January 2020

Awards 

PhD Amanda Kate Weber (Music), student of Director of Choral Activities Kathy Saltzman Romey, has received the 2018 Julius Herford Dissertation Prize from the American Choral Directors Association for her dissertation, "Choral Singing and Communal Mindset: A Program Evaluation of the Voices of Hope Women's Prison Choir." This is one of the highest honors in the academic field of choral conducting. 

Grants & Fellowships

The latest round of full Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop (ICW) grants have been awarded. Now in its fourth year, the ICW program has supported 17 workshops; workshop leadership teams have collectively brought together 184 faculty and staff members from CLA, 82 from other units at the University of Minnesota, and 101 scholars and professionals from outside the University. The full grants of up to $85,000 support interdisciplinary projects that bring together faculty, staff, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students from a variety of fields to intensively study topics that span disciplines. The ICW full grants in this round are as follows:

Environmental Humanities Initiative 2.0: New Directions in Research and Outreach
Professor and Department Chair Christine Marran (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies)
Associate Professor Dan Philippon (English)

Queer and Trans* Ecologies: Bodies, Social Relations, and Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene
Assistant Professor Aren Aizura (Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies)
Merle Davis Mathews ( Anthropology)
Associate Professor Kate Derickson (Geography, Environment & Society)
Associate Professor Kale Fajardo (American Studies)
Professor Rebecca Montgomery (Forest Resources)
Khoi Nguyen (American Studies)
Assistant Professor Corinne Teed (Art)

Workshop and Pilot Investigation of Auditory Behaviors of Bald Eagles
Professor and Executive Director of the Center for Applied & Translational Sensory Science Peggy Nelson (Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, CATSS)
Assistant Director Lori Arent (Raptor Center)
Associate Director of Engineering and Facilities Jeffrey Marr (St. Anthony Falls Laboratory)
JoAnn McGee (Animal Bioacousticians) 
Associate Engineer Christopher Milliren (St. Anthony Falls Laboratory)
Professor and Director of the Auditory Perception and Cognition Lab Andrew Oxenham (Psychology, Otolaryngology, CATSS)
Associate Professor and Executive Director of the Raptor Center Julie Ponder (College of Veterinary Medicine) 
Professor Patrick Redig (College of Veterinary Medicine) 
Edward Walsh (Animal Bioacousticians)

Associate Professor Katharine Gerbner (History) has won a National Endowment for the Humanities for her project “Constructing Religion, Defining Crime: Slavery, Power, and Belief in Colonial America” which will explore religion and religious freedom in colonial America as they were shaped by slavery and the criminalization of black religious practices.

Professor Peter Mercer-Taylor (Music) has won a National Endowment for the Humanities for his project “Classical Music in Pre-Civil War American Hymnody: A Digital Anthology for Listening and Singing.” Professor Mercer-Taylor plans on preparing an open-access digital anthology of almost 300 hymn melodies published in the United States before 1861 derived from European classical music.

Director Jeanne Kilde (Religious Studies), Research Fellow Virajita Singh (OED/CDES), Professor Penny Edgell (Sociology), and Assistant Professor Aisha Ghani (Anthropology, Religious Studies) have received a Faculty Driven Initiative Award from the University of Minnesota's Institute for Diversity, Equity, and Advocacy (IDEA) to augment the work of the Religion and the Public University Collaborative, sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study. The award will be used to bring in a nationally noted speaker on the subject of religion and public education and to host faculty and staff conversations regarding religion and the UMN campus climate. 

Publications and Creative Activities

Assistant Professor Sima Shakhsari (GWSS) has published Politics of Rightful Killing, Duke University Press. Analyzing online and off-line ethnography, Shakhsari looks at a transnational network of Iranian bloggers and provides an account of digital citizenship that raises questions about the internet's relationship to political engagement, militarism, and democracy.