Spring 2024 Fellowship Leave Grant and Micro-Grant Award Recipients

Fellowship Leave Grant Recipients

Carrie Anderson

History of Art and Architecture

Professor Anderson received a grant to support research related to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch coral trade on the western coast of Africa. The grant will enable her to compile and visualize coral-related data from the cargo lists of the Dutch trading companies, which she will use to reevaluate early modern images and objects that feature coral. The goal of this project is to better understand how coral accrued symbolic and economic value for Dutch and African consumers in the early modern period.

Kate Crawford

Environmental Studies

Professor Crawford received a grant support her leave working on two new projects that utilize novel approaches to measuring and analyzing people’s simultaneous exposure to many chemical pollutants (the exposome) to investigate how these exposures jointly impact growth, development, and cardiometabolic health across the life course. Both projects rely on recently developed statistical methods to allow for the analysis of high-dimensional environmental exposure and health outcome data. This work will contribute novel and important knowledge to the field of perinatal environmental health that has not previously been feasible without new analytical and statistical methods.

Ananya Das

Computer Science 

Professor Das received a grant to support the development of a proof-of-concept for a community owned and operated bikeshare program that will evolve out of the already existing Montpelier E-bike Lending Library and ultimately expand to other parts of Vermont, including Middlebury. This project aims to perform the research to determine various logistics of the program including locations/numbers of bike hubs, types of bikes, software devices, and software apps to be used by a wide variety of users.

Raphaelle Gauvin-Coulombe

Economics

Professor Gauvin-Coulombe received a grant to support understanding the mechanisms behind the economic impacts of fires and to assess possible policies aiming at reducing the probability and severity of fires including fire mitigation, adaptation, and remediation strategies. To unpack these mechanisms, this project involves producing a dataset of fire exposure and economic activity across the entire US and building and estimating a multi-region structural model of the US economy and its exposure to fire risk.

Niwaeli Kimambo

Geography

Professor Kimambo, received a grant to integrate generative AI into geographic research with Alex (Yide) Xu ’24, using the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to analyze satellite imagery for land cover changes, particularly tree planting in Eastern Africa.

Gyula Zsombok

French & Francophone Studies 

Professor Zsombok, received a grant to support the study of the social dynamics of language ideologies and authority in modern French. He will work with empirical textual data from surveys, newspapers and social media to investigate linguistic innovation and inclusive language.

Alexis Mychajiliw

Biology/Environmental Studies

Professor Mychajiliw received a grant to support better understanding about whether humans are now causing a sixth mass extinction event. Our planet experienced five mass extinction events that unfolded over millions of years - a timescale difficult to reconcile with the losses we are witnessing today through the perspective of a human lifespan. Dr. Alexis Mychajliw and colleagues are working to synthesize an accurate record of vertebrate species extinctions over the past 10,000 years - a time when humans rapidly spread around the planet and began altering ecosystems in ways that shape our modern-day conservation dilemmas.

Micro-Grant Recipients

Dima Ayoub

Arabic

Professor Ayoub received a micro-grant to support interviewing publishers, editors, translators, and writers at the Breadloaf Conference. The goal is to visualize the data collected from these interviews to help gain a better understanding of the translating landscape and how these key players deal with Arabic to English translation given the political moment. 

Kristin Bright

Anthropology

Professor Bright received a micro-grant to support Feminist Health Futures by fostering faculty-student collaboration in health humanities, led by colleagues from Mount Holyoke College and the University of Connecticut. Using ArcGIS with support from Midd.data, the project maps health humanities initiatives, facilitating connections and visualizing potential “feminist health futures” at Middlebury and globally.

Charles Caldwell

Center for Careers and Internships

Professor Caldwell received a micro-grant to support a student RA position on your project analyzing Center for Careers and Internships (CCI) survey data. CCI holds valuable qualitative data requiring analysis for accessibility improvements and enhancing student summer experiences. While Caldwell has analyzed quantitative data and explored text analysis tools, additional skills and resources are needed. This project aims to develop these resources, including collaborating with a student research assistant, and enhancing proficiency in R Studio for sustained progress.

Laurie Essig

Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies

Professor Essig received a micro-grant to support collaboration with colleagues worldwide to create a podcast exploring the global anti-gender ideology movement and its resistance. They have released two episodes, with the third imminent, and are currently working on episodes 4 and 5. Essig will take a podcasting course during leave in Spring 2025 to enhance her podcasting abilities. You can listen to the podcast here. 

Carly Thomsen

Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies

Professor Thomsen received a micro-grant to support exploration of the pelvic health industry’s use of technological apps, which often collect users’ medical data with little oversight, raising concerns about privacy and potential misuse. To investigate further, she will attend the PelvicBiz conference in San Diego to network with professionals and inquire about their views on app risks and patient recommendations. This research is crucial for her book, “Under Examination: The Business of Pelvic Health,” and aligns with feminist data analysis approaches and midd.data’s commitment to critical data evaluation.

Lida Winfield

Dance

Professor Winfield received a microgrant to support Making Embodiment Visible. It is a 6-episode podcast featuring different dance artists. Very little research has been done about how embodiment contributes to empathy and community building. The goal of this project is to demonstrate how embodied practices can be a tool to build empathy across differences. We hope to make visible the transferable life skills dance artists are assisting students in developing by demonstrating how embodied practice can help build empathy and connection. We will share our research findings with each dance artist and discuss their thoughts, takeaways, and contributions to advancing the project. We will also discuss how the data informs and allows them to think about their teaching and artistic practice.