Collaborative Research Fellowships for Rice Faculty
The Humanities Research Center awards up to three teaching-release fellowships per year to Rice faculty to foster collaborative research initiatives and provide them the time and resources to write grants for new intellectual endeavors, sponsored or co-sponsored by the HRC. Fellows may develop proposals for major grants (for example, to the Rockefeller Foundation or the Ford Foundation, among others), or may apply for institutional programs (such as the Mellon Foundation's Sawyer Seminars). Collaboration can occur between Rice faculty or between Rice faculty and other institutions. To offset costs associated with collaborative research, the HRC provies a collaborative research fund to each fellowship recipient. The HRC also provides in-house grant-writing support as appropriate.
The fellows participate in the intellectual life of the center by sharing research activities through active participation in a yearlong brown-bag series with other HRC Fellows.
The collaborative fellowship program furthers the HRC's mission of
fostering scholarly research and intellectual community in the
humanities broadly understood; facilitating scholarly work between
the School of Humanities and other areas of the university; and leading
institutional change through partnerships with foundation, other
centers, research institutions, and other universities. It coincides
with the HRC's goal of stimulating innovative collaborative initiatives
that have lasting impact on Rice University's intellectual life and that
bring Rice humanities to national attention.
2009-10 Fellows
Visit the HRC office to examine or borrow selected publications by these scholars.
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Melinda Fagan, Fall 2009
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Philosophy of Stem Cell Biology
Fagan will collaborate with the Stanford University School of Medicine's Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine Institute in order to investigate philosophy of stem cell research. This collaboration focuses on three areas: the nature of stem cells, cancer stem cell theory, and philosophical accounts of biological development. Her work aims to connect central theories and concepts of stem cell biology to core issues in philosophy of biology, to the ultimate benefit of both fields, helping to integrate philosophical theories of biological development with theories of evolution, genetics, and molecular biology,
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Jeffrey J. Kripal, Spring 2010
Chair and J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religious Studies
Comparing Religions: A Textbook Initiation
Building on the groundwork laid by his 2008-09 Mellon Seminar “Comparison in Theory and Practice ,” and in collaboration with scholars and graduate students across the state of Texas, Kripal a next-generation textbook on comparative religion, in which he aims to foreground comparative practice itself, situating the religions themselves in the background to be discussed in historical relation to one other. The textbook adopts the tripartite structure of the initiation ritual: separation (creating a safe place for critical thinking), transition (a “liminal” state defined by paradox and ambiguity), and incorporation (settling into a tentative set of answers).
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Tatiana Schnur, Spring 2010
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Language and Neuroanatomical Change during Recovery from Stroke
After suffering a stroke, patients commonly experience difficulties in speech, termed aphasia, resulting from lesions in specific parts of the brain governing language. Tatiana Schnur will employ new imaging technologies – in collaboration with the Department of Neurology at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center-Houston – to examine the brains of aphasic speakers immediately after stroke and again one year later. She will administer a variety of language tests with these patients and expects not only to improve understanding of language recovery in stroke patients, but to identify the neuroanatomical basis for speech production and language processing and comprehension.
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2008-09 Fellow
Photograph by Tommy LaVergne |
Marcia Brennan , Spring 2009
Associate Professor of Art History
"The Arts of Transformation: Museums and the Medical Humanities." Brennan’s project promotes a collaborative partnership between Rice University’s Department of Art History, the Museum District, and the Texas Medical Center. Her work fosters integrative, transdisciplinary scholarship based on the conceptual intersections shared by these seemingly diverse communities, which span themes of embodiment, creativity, trauma, diagnosis, healing, reflection, and transformation. Brennan will organize the 2008-09 biennial Menil-Rice lecture series sponsored by the Department of Art History and the Menil Collection, featuring distinguished speakers on these same topics. See Rice News story (10/30/08) about the lecture series.
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2007-08 Fellows
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Alexander X. Byrd, Fall 2007
Assistant Professor of History
"Two Schools: Race and Society in the Urban South Since Brown." Byrd initiated a study of the consequences in the urban south over the past forty years of Brown v Board of Education. Focusing on Sharpstown and Yates High Schools, Byrd organized a multiyear research seminar open to students and faculty at Houston area universities and to community leaders. In its first year, the seminar examined the larger course of urban development and education in the post-war south and benefited from the counsel of a host of community leaders and nationally recognized researchers. In its second year, the Two Schools project will begin collecting oral histories concerning Yates and Sharpstown high schools and their respective neighborhoods from the early 1960s. These stories will form the foundation of a physical and digital archive documenting the institutional life of these schools and their surroundings.
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Robert E. Englebretson, Spring 2008
Assistant Professor of Linguistics
"Grammatical Resources for Interactional Practices: A Cross-Linguistic Survey of Subject Ellipsis and Expression in Conversation." In collaboration with Marja-Liisa Helasvuo (Department of Finnish, University of Turku, Finland), Englebretson will explore the relationship between language form and language function by means of a cross-linguistic investigation of subject expression and ellipsis as observed in corpora of naturally occurring conversational data from English, Finnish, and Colloquial Indonesian. His initiative brings together methodologies from Conversation Analysis and Discourse-Functional Linguistics. Two conversely-related questions inform the research: How do the grammatical resources of a particular language facilitate or constrain the options that speakers have for pursuing micro-level social actions in conversation? And, how do the micro-level social actions that speakers pursue in conversation in turn serve to shape and motivate the grammatical systems that have developed in particular languages?
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