honor and a gift to be given this research opportunity and this period of time in which to focus on writing."
Professor of Asian Studies and English Belinda Kong has been teaching Asian American and Asian diaspora literature at ³Õºº¾ãÀÖ²¿ for twenty years. Her latest award, a Mellon Fellowship issued by the Huntington Library in California, will allow her to further explore her latest project on Asian diaspora during a one-month residency.
Kong will be researching library’s collections on early Chinese America and the Pacific Rim, with an emphasis on Cantonese migrants from the Gold Rush of the mid-nineteenth century to the “Chinese Exclusion era,” which began in the 1880s and severely limited the rights of Chinese workers in the US for six decades.
This research is part of Kong’s new book project, Subaltern Sensoriums of Early Cantonese America, which tells the stories of early Cantonese American immigrants. “As a child immigrant from Hong Kong myself,” she says, “I want this project to focus on Cantonese immigrants, to pay homage to the richness and resilience of these early forerunners."
More than a hundred thousand Chinese came to the US during this period, but most of them did not leave behind any written records. Kong therefore proposes a framework of “alternative literacies” to explore what she calls the “multisensory dimensions” of immigrant lives, looking beyond written archives toward photographs, objects, sound recordings, and spaces.
“Despite the long history of Asians' cultural exclusion and disempowerment in the US,” says Kong, “they have always had tremendous creative agency as they make meaning and beauty in their everyday lives.”
Assistant Professor of Physics Fe McBride was awarded a grant from NASA for her project Swift Cycle 21: X-ray Signatures of Neutrino Emitters, which seeks to understand more about cosmic rays. These are collections of highly charged particles that stream into the earth’s atmosphere from space, explains McBride, while neutrinos, also known as “ghost particles,” are often produced from cosmic rays interacting with light. Observing neutrinos could help us learn more about the origins of cosmic rays, she added. “Cosmic rays are millions of times more energetic than any particles we can accelerate on Earth, and understanding these processes would help us understand a wide variety of topics better, including black holes and black hole formation, galaxies, and their evolution.”
This grant was crucial in enabling McBride to obtain the required data, which involves access to a NASA-administered satellite and radio data from the (located in New Mexico). The funding is also invaluable in providing support for several students working with McBride on neutrino research. The first part of this research was recently published in the .
“I've been able to present this research at conferences and meetings and was even able to bring students to meetings and will attend another meeting with a student in October.”
Assistant Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies Mary Rogalski received a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation for her , titled Adapting to Life with a Dash of Salt: Eco-Evolutionary Consequences of Freshwater Salinization. Her research was prompted by the fact that lakes and rivers across the US are becoming saltier. Here in coastal Maine, said Rogalski, this is mainly driven by the use of road salt in the winter and sea level rise caused by climate change. “One big unanswered question is how freshwater organisms will respond to this stress and how that might affect lake water quality,” she explains.
Rogalski’s laboratory studies how changing salt levels affect lake food webs by focusing on tiny freshwater crustaceans called Daphnia. While barely visible to the naked eye, these grazers are important because they help keep lakes clean by controlling algal blooms and they serve as food for fish, she explained. “Daphnia can evolve quickly—within just a few generations—making them a powerful model for studying how rapid adaptation to environmental change can ripple through ecosystems. Understanding how Daphnia cope with salt stress could help explain and predict changes in water clarity and fish populations.”
Together with her students, Rogalski will be doing a combination of field surveys and lab experiments to tease apart these dynamics. “I'm excited to be able to expand both the spatial scale and the methodology I use in my work with the funds from this grant,” she adds.
Part way through the spring semester, German literary and cultural scholar Birgit Tautz headed to Humboldt University in Berlin for a few months to pursue her latest research project. She was recipient of a Re-Invitation Grant from the Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers.
Tautz, who is the George Taylor Files Professor of Modern Languages, was an existing fellow of the , which is dedicated to international exchange with German Universities. “The foundation often speaks of the Humboldt family,” she explains, “and just like family gatherings, fellows can be re-invited to work with new hosts and on new projects.”
Her latest fellowship, which is part of an ongoing book project, explores the linguistic and cultural legacy of great European literary works of the eighteenth century and beyond and how the translations of such works into other languages, including English, often omitted original passages that were deemed superfluous but appealed to readers' emotions and empathy. “My project turns to what was cut or left behind,” says Tautz, “as I propose an alternative model of thinking about world literature.” By focusing on the discarded material, Tautz’s model aims for a more global view of literature, rather than one constrained by narrow linguistic or national boundaries.
“By tackling these questions,” she stresses, “we may gain insights into how literature works, what its appeal is, and how it binds audiences and communities beyond the territories from which they originate or the spaces in which they interact.”
