Five faculty members receive grants
to participate in NEH Summer Institutes
MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — Courtesy of the president's office, here is a list of recent accomplishments and publications by Middlebury faculty members, and in some cases their students.
The following faculty members were awarded grants to participate in Summer Institutes sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities this past summer:
- Timi Mayer (Geography) participated in a five-week institute entitled "The Silk Road: Globalization and Chinese Cultural Identity," held at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her research project focuses on the ways Muslim minorities in China express their national identity in the landscape.
- Jeffrey Flynn (Philosophy) participated in a five-week institute, "Human Rights in Conflict: Interdisciplinary Perspectives," held at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Flynn is working on building interdisciplinary perspectives into his teaching of human rights and doing research on human rights and global constitutionalism in the political philosophy of Jürgen Habermas.
- Daniel Brayton (English) participated in a six-week institute, "The American Maritime People," which was held at Mystic Seaport, in Mystic, Connecticut. This Institute entailed intensive study of maritime social, cultural, and material history in the Americas, important background for future iterations of ENAM 243, "Maritime Literature and Culture."
- John Spackman (Philosophy) participated in a six-week institute, "Mind and Metaphysics," held at Washington University in St. Louis. During the seminar John was working on a project titled "Physicalism and the Explanatory Gap," which seeks to defend a physicalist account of the mind against some recent criticisms. This research is connected to his upper level courses in the Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness.
- Greg Vitercik (Music) was awarded a grant to participate in "Modernist Paris." During this five-week seminar, held in Paris, Greg worked on a project titled "The Greatest Audacity; Simplicity," which examines Virgil Thomson's setting of Gertrude Stein's text for the opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. The seminar relates to music history courses as well as courses on fin-de-siecle culture Vitercik teaches periodically with James West of the History Department.
Grace Spatafora (Biology) reports that her students generated a photo of S. mutans that appeared on the cover of the Journal of Bacteriology 2006 188, 14: 5033-5044 along with their accompanying manuscript:
http://jb.asm.org/content/vol188/issue14/cover.shtml
Spatafora also has learned that her R01 award from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research was renewed for the third year of what is proposed to be a five-year project. Money from this award will continue to support the work of Middlebury College undergraduates who are investigating the molecular genetic mechanisms of S. mutans virulence.
David Bain (English and American Literature) served as chief commentator and consultant in the History Channel "Magic Marvels" documentary, "Transcontinental Railroad," which premiered nationally on June 7 and will be repeated frequently.
Jeff Munroe (Geology) has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the USDA Forest Service in support of a conference he organized, UINTAS 2006, which brought together scientists across many disciplines and Forest Service land managers who are collaborating to better understand the geology and ecology of the Uinta Mountains of northeastern Utah.
Munroe has also co-edited a special issue of the journal Geomorphology entitled "Quaternary landscape change and modern process in western North America."
Bettina Matthias (German) has had a book, The Hotel As Setting in Early 20th Century German and Austrian Literature: Checking in to Tell a Story, published by Camden House Publishers.
Matthew Dickerson (Computer Science) has published a book entitled From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy (Brazos Press, 2006). It was co-authored with Middlebury alum David O'Hara, class of 1991, who teaches philosophy and classics at Augustana College.
Mark Williams (Political Science) has published a paper entitled "Technocracy versus Democracy in Latin America: Escaping the Zero-Sum Scenario." It was published in the Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 121, No. 1 (Spring 2006).
Ted Perry (Film and Media Culture) has collaborated with his colleague Hans Breder to create a new performance work, "When I Was a Child ...," which was presented on April 12-24 at L'antic Theatre in Barcelona, Spain. Ted also directed the play at the Dallas Children's Theater in Dallas, Texas, when it ran there from June 17-25.
Middlebury College received a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a New Directions Fellowship which is designed to foster interdisciplinary work by allowing academics to receive formal training in a discipline other than the one in which they were educated. It will fully fund Associate Professor Timothy Billings's (English) leave in 2006-07, during which time he will study for the M.A. degree in Sinology at the School for Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and also conduct research related to Renaissance sinology in Poland, Italy, France, and China.
Jonathan Miller-Lane (Teacher Education) has had two articles published recently in peer reviewed journals:
"Constructive Disagreement, the Body, and Education for Democracy" in The Social Studies, V97, #1.
"Social Studies Teachers' Views on Committed Impartiality and Discussion" in Social Studies Research & Practice, Spring 2006. http://www.socstrp.org
In addition, Miller-Lane was selected to participate this past summer in a faculty seminar at Transylvania University in Kentucky. The seminar was entitled "Twenty-first Century Liberal Education - A Contested Concept" and involved faculty from around the country.
Noah Graham (Physics) received a three-year research grant from the National Science Foundation through NSF's Research in Undergraduate Institutions activity. This grant provides support for Noah's 06-07 leave and will fund three undergraduate students. Middlebury students, as well as physicists at MIT and Tuebingen University, will be involved in research investigating coherent states of matter in the early universe, including a large-scale computational effort making use of Middlebury's computing cluster.
Pieter Broucke (History of Art and Architecture) received a grant from the Parnassus Foundation in support of his archaeological fieldwork. The grant helped fund a research trip to Greece this past summer to monitor progress on the Messene Heroon Reconstruction Project, which has occupied much of Broucke's time during the past decade, and to explore future fieldwork opportunities for MiRA (Middlebury Research in Archaeology).
John A. Maluccio (Economics) has had an article published. Co-written with N. Caldés and D. Coady, it is titled, "The cost of poverty alleviation transfer programs: A comparative analysis of three programs in Latin America" and appears in World Development, 34(5): 818–37.
Christopher Star (Classics) has published an article in the Transactions of the American Philological Association entitled "Commanding Constantia in Senecan Tragedy."
Jason Arndt (Psychology) recently had two articles published: "Models of recognition: A review of arguments in favor of a dual-process account" co-authored with Rachel Diana, Lynne M. Reder, and Heekyeong Park, published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review; and "An examination of two-process theories of false recognition," published in the journal Memory. His co-author was Christine Gould ('04).
Eliza Garrison (History of Art & Architecture) was awarded supplemental funding from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation's Bundeskanzler Fellowship program for a project entitled Percy Ernst Schramm's Portraiture Idea. This grant provided support for three months this past summer to pursue research in Germany on the history of portraiture and on the scholarship of Schramm, an eminent German historian (1984-1970).
John Schmitt (Mathematics) has had an article published titled, "Constructive Upper Bounds for Cycle-Saturated Graphs of Minimum Size." It was co-authored with R. Gould (Emory University) and T. Luczak (Adam Mickiewicz University) and appeared in the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics.
Hang Du (Chinese) had her book, The Acquisition of the Chinese ba-construction, published this past summer by Lincom.
Jill Coleman (Psychology) has recently published an article titled, "Sex differences in regret: All for love or some for lust?" It was co-authored with N.J. Roese, G.L. Pennington, M. Janicki, N.P. Li and D.T. Kenrick and appeared in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Jeffrey Carpenter, Jessica Holmes, and Peter Matthews, all members of the economics department faculty, have received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled Raising money for charity: An experimental approach. This research, involving at least nine undergraduates, will focus on the ability of common auction formats to raise money for charity compared to newly designed mechanisms. The results will be useful to nonprofit organizations in designing ways to raise revenues.
Carpenter also published an article, entitled "Space, Trust, and Communal Action: Results from field experiments in Southeast Asia," in The Journal of Regional Science. It was co-written with A. Daniere and L. Takahashi.
James Larrabee (Chemistry & Biochemistry) has received a 3-year research grant from the National Science Foundation through NSF's Research in Undergraduate Institutions activity. At least four undergraduate students will be involved in this research, which is the study of some unusual enzymes which contain cobalt in the active site. Title: Determination of Magnetic Exchange Coupling in Carboxylate-Bridged Binuclear Co(II) by Magnetic Circular Dichroism.
Andrea Lloyd (Biology) received funding from the National Science Foundation through NSF's Research in Undergraduate Institutions activity. The 3-year project is entitled Collaborative Research/RUI: Past, Present, and Future Productivity of Arctic Woody Vegetation in a Warming Climate; it is a collaborative project with researchers at Western Washington University and at the Woods Hole Research Center. It will examine trends in boreal forest tree growth around the globe, using models to project future patterns of forest productivity and tree growth in a warming climate. The project provides funding for her 2006-2007 leave, will support several undergraduate research assistants, and involves fieldwork in Siberia and northwestern Canada.
Lloyd also received funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service (through a sub-award from the University of Alaska) for research during her 2006-2007 leave. The research project is titled Alaska's Changing Boreal Forest: Resilience and Vulnerability. The funding will support Andi's efforts to assist the Bonanza Creek Long-Term Ecological Research Site at the University of Alaska in planning future paleoecological research at the site, and in a project investigating how boreal forest plant species differ in their sensitivity to climate warming.
As announced last year, Middlebury College is one of the baccalaureate partner institutions participating in a project funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health to the University of Vermont. This grant continues the Vermont Genetics Network support that has been a significant source of funding for faculty and student research in the past four years. In June, the following faculty members received individual one-year grants from this program:
- Jeremy Ward (Biology) Renewal of support for the research project originally funded last year (title: The Identification and Characterization of the Mammalian Meiotic Mutation mei4). The grant provides funding for summer and academic year effort and stipends for two undergraduates.
- Roger Sandwick (Chemistry & Biochemistry) Renewal of support for the research project originally funded last year (title: The Maillard Reaction between Ribose 5-Phosphate and Cellular Amines). The grant provides funding for his 06-07 leave as well as support for summer research, including stipends for two undergraduates.
- Robert Cluss (Chemistry & Biochemistry) Renewal of support for the research project originally funded last year (title: Cytopathic Effect of the Borrelia burgdorferi Exoproteins Oms28 and Enolase). The grant provides funding for summer and academic year effort and stipends for three undergraduates.
- Marcia Collaer (Psychology) New grant to support a pilot research project titled Cognitive and vestibular contributors to sex differences in visuospatial ability. The grant provides funding for her 06-07 leave.
Ward has also been awarded a three-year grant from the National Institutes of Health through the AREA program (Academic Research Enhancement Award). The grant funds basic research related to human infertility and complications of reproductive processes and will support Jeremy's 2007-08 academic leave. At least six undergraduates will be involved in this project, which is titled, The identification and characterization of the mammalian mutation mei4.
Collaer also received a grant from the Vermont EPSCoR program to fund research during her 2006-07 academic leave on a project titled, Does stereotype threat contribute to visuospatial sex differences in line judgment? This research will contribute to the understanding of how and why females and males may perform differently on certain types of tasks.
Molly Costanza-Robinson (Environmental Studies and Chemistry & Biochemistry) received a grant from the Vermont EPSCoR program to fund research with students at Middlebury and at Argonne National Laboratory's Advanced Photo Source. The long-term goal of this interdisciplinary environmental research is to characterize properties of porous media, such as soils, and chemical contaminants that influence fate and transport in the subsurface environment.
Ellen Oxfeld (Sociology and Anthropology) turned down a fellowship from the U.S. Dept. of Education's Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad program in order to accept funding from the Fulbright Scholar Program to support the same research project, on food and cultural transformation in China, during her 2006-2007 leave.
Michael Kraus (Political Science) received a fellowship from the U.S. Dept. of Education's Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad program that provides support for his 2006-2007 leave. He will be spending the year in the Czech Republic doing research for a project titled Edvard Benes, Czechoslovakia and the Great Powers, 1938-1948. The grant will also fund a research trip to Russia. He had to turn down a grant from IREX (International Research and Exchanges Board) for the same project.
Allison Stanger (Political Science) won a lecturing award from the Fulbright Scholar Program to teach American foreign policy at China Foreign Affairs University (the school of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) in Beijing during her 2006-2007 leave. Due to other commitments, she was unable to accept the award.
Sallie Sheldon (Biology) received funding from the Lake Fairfield Pond Association for continued research on biocontrol of Eurasian Water Milfoil, an invasive aquatic plant found in lakes in Vermont and across the country.
Jason Mittell (American Studies/Film & Media Culture) has had an article published: "Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television," The Velvet Light Trap #58, Fall 2006, 29-40.
Leger Grindon's (Film & Media Culture) essay, "Tod Browning's Thematic Continuity and Stylistic Development in Iron Man," was published as a chapter essay in The Films of Tod Browning, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath [London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006].
Amy Briggs and Daniel Scharstein (Computer Science) have co-authored a journal article with 3 Middlebury alums:
Amy J. Briggs, Carrick Detweiler, Yunpeng Li, Peter C. Mullen, and Daniel Scharstein, "Matching scale-space features in 1D panoramas", Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Volume 103, Issue 3, September 2006, pages 184-195.
Bill Hart's (History) course "United States History: 1492-1861 (HIST 203) was identified as one of the top examples of best practices in a national study of U.S. history courses.