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), 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 provides a collaborative research allowance 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.

 2011-12 Collaborative Research Fellows

	Jeffrey Fleisher, Assistant Professor of Anthropology Objects and Spaces Experienced: The Digital Reconstruction of Songo Mnara, Tanzania  Fleisher's project focuses on the digital reconstruction of Songo Mnara, a medieval Swahili town on the southern Tanzanian coast. An interactive, three-dimensional digital model of this settlement—based on laser scans of standing architecture, archival photographs, and archaeological data—will allow, for the first time, a way to understand how the ancient Swahili experienced and used their town spaces. The collaboration involves archaeologists from the University of York (UK), and specialists in digital technologies and photogrammetry/geomatics from the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University (UK) and the University of Cape Town (South Africa).
	Anthony Pinn, Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies The Oxford Handbook of African American Theology Pinn will finish work on a co-edited volume titled "The Oxford Handbook of African American Theology." Upon completion, it will be the most comprehensive examination of African American theology available. In this way, it sets the standard for discussions of theological discourse in African American religious studies.
	Diane Wolfthal, David and Caroline Minter Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Art History Corpus of Fifteenth-Century Painting in the Southern Netherlands and the Principality of Liège: Early Netherlandish Paintings in Los Angeles Wolfthal will conduct research with Catherine Metzger, a senior conservator at the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., and Don H. Johnson, the J.S. Abercrombie Professor Emeritus of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Rice University. This volume will be published by the Centre d’étude de la peinture du quinzième siècle dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux et la principauté de Liège in Brussels. In short, this project, which involves collaborations among an American art historian, conservator, engineer, and Belgian art historians, is an interdisciplinary venture that will produce new knowledge by engaging in cutting-edge research at the intersection of science and the humanities.

 2012-13 Collaborative Research Fellows

Masayoshi Shibatani, Deedee McMurtry Professor of Humanities and Professor of Linguistics Theoretical Explorations of Japanese Dialect Grammars Language endangerment is a major global issue with dire consequences of a massive and irrecoverable loss of unique cultural, historical, and ecological knowledge. In an attempt to arouse more interest in the study of minority languages and dialects on the verge of extinction, Professor Shibatani tries to bridge the long-standing gulf between field workers and theoretical linguists by demonstrating theoretical importance of studying dying languages and dialects. To this end, he undertakes theoretical explorations of Japanese dialect grammars in collaboration with the members of the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics in Tokyo, with which he will be affiliated as a Visiting Professor during the summer and the fall of 2012.

   Previous Collaborative Research Fellows