The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program recently selected two faculty members for fellowships, and the National Science Foundation awarded a Civic Innovation Challenge grant to another faculty member.

Also, the UC Davis Humanities Institute announced its 2021-22 Faculty Research Fellows.

The awards:

●︎ National Endowment for the Humanities — A research fellowship of $60,000 awarded to Stacy Fahrenthold, assistant professor, departments of History and Middle East/South Asia Studies, allowing her to spend 2021-22 researching and writing Working Class Cosmopolitans: Syrian Textile Workers in the Arab Atlantic, 1890–1934. “I will travel to archives in New England and Sao Paulo, Brazil, to access records related to Arab weavers, spinners and stitchers who worked across both Americas between 1890 and 1934,” she said. Fahrenthold’s future book was among 213 humanities projects nationwide awarded a total of $32.8 million in NEH grants in December.

Read complete article by Kathleen Holder, content strategist, College of Letters and Science.

●︎ Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program — Wilson K. Rumbeiha, professor, Department of Molecular Biosciences, School of Veterinary Medicine, earned a fellowship to work with Kizito Nishimwe at the University of Rwanda to incorporate environmental health toxicology into an updated One Health curriculum, explore joint research collaborations in this field and lead the creation of the One Health Center of Excellence. With the project, the University of Rwanda will gain an updated curriculum in One Health, newly cultivated research collaborations in One Health toxicology, and e-learning content. UC Davis will gain a global research partner and host for UC Davis students interested in studying abroad.

Read complete article by Trina Wood, communications officer, School of Veterinary Medicine.

●︎ National Science Foundation — Stage 1 Civic Innovation Challenge grant to Professor Tom Maiorana of the department of Design and two collaborators to continue their work on their “Rehearsing Natural Disasters Through Games and Simulations” project.

The grant recipients — Maiorana, Professor Kenichi Soga of the UC Berkeley Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Louise Comfort of the CITRIS Policy Lab at CITRIS and the Banatao Institute — have been working with the coastal community of Bolinas, Marin County, to help prototype ways of dealing with evacuations in the case of wildfires.

The NSF’s Civic Innovation Challenge is a research and action competition that aims to fund ready-to-implement, research-based pilot projects that have the potential for scalable, sustainable and transferable impact on community-identified priorities.

●︎ UC Davis Humanities Institute — Here are the DHI’s 2021-22 faculty research fellows and their projects:

• Yuming He, associate professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Culture — “Wonder and Order: Human Kinds and Global Geography in the Making of Ming Identity”
• Carol Hess, professor, Department of Music — “Manuel de Falla’s El amor brujo (Love, the Magician): New Perspectives”
• Beenash Jafri, assistant professor, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies — “Lingering Attachments: The Settler Colonial Cinematic and Queer Asian Diasporic Possibility”
• Davis McCourt, associate professor, Department of Sociology — “American Hegemony and the Rise of China: Experts, Culture and U.S. National Security in the Asia-Pacific Since 1972”
• Jocelyn Sharlet, associate professor, Department of Comparative Literature — “Proverbs and Innovation in the Poetry of Abu Nuwas, Abu l-‘Atahiya, and Ibn ar-Rumi”
• Kalindi Vora, professor, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies — “Autoimmune: Chronic Conditions and the Cost of Care in a Time of Uncertain Medicine”

This diverse group of faculty represents the breadth of the arts and humanities at UC Davis. From proverbs in premodern Arabic poetry to the afterlife of a Spanish musical composition, from autoimmunity as a topic of feminist science to settler colonial imaginaries in Asian diasporic films, from the making of identity in the Ming dynasty to the cultural underpinnings of American foreign policy toward China, their projects demonstrate the myriad ways in which arts and humanities scholarship can shed light on our world.

The DHI’s Faculty Research Fellowship program is aimed at helping faculty in the humanities, arts and qualitative social sciences make progress on major research or creative projects. The purpose of the fellowship is to further the research or creative activity of the individual recipients and to enable faculty to meet and work with colleagues in other disciplines and departments.

The new fellows will receive a single course release in spring 2022 to participate in a research seminar at the DHI where they will share their work with the other fellowship recipients.

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