Seed Grants
The IHR seed grant program is designed to provide support for projects that advance the transdisciplinary, collaborative, and issue-focused mission of the Institute and are sufficiently developed to be competitive for national grants. Seed grant funds are available for transdisciplinary projects for junior and senior humanities faculty members and/or collaborative teams. Funds may be requested for the purpose of conducting research and developing proposals for submission to external funding agencies. It is expected that with a year of support for planning and research, faculty will enhance the competitive nature of their grant proposals. The IHR will support projects that best address the mission of the IHR and that have strong prospects of receiving external funding.
Embodied Identity: Plants, Social Meaning, and Belief Systems Among the Chiribaya
Embodied Identity will pioneer transdisciplinary archaeological research linking the humanities with the social, biological, and physical sciences. Transdisciplinary archaeological research typically bridges to the sciences rather than engaging humanities scholarship as the core driver, as we propose here.
Seeing Beyond the Seemingly Omnipotent State: Examining the Imperial Russian Self through the Lens of Class, Gender, Nationality
This project will for the first time publish in a single collection autobiographies written by individuals from different nationalities, social estate groups, and sexes who lived in Imperial Russia. To avoid any bias associated with texts previously chosen for publication under varied regimes, the volume will include many autobiographies never published before.
Chicana/o Figurative Visual Art in a Unique Relationship to Mainstream American, Mexican, and Mexican-American Themes & Images
The seed grant team will conduct pioneering research on important themes of Mexican, mainstream American and the earlier Mexican-American culture in order to show how Chicana/o art distinguishes itself from the closely connected three aforementioned cultures. The project makes use of a substantive information base to analyze hundreds of works of art.
Whole Local Slow: Exploration of the Complex Relationships between Food Systems, Bodies, Economies, Ecologies, Cultures
Since the turn of the 20th century, the industrial economies of the West have tried to radically simplify what were previously complex food systems in the name of efficiency and plenty. While the assembly line model has enabled far more growth and choice than was possible in traditional systems, we are discovering that the loss of that complexity has disastrous results for the health of our bodies, our environment and our culture.
Girl Talk: An Exploration of Gender, Sexuality, and the Media
This study will utilize a critical ethnographic approach to explore the social construction of adolescent girls’ sexualities by adults in the youth residential services system. A critical component of this proposal is the collection of historical and contemporary media resources and material that would be used as a touchstone for eliciting responses from staff members participating in our focused group discussions and internet forum.