2019-2020 Faculty Professional Development Grant Awards
Rikhil Bhavnani, Political Science; Although most large-scale political change—such as the birth of new countries or democratization—occurs through violent means such as wars and revolutions, some change occurs through nonviolence. Nonviolence is attractive, since it is arguably less costly than violence. I request to be released from teaching for a semester to help become an expert on nonviolence, and to develop curricular materials, including a large undergraduate lecture class, on the subject.
Ankur Desai, Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences; I request one-semester faculty development support in Fall 2019 to develop skills needed to provide core professional skills in our proposed professional master’s in AOS. I will develop materials for our summer practicum course, complete portfolios for the Certified Consulting Meteorologist exam, and visit peer programs in our discipline. These activities will allow me to provide better guidance and support to this growing component of our department and meet a key campus strategic goal.
2018-2019 Faculty Professional Development Grant Awards
Stephen Hilyard, Art; A faculty development grant would allow me to learn two forms of Photogrammetry: “Photogrammetry Scanning” & “Match-moving”. Both techniques are becoming increasingly important in the fields of game design, cinema & video production. They are not being taught elsewhere on campus. Incorporating these techniques into my digital media classes will maintain the relevance of these classes to students from Art Department as well as attracting new students from other areas of study.
Katrina Thompson, African Cultural Studies; I request faculty development in the area of Arabic as a foreign language, which will enable me to bring our Arabic courses up to the same level of excellence evident in the other languages we offer. My proposed faculty development has two components: studying Arabic; and conducting site visits of other strong Arabic programs in the United States, and interviewing experts in the field.
Michael Wagner, School of Journalism & Mass Communication; I am applying for a faculty development grant in the form of release time for Fall of 2018 to train in social-media network analysis, computational “big data” analysis, and data visualization. I am looking to understand how the ways in which Wisconsin’s media ecology has changed over the past decade has affected 1.) claims that politicians make about policies, their accomplishments and their opponents and 2.) the political attitudes and behaviors of Wisconsin citizens.
2017-2018 Faculty Professional Development Grant Awards
Susan Johnson, Department of History; To meet the demand for lower-division courses that meet the Ethnic Studies Requirement and to address needs in History and Chican@ & Latin@ Studies, I propose transforming my two-semester sequence of upper-division courses on the North American West into two lower-division courses that satisfy ESR. In addition, I propose developing a new upper-division course for History majors and Chican@ & Latin@ certificate students on the history of North American Homelands, Frontiers, and Borders.
Jung-Hye Shin, School of Human Ecology; A Faculty Development Grant would enable me to learn Building Information Modeling programs and apply the knowledge in my undergraduate & graduate teaching. Incorporating this technology will help undergraduate students learn the standard tool of future building industry, which enables cross-sector collaboration between environmental design, construction management, and engineers. The training will also enable the Design Studies department to provide guidance to graduate students who will pursue their research in building analysis and simulation research.
2016-2017 Faculty Professional Development Grant Awards
Junko Mori, Department of East Asian Languages & Literature; In conjunction with the formation of a new department on Asian languages and cultures, I would like to expand my understanding of issues pertaining to languages used in East, Southeast, and South Asia and their interconnections. While my research and teaching to date have primarily focused on speakers and learners of Japanese, I aim to cross regional and disciplinary borders in this new department.
Cherene Sherrard, Department of English; I will create courses and gain expertise in the emerging fields of Archipelagic and Island Studies with an emphasis on Hemispheric American Studies. This course of study builds upon my existing expertise in American literature, renews my secondary field of Caribbean studies, and augments departmental strengths in Hemispheric American Studies, transnationalism and diaspora studies.
Peter Timbie, Department of Physics; This Faculty Development Grant is for Prof. Peter Timbie to transform the largest course in the Department of Physics into an active learning course.
2015-2016 Faculty Professional Development Grant Awards
Katarzyna Beilin, Department of Spanish and Portuguese; This project requests funding for a curricular development that would allow teaching undergraduate and graduate classes on the environmental crisis in the Hispanic World from a cultural studies perspective, but in dialogue with the economic and ecological frameworks. These classes would focus, in particular, on various local attempts to confront the on-going destruction by transforming altogether economy, culture and society.
Robert Hamers, Department of Chemistry; One semester of teaching relief is requested to facilitate the development of a large, multidisciplinary center, the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology. Resources are requested to expand my knowledge of biological sciences, and to develop novel programs in technology transfer and public science outreach.
Nadav Shelef, Department of Political Science; A Faculty Development Grant would enable me to train in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology and its application to research questions in political science. This training would allow the development of a novel undergraduate class on the role of territory in politics that would integrate GIS technologies into the classroom. This will enable the political science department to provide supervision and guidance to graduate students who would like to use GIS techniques in their dissertations.
2014-2015 Faculty Professional Development Grant Awards
Glen Close, Spanish and Portuguese; I propose to audit courses and do research on contemporary screen integrated undergraduate Spanish American screen studies course and a graduate seminar on contemporary digital cinema and media theory. The purpose is to relieve my department’s heavy investment in literature and traditional film and to better accommodate today’s students by supplementing my training in literary scholarship and my autodidactic forays into film and photography.
Jesse Kercheval, English; A Faculty Development Grant would give me the time I need to deepen my knowledge of Uruguayan poetry, the poetry I am currently translating, as well as to learn how to better integrate the teaching of translation into my undergraduate poetry writing courses and to design and implement a workshop in translation as part of the MFA in Creative Writing.
Susan Robinson, Journalism and Mass Communication; This grant would enable me to train in social-media network theory/analysis and to learn about media ecology around education policy in terms of racial and class differences in a time of significant demographic and technological revolutions. This retraining would allow the development of a new Service Learning class that would apply theoretical constructs about race and class in communication systems as well as new digital technologies to a local community experiencing racial transition.
2013-2014 Faculty Professional Development Grant Awards
Patricia Loew, Life Sciences Communication; This is an opportunity for me, as a humanities scholar, to collaborate with scientists on a project to promote climate change literacy and promote activities that reduce climate change impacts, especially in Native American communities.
Melanie Manion, Political Science; I propose to develop a new large freshman course with new curricular materials to strengthen undergraduate knowledge about the political economy of China. The course would develop empirically accurate cases to augment lectures. In addition to cases, I propose to write an introductory textbook on the Chinese political economy.
Anne McClintock, English; I will train in the field of twentieth century Irish Literary Studies, focusing on writings about violence and its traumatic aftermath. This training will enable the development of an undergraduate course on Irish literature, violence and sexuality and a comparative graduate course on violence in Irish and South African literature.
2012-2013 Faculty Professional Development Grant Awards
Lisa Gralnick, Art; To obtain training in a new state-of-the-art metal casting technology, called Vacuum Pressure Casting, in order to teach a design class in this process to art students.
Anne Hansen, Languages & Cultures of Asia; To develop two new interdisciplinary courses for undergraduates on Buddhist ethics of care, including an international service-learning course in Cambodia, through substantive reading in new fields of Buddhist social work and cognitive studies of medication, and feminist ethics of care.
Anja Wanner, English; To train in the area of computer-mediated communication, and develop courses and supervise dissertation projects that deal with the impact of the new media on the English language from a linguistic viewpoint.
2011-2012 Faculty Professional Development Grant Awards
Charles L. Cohen, History/Religious Studies; I plan to create an interface that consolidates visual resources for time-based art forms. Working with students and library staff, I will assemble a data base of artists, find images associated with their work, create descriptive texts, and develop a comprehensible organizational design. The resource will be used by students and teachers in the Art Department while the model will be available for use in related fields.
Maryellen MacDonald, Psychology; I will learn to develop computational models of human cognition, which have become a critical part of cognitive science research. I will take a laboratory class in models and attend other lectures and seminars about computational modeling. I will incorporate the computational modeling into my graduate and undergraduate teaching.
2010-2011 Faculty Professional Development Grant Awards
Guillermina De Ferrari, Spanish and Portuguese; To train in the field of Caribbean visual arts in order to supplement my expertise on contemporary Caribbean literature and theory. I expect to develop two courses (a topics graduate course and an undergraduate culture course) based on aesthetic and political questions dominant in Caribbean literature and visual culture.
Stephen Kantrowitz, History; To retrain in Native American history in order to develop an undergraduate research seminar on the continuing Indian presence in the Madison area after removal; revise and refocus an existing lecture course to fully incorporate Indian history; and develop resources and questions for a scholarly work on this subject.
Mara Loveman, Sociology; To train in demographic methods to develop a new line of research on approaches to modeling racial and ethnic population change. This training will also facilitate collaboration with demographers on current and future research. I also propose to develop a new course on the politics of the census.
Basil Tikoff, Geoscience; To develop the syllabi for three new courses (The Science Illuminated series: Deciphering the past, Investigating the present, Predicting the future), which are designed to be a general science introduction for pre-service teachers.
2009-2010 Faculty Professional Development Grant Awards
Aristotle Georgiades, Art; To obtain training in computer-aided design programs in order to enhance my classroom abilities in teaching Sculpture and Public Art.
Robert Howard, Communication Arts; To study the new forms of literacy emerging from digital media, develop a syllabus, and create a course Web site that would serve as the basis for a pilot of a new undergraduate Communication A course focusing on digital media.
William Jones, History; To permit a comprehensive revision of classes on labor history and to develop a cross-disciplinary and comparative perspective for my research on race and service in the post-industrial United States.
2008-2009 Faculty Professional Development Grant Awards
Susan Friedman, English and Women’s Studies; To develop expertise in and develop a course for English and Women’s Studies on feminist theory about women and Islam and on women’s writing among women of Muslim migrant and exile backgrounds.
Stephen Hilyard, Art; To support the development of software skills that are specifically important to my teaching and to the development of a cohesive Digital Media program in the Art Department.
Lea Jacobs, Communication Arts; I will prepare an undergraduate survey course on animation that will cover the development of technology and techniques of animation, its evolution as an art form, and the historical and industrial conditions of its production.
Lynn Keller, English; To retain in environmental literacy criticism, I will I read widely in ecocritical theory; to identify works of literature to teach to undergraduate and graduate students in conjunction with that theory, and to select the books of poetry for focus in the scholarly study. I intend to write on experimental ecopoetics.
Caroline Levine, English; To build expertise in the rapidly emerging field of transatlantic studies in order to develop two new courses, foster a rethinking of the English Department’s curriculum, and contribute to scholarly and collegial exchange.
Yongming Zhou, Anthropology; To obtain a systematic training in environmental studies to help complete a cross-disciplinary book on “History of Road Construction in Chinese East Himalayas,” and to enable me to serve as a competent leader of the cross-campus and multi-disciplinary research circle “Biocultural Diversity and Socio-Ecological Resilience.”