Humanities Research Innovation Fund

The Humanities Research Center and Dean of Humanities are pleased to award Humanities Research Innovation Fund grants to four Rice faculty engaged in ambitious interdisciplinary and collaborative research projects. The Fund provides seed grants of up to $25,000 for projects that develop innovative paradigms for conducting humanities research or ask innovative questions within existing paradigms. The Fund aims to support research projects that might lead to larger endeavors, external funding opportunities, or unusually innovative collaborations.

2012-13 Fund Recipients

Mobile Arts Space

The art world is defined by real estate. By remodeling a shipping container into an exhibition space, this project challenges the located-ness of the average art gallery. Traveling to parts of the city under-served by artistic institutions and programs, the mobile arts space offers to expose a wide-ranging audience to contemporary art and artistic methods. The nature of these artworks will be dictated by the specific locations and through dialogue with each location’s residents.

Faculty: Christopher Sperandio, assistant professor of art, department of visual and dramatic Arts

El Taller

As a workshop that supports advanced research in the interdisciplinary field of Chcana/o studies, El Taller links scholars across universities through a range of conversations, including discussions on modernism, global labor migrations, indigeneity, environmentalism, mestijaze, and Mexican American women in the military. Graduate students and faculty gather to critique and edit works for publication and discuss personal and professional questions of racism and sexism.  

 Faculty: José Aranda, associate professor of English

Hermeneutics of Alterity and the Study Abroad Experience

In collaboration with the Center for the Study of Languages, the HRC will be funding summer courses in intensive language and technology training for students studying abroad in the summer of 2012. These courses will nurture intercultural competence and the skills of global citizenry. Students will be required to participate in a technology project under the supervision of a virtual Rice faculty member. Using social media, students will discuss readings and reflect upon the practical and theoretical aspects of their study abroad experience.  

 Faculty: Wendy Freeman, director for the Center of the Study of Languages

 Medical Futures Lab Symposium

The Humanities Research Innovation Fund will be supporting the 2012 Medical Futures Lab symposium. The Medical Futures Lab is a new digital medical humanities collaboration between Rice, the University of Texas Health Science Center, and Baylor College of Medicine and is supported by a Rice Faculty Initiatives Fund. The Lab will offer pedagogical training, hands-on critical thinking and design, publication, and dissemination online. The purpose of the Lab is to pioneer innovative approaches and methods for medical education that can keep pace with the accelerating information technologies driving the mobile, social, personalized and global health practices of our contemporary knowledge economy.

Faculty: Kirsten Ostherr, associate professor of English 

The New and Old Materialisms Across the Disciplines

Defined around the primacy of matter and its properties and actions, the New Materialism challenges long-held assumptions about the nature of the stuff of the universe. The New Materialism calls for interdisciplinary methods that approach not only philosophical questions, but also issues that dominate the natural sciences and contemporary political and cultural controversies. In 2012-13, the Humanities Research Innovation Fund will support a series of speakers that will lead toward further development of the project.

Faculty: Sarah Ellenzweig, associate professor of English; John Zammito, John Antony Weir professor of history

Houston Urban English Survey

This project involves the collection, archiving, and analysis of predominantly conversational data from various communities in Houston. In collaboration with students from the University of Houston, Rice fieldworkers will collect and archive conversational data on digital recording media. Faculty and students will use this data base to analyze language variation in Houston from a qualitative and quantitative perspective to provide crucial information about how language influences identity within and among different social groups.

Faculty: Nancy Niedzielski, associate professor of linguistics

Digitalization in the Humanities

Collaborating with scholars at Oxford University, Rice will hold an interdisciplinary workshop to provide baseline instruction for scholars at various stages of familiarity with digitalization. The purpose of the workshop will be to further develop research skills and facility with innovative software tools and nurture better understanding of the field overall. This workshop offers an opportunity for further instruction in digital methodologies and provides opportunities to build inventive collaborations between digitalization and humanistic research.

Faculty: Anne Chao, lecturer, department of history

Building Creative Minds

Focused on inspiring creativity and innovation, this project seeks to develop a “Rice Creativity Curriculum” that takes a radically new approach in which students wills study a unified model of creativity and apply it broadly to multiple art forms. This project will focus on developing creativity within young children in the hopes of shifting the educational models focused on standardized testing rather than the development of creativity, inventiveness, and flexibility, and self-expression. The curriculum will build on emerging theories of creativity to infuse other academic subjects with the same imaginative impulse.

Faculty: Anthony Brandt, associate professor of composition and theory; Karen Capo, director, School Literacy and Culture Project; Linda McNeil, professor of education

  Click here to view past recipients of the Humanities Research Innovation Fund