Bowdoin College Faculty Members Receive Prestigious Fellowships and Grants

Strategic Insights -

Bowdoin College, a prominent institution in Maine, has garnered international recognition as several of its esteemed faculty members have been awarded esteemed fellowships and grants. This recognition highlights the college's commitment to academic excellence and innovative research. The recipients of these honors will engage in groundbreaking projects, expanding our understanding of various disciplines, from politics and literature to physics and biology.

Key Takeaways:

  • Barbara Elias, Professor of Government, has been chosen by the Carnegie Foundation for a nationwide project to explore polarization, focusing on the impact of foreign military occupations on domestic politics.
  • Elias's research, "The Unexpected Home Front: Roots of Domestic Radicalization in US Counterinsurgency Wars," examines the effects of foreign counterinsurgency operations on domestic political radicalization in the US and other democratic nations.
  • Jordan Kisner, Assistant Professor of English, has earned a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellowship to work on a book-length essay about Shakerism, one of the longest-running utopian experiments in America.
  • Kisner's project will explore the Shaker community's archival material, providing a unique insight into this fascinating aspect of American history.
  • Belinda Kong, Professor of Asian Studies and English, has received a Mellon Fellowship from the Huntington Library in California to further explore her project on Asian diaspora during a one-month residency.
  • Kong's research will focus on early Chinese America and the Pacific Rim, using "alternative literacies" to explore the "multisensory dimensions" of immigrant lives.
  • Fe McBride, Assistant Professor of Physics, has been awarded a grant from NASA for her project Swift Cycle 21: X-ray Signatures of Neutrino Emitters, which aims to understand more about cosmic rays and neutrinos.
  • McBride's research involves observing neutrinos, which could help us learn more about the origins of cosmic rays.
  • Mary Rogalski, Assistant Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies, has received a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation for her project Adapting to Life with a Dash of Salt: Eco-Evolutionary Consequences of Freshwater Salinization.
  • Rogalski's research studies how changing salt levels affect lake food webs, focusing on tiny freshwater crustaceans called Daphnia.
  • Birgit Tautz, German literary and cultural scholar, has been awarded a Re-Invitation Grant from the Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers.
  • Tautz's project explores the linguistic and cultural legacy of great European literary works of the eighteenth century and beyond.

Statistics:

  • $18 million: the three-year, nationwide initiative to support interdisciplinary research into the causes of political polarization and ways to mitigate it.
  • 20: the number of researchers honored with an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship earlier this year.
  • 26: the total number of researchers, including Barbara Elias, honored with an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.
  • 100,000: the estimated number of Chinese immigrants who came to the US during the period of study in Belinda Kong's project.
  • 1880s: the time when the Chinese Exclusion era began, severely limiting the rights of Chinese workers in the US for six decades.

Sources:

  • Carnegie Foundation
  • New York Public Library Cullman Center
  • Huntington Library in California
  • NASA
  • National Science Foundation
  • Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers
  • The New York Times Magazine
  • The Atlantic
  • Paris Review Daily
  • Pushcart Prize
  • National Magazine Award
  • Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
  • Andrew Carnegie Fellowship
  • Humboldt Foundation