Humanities projects receive seed funding

Ten faculty projects have been selected to receive funding as part of a new initiative by the Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development (OVPRED) and the Humanities Institute (HI) to support research and creative activity in the humanities.

The OVPRED/HI Seed Money in the Arts and Humanities initiative provides awards for long-term projects, with the goal of generating applications for outside funding within two years. The projects selected for funding were those for which an infusion of seed money is expected to increase the chance they will be awarded a prestigious external fellowship.

“OVPRED and HI are both committed to promoting a culture of grant-writing in the arts and humanities,” says Erik R. Seeman, professor of history and director of the Humanities Institute.  “UB’s arts and humanities faculty have a great track record of winning extremely competitive national fellowships, but they need even more support to ensure that their projects have the best chance of being funded by external agencies.

“Humanities researchers and creative artists often need a relatively small amount of money to help convince granting agencies that their work is worthy of a prestigious fellowship,” Seeman adds, explaining that for artists this involves demonstrating “proof of concept” by getting a project started; for humanists, it often entails doing some archival research or fieldwork to provide concrete examples of the project’s larger conceptual claims.

The winning applicants will use their seed money to support early-stage research and creative activity in a variety of ways, he notes. “Several will travel to archival collections overseas and around the United States, others will perform beginning ethnographic work, and still others will pay for research assistance, such as translation, computer coding and transcription,” he says.

Awardees also will participate in HI’s annual External Grant Writing Workshop, in which a senior faculty member with a strong record of obtaining grants offers advice on writing outstanding fellowship applications and participants share their proposed grant applications for critique.

Faculty members receiving $5,000 awards in the first round of funding in the OVPRED/HI Seed Money in the Arts and Humanities initiative are:

• Susan Cahn, professor, Department of History: “Borderlines of Power: Women and Borderline Personality Disorder.”
• Laura Garofalo, associate professor, Department of Architecture: “The Seamless Seam: Enclosure as Ornament.”
• Walter Hakala, assistant professor, Department of English: “Words, Verses, and the World: Multilingual Vocabularies and Indo-Persianate Learning in South Asia.”
• David Herzberg, associate professor, Department of History: “The Other Drug War: Prescription Drug Abuse in American History.”
• Frederick Klaits, assistant professor, Department of Anthropology: “Respect and Responsibility: Blessings and Black Sexual Politics in Buffalo’s Charismatic Churches.”
• Miriam Paeslack, assistant professor, Arts Management Program: “Contemplating the Past through the Present: Italian Fascist Architecture in Artistic Discourse.”
• Deborah Reed-Danahay, professor, Department of Anthropology: “Being French in London: Social Space, the EU, and Privileged Migration.”
• Stephanie Rothenberg, associate professor, Department of Art: “Reversal of Fortune.”
• Jasmina Tumbas, assistant professor, Department of Art: “A Matter of Decision: Experimental Art in Hungary and Yugoslavia, 1968-1989.”
• Paul Vanouse, professor, Department of Art: “Labor.”

Details about the individual projects and the funding program are available on the Humanities Institute’s website.