Duke University Provost Peter Lange has awarded funding to 12 projects that represent a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship -- - from documenting policy issues surrounding Latino immigration, to computational analysis of handwriting, to understanding the links between the health of babies and mothers.
The Provost's Common Fund provides seed money on a competitive basis for innovative scholarly research and artistic activities that clearly cross the boundaries of departments, schools and centers and institutes. Thirty-five proposals were submitted for consideration for the 2008-09 academic year, the largest applicant pool on record.
The projects receiving this year's awards and participating faculty are:
-- The Duke University Program on History, Public Policy and Social Change. William H. Chafe (History), Robert Korstad (Public Policy, History);
-- Race, Genetics, and Health. William Darity, Jr. (Public Policy), Charmaine Royal (IGSP), Keith Whitfield (Psychology & Neuroscience);
-- Scenes of Secrecy: Interdisciplinary Inquiries on Suspicion, Intelligence, and Security. Elizabeth Anne Davis (Cultural Anthropology), Robin Kirk (Duke Center for Human Rights), Johanna McAuliffe (Theater Studies), Thomas Rankin (Art, Art History, and Visual Studies; Center for Documentary Studies);
-- Vision and Design: Bloomsbury Then and Now. Craufurd D.W. Goodwin (Economics), Kimerly Rorschach (Art, Art History, and Visual Studies; Nasher Museum of Art), Donna Zapf (Liberal Studies);
-- Understanding the Transformed and Transforming South: Perspectives on Race, Economics, Politics, and Public Policy. Kerry L. Haynie (Political Science), William H. Chafe (History);
-- Southern Africa's Place-on-the-Continent, Africa's Place-in-the-World (The Concilium on Southern Africa). Anne-Maria Makhulu(Cultural Anthropology), Paul Berliner (Music), Louise Meintjes (Music);
-- Maternal and Child Pairs Working Group. Marie Lynn Miranda (Environment and Earth Sciences), Sarah C. Armstrong (Pediatrics), Christina Gibson-Davis (Public Policy), Sherman James (Public Policy), Pamela Maxson (Children's Environmental Health Initiative), Jerome Reiter (Statistics), Geeta Swamy (Obstetrics & Gynecology), Kathryn Trotter (School of Nursing), Redford Williams (Psychiatry);
-- A Center for Theoretical and Mathematical Science at Duke. Berndt Mueller (Physics), Harold Baranger (Physics), Steven Cummer (Electrical & Computer Engineering), Stefano Curtarolo (Mechanical Engineering & Material Science), Gabriel Katul (Environment and Earth Sciences), Jonathan Mattingly (Mathematics), Fred Nijhout (Biology), Dalia Patino-Echeverri (Environment and Earth Sciences), Robert Wolpert (Statistics), Weitao Yang (Chemistry);
-- Immigration and the Documentary Lens. Tom Rankin (Art, Art History, & Visual Studies; Center for Documentary Studies), John Biewen (Center for Documentary Studies), Pedro Lasch (Art, Art History, & Visual Studies; Center for Documentary Studies), Claudia Milian (Romance Languages), Emilio Parrado (Sociology), Gunther Peck (History; Public Policy), Jose David Saldivar (English), Charles Thompson (Center for Documentary Studies), Tennessee Watson (Center for Documentary Studies), Jenny Snead Williams (Latino/a Studies);
-- Duke Center for Science Education. Rochelle D. Schwartz-Bloom (Pharmacology & Cancer Biology), Harris Cooper (Program in Education, Psychology & Neuroscience);
-- Manos Teatrales: An Experiment in Cyber-Paleography. Carlo Tomasi (Computer Science), Margaret Greer (Romance Languages);
-- Bioengineering Technologies and Therapies for Global Health. George Truskey (Biomedical Engineering), Robert Malkin (Biomedical Engineering), Michael Merson (Duke Global Health Institute)
The proposals can be viewed in their entirety at http://interdisciplinary.duke.edu/administration/funding/common_fund.php.