Grants in Action

Celebrating Scholarship

Vassar Grants in Action highlights and celebrates the grant funding, principal investigators, and project leadership that enrich faculty research and scholarship, institutional programs and priorities, and the student experience at Vassar.

Photo portrait collage of Robert DeMaria and Rob Brown.

Robert DeMaria Jr. and Robert D. Brown co-edit The Complete Poems of Samuel Johnson

Robert DeMaria Jr., Professor of English on the Henry Noble MacCracken Chair, and Robert D. Brown, Professor Emeritus of Greek and Roman Studies, are co-editors of The Complete Poems of Samuel Johnson, published in June 2024 by Routledge for the Longman Annotated English Poets series.

Kirsten Menking, Professor of Earth Science, Was Elected as a Geological Society of America Fellow

Kirsten Menking, Professor of Earth Science on the Althea Ward Clark Chair and Chair of Earth Science and Geography, was elected as a Fellow of the Geological Society of America (GSA) in recognition of her distinguished contributions to the field.

Josh de Leeuw Receives NSF Grant to Create “An Open-Source Ecosystem for Behavioral Experiments”

Josh de Leeuw, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, received a grant from the National Science Foundation, together with his collaborators from MIT, MGH IHP, and Yale University, for their project entitled “POSE: Phase II: An Open-Source Ecosystem for Behavioral Experiments.” The funded project will create an open-source ecosystem for behavioral experiments centered around jsPsych, an established and highly-used tool for behavioral research.

Jamie Kelly Receives an Award from the Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab

Jamie Kelly, Associate Professor Philosophy, and Kafui Attoh (CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies) have received an award for “Generative AI and the Social Value of Artifacts: The Case for Saving Photo Morgues” from the Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab.

Pictured: Haoming Liu - Man with a suit and glasses standing outside with grass and trees in the background.

Haoming Lui has a Spring 2024 Fellowship from the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Peking University

Haoming Liu, Professor of Chinese and Japanese, is spending the Spring 2024 Semester as a visiting professor in the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS) at Peking University on a fellowship awarded by the University and is working on his study and translation of Friedrich Hölderlin’s odes.

Mootacem Mhiri wearing a light blue collared shirt and gray jacket against a gray background.

Vassar Selected to Host Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) in Arabic

Thanks to the efforts of Professor Mootacem Mhiri, Senior Lecturer in Arabic, Vassar has once again been selected to host a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) in Arabic. Professor Mhiri will serve as the Academic Advisor of the FLTA. The presence of an Arabic language FLTA will continue to provide critical instructional support as well as cultural exposure to Vassar students.

Lydia Murdoch Awarded an NEH Summer Research Stipend for Archival Research in London

Professor of History Lydia Murdoch is awarded an NEH Fellowship to undertake research for her book project, Children as Medical Subjects and the Early-Nineteenth-Century Global Spread of the First Smallpox Vaccines, which investigates the particular contributions of children to early nineteenth-century vaccination through microhistories of the London Foundling Hospital and East India Company programs in South Asia.

April M. Beisaw, Professor of Anthropology, Selected for a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to Austria

April M. Beisaw, Professor of Anthropology, was selected for a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to Austria, where she will serve as the Fulbright-Natural History Museum Vienna Visiting Researcher in academic year 2024–25. While in Vienna, April will be investigating the wild-domestic divide in species of rabbits and pigs and how certain species resist complete domestication while others become irreversibly changed by human interaction.

Seungsook Moon is Author of Civic Activism in South Korea: The Intertwining of Democracy and Neoliberalism

In Civic Activism in South Korea: The Intertwining of Democracy and Neoliberalism (Columbia University Press), Professor of Sociology Seungsook Moon offers new ways to understand the intricate relationship between democracy and neoliberalism as modes of ruling.