UConn Invests $10 Million in Support of Academic Vision

A new institute for brain and cognitive science and a humanities project exploring the barriers to meaningful public discourse are just two of the faculty-led initiatives the University of Connecticut is supporting through the allocation of nearly $10 million in grants.The three-year grants represent the first set of targeted school investments directly related to UConn’s new Academic Vision, which pursues excellence in five fundamental areas: undergraduate education, graduate study, teaching, engagement, and research.

The Public Discourse Project, also the recipient of a $1 million grant, will be overseen by UConn’s Humanities Institute in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Through the project, UConn faculty in the arts and humanities will explore ways to achieve meaningful public discourse in an increasingly divisive culture. Those involved with the project will look at the historical and sociological barriers that stymie productive social dialogue and, alternatively, the conditions that foster it. With anticipated additional funding from the John Templeton Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project is designed to establish UConn as an international leader in public and digital humanities research.

“The project aims not only to understand the sources of our cultural division, but to do something about it: to combine academic research and community engagement toward the goal of raising the level of discussion in the hope of strengthening democracy,” says philosophy professor Michael Lynch, director of the Humanities Institute.

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Eric Medawar ’15 (CLAS)

Travel Award for Revisiting Iconoclasm: Image and Power in Byzantium and Early Islamic Syria

Eric’s project interrogates the origins of Byzantine iconoclasm and Islamic aniconism, and what, if any, relation exists between these phenomena. Through travel to Jordan, Eric will study the décor of the mosque at Qasr al-Hallabat, a site that has attracted little prior scholarly attention. Documentation and study of this site will provide further evidence as to whether the use of figurative representation in Islamic religious spaces was deliberately avoided only after the reign of the Marwanids and will represent an original contribution to the field of Islamic art and architectural history.

Jessica Gaafar ’15 (CLAS)

Supply Award for Language Specific Tuning of Audiovisual Integration in Early Development

As infants mature and gain experience, their perceptual system tunes to the most relevant features around them, such as the sounds of their native language. Jessica’s project aims to test the hypothesis that the visual component of speech can influence infants’ perception of the auditory component, thereby reopening sensitivity to unfamiliar perceptual experiences. By exposing infants to longer and richer speech in an unfamiliar language, she will see whether perceptual narrowing can be delayed.

Tara Pealer ’15 (CLAS)

Travel Award for The Love Triangle: How Twilight, The Hunger Games and Divergent Defy and Affirm the Power of Romance and Sex When Defining Female Characters

Tara will be presenting a paper at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association’s annual conference in April in New Orleans, LA. Tara’s paper draws on Judith Butler and Eve Sedgewick’s theorizations of erotic triangles to consider how the female protagonists in three young adult fiction series are implicated in love triangles that diverge from standard formulations. Tara traces a shift from passive to active feminine power chronologically from Twilight to Divergent.

Abdullah Hasan ’16 (CLAS)

Supply Award for Muslim Masculinities: A Methodological Study of the Qur’an and Hadith.

Alexandria Bottelsen ’16 (ED, CLAS) & Luke LaRosa Dec ’15 (CLAS)

Travel Award for After the Branding: Student Created Perceptions of the University Writing Center

Alexandria and Luke presented a paper at the Northeast Writing Center Association’s annual conference in April in Hackettstown, NJ. Their project examines the place branding of the UConn Writing Center by surveying students in order to understand their perceptions of the center now that it no longer actively brands itself. As writing center tutors, they sought to determine whether the place identity that was sought a decade ago (a welcoming space for all students) is currently the reality of how the space is perceived and to identify demographics or information sources that may need to change to better adhere to that desired identity.

Sarah Carew ’18 (CLAS), Brandon Marquis ’17 (CLAS), Chantel Martin ’15 (CLAS), Jessica Zaccagnini ‘16 (CLAS)

Travel Award for The Androgynous Center: Tutoring Across the Masculine/Feminine Spectrum

Sarah Carew ’18 (CLAS), Chantel Martin ’15 (CLAS), Jessica Zaccagnini ‘16 (CLAS) Brandon Marquis ’17 (CLAS)

Sarah, Brandon, Chantel, and Jessica conducted a panel discussion and interactive workshop at the Northeast Writing Center Association’s annual conference in April in Hackettstown, NJ. Their conference session posed the question of whether or not writing centers may productively position themselves as androgynous entities in sexist campus environments. They employed Talcott Parsons’ and Robert Frees Bales’ work in social psychology to explore the ways in which writing centers may benefit from an awareness of the range of masculine traits and feminine traits as these traits are expressed in directive and non-directive tutoring.

Victoria Sylvestre ’17 (NUR)

Travel Award for Type 1 Diabetes: The Liminal Space Between Ability and Disability

Victoria will be presenting a paper at the Society for Disability Studies annual conference in June in Atlanta, GA. Victoria’s analysis of personal blogs leads her to posit that people with type 1 diabetes transcend the current bifurcations of “ability” and “disability” due to fluctuating blood glucose values. Her research places type 1 diabetes within a disability framework and addresses ruptures in the medical and social definitions of this condition.

Brighid DeAngelis ’17 (Theater Design & Technology), advised by Adrienne Macki Braconi (Dramatic Arts)

SHARE Award for Dramaturgies of memory, materiality, and violence in African American theatre

Brighid’s SHARE project integrated her interests in theater and history. She conducted dramaturgical research in order to help the cast and audience of Reginald Edmund’s play, “Daughters of the Moon,” to better understand the historical and religious context of West Africa in the early 19th century, where the play begins. She also assisted in the compilation of the literature review for Professor Macki Braconi’s forthcoming second book, Enacted Violence: Materiality, Cultural Memory, and African American Performance.

Matthew Henderson ’18 (Linguistics and Anthropology), advised by Harry van der Hulst (Linguistics)

SHARE Award for The linguistic analysis of graphic novels

Matthew’s SHARE project explored the structure underlying sequential graphics, as found in comics, graphic novels, and other types of texts. Together with Professor van der Hulst, he analyzed a range of written and drawn works to develop an inventory of formal elements in sequential drawing and to characterize the range of form elements from non-iconic through iconic. By applying the methods of linguistic analysis and cognitive science to sequential graphics, this team considered how iconicity functions in graphic communication and contributed to the interdisciplinary study of sequential graphics.

Dissertation Fellowships

Joanna A. MacGugan “Competing authorities and contested spaces:  Dying in Dublin in the reign of Edward I”

Christiana Salah “The Popular Invention of the Victorian Governess, 1815-2015”

Draper Dissertation Fellowships

Hilary Bogert-Winkler “Prayerful Protest and Clandestine Conformity:  Alternative Liturgies and the

Allison B. Horrocks “The Family and the Home as the Nursery of Humanity”:  Flemmie Kittrell and Book of Common Prayer in Interregnum England” the International Politics of Home Economics

Trying Not to Try: Cooperation, Trust and the Paradox of Spontaneity

Edward Slingerland (University of British Columbia)

April 21, 2015

Edward Slingerland received a B.A. from Stanford in Asian Languages (Chinese), an M.A. from UC Berkeley in East Asian Languages (classical Chinese), and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Stanford University. His research specialties and teaching interests include Warring States (5th-3rd c. B.C.E.) Chinese thought, religious studies (comparative religion, cognitive science and evolution of religion), cognitive linguistics (blending and conceptual metaphor theory), ethics (virtue ethics, moral psychology), evolutionary psychology, the relationship between the humanities and the natural sciences, and the classical Chinese language. His first trade book, Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity, was released by Crown (Random House) in March 2014. His current primary work in progress is an academic monograph with the working title Body and Mind in Early China: Beyond the Myth of Holism, an article-length version of which was recently published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Other recent publications include Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities (co-edited by Prof. Mark Collard of SFU), a statement on the importance of a “second wave” of science-humanities cooperation, and articles including a qualitative coding analysis of ancient Chinese texts published in Cognitive Science, a response to the situationist critique of virtue ethics published in Ethics, and the article “Metaphor and Meaning in Early China,” which was recently awarded the 2012 Annual Best Essay award from the journal Dao.