Olivia DrakeWesleyan University Press received a grant of $35,000 from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving on Nov. 6, 2012. The grant will support the publication of up to seven books, published either as part of the 2013 Driftless Connecticut Series or selected books outside the series. The grant was made possible through the generosity of the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation.
The Center for the Arts received a grant for $25,000 from the Department of Economic and Community Development. on Jan. 17. The award will support the Middletown Remix project and a festival in Middletown's North End on May 11. The Department of Economic and Community Development, Connecticut Office of the Arts, also receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
Wesleyan University Press received a grant for $2,500 on Dec. 14 from the J.M. Kaplan Fund. The award will support of Jelle Zeilinga de Boer's forthcoming book New Haven's Sentinels: the Art and Science of East Rock and West Rock. de Boer is Harold T. Stearns Professor of Earth Science, Emeritus at Wesleyan.
The Center for the Arts received a grant for $6,000 from the Arts Council of Greater New Haven on Dec. 18, 2012. The award will support a symposium titled "Innovations: Intersections of Art and Science" on Feb. 28 and March 1. The symposium will bring teams of artists and scientists together to share approaches, skills and outcomes of their research at the intersection of art and science. For more information, open the graphic on this page, or see this link.
Leah Wright, assistant professor of history, assistant professor of African American studies, received a 2012 Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The grant, worth $31,500, will support her her current book project, tentatively titled, The Loneliness of the Black Conservative: Pragmatic Politics & The Pursuit of Power. The 2012 Career Enhancement Fellowship program seeks to increase the presence of minority junior faculty (African Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, and Native Americans and Native Alaskans), and other junior faculty members committed to eradicating racial…
Jacob Herman, a graduate student in biology, received a grant worth $807 from the Sigma Xi Committee on Grants-in-Aid of Research in January 2013. The award will go toward lab supplies. Herman is investigating DNA methylation as a possible mechanism for adaptive trans-generational effects of drought on plant offspring development. His advisor is Sonia Sultan, professor of biology, professor of environmental studies. The Sigma Xi Grant-in-Aid of Research program has a highly competitive application process and only 20 percent of applicants receive any level of funding.
Wesleyan's Program for Student College Success received a $5,000 grant from the Liberty Bank Foundation on Dec. 19. The award will support the program through Nov. 1, 2013. Wesleyan’s Program for College Success is a comprehensive program that supports first-generation, low-income and underrepresented students as they move through high school and into college. The program serves 100 high school students (25 in each class), helping them to make a successful transition to college. Led by a director and operated by college students and recent graduates, the program consists of a four-week summer session and 40 weeks of programming throughout the…
Wesleyan University Press received a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts on Nov. 27 to support the Wesleyan University Press Poetry Program in 2013-14. Works by such poets as Kazim Ali, Rae Armantrout, Heather Christie, Brenda Coultas, Annie Finch, Peter Gizzi, Brenda Hillman, and Yusef Komunyakaa will be published and promoted. The Press will promote the books through organized reading tours for each author and new digital initiatives including custom e-book and print-on-demand anthologies and free online teaching guides.
Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock, assistant professor of history, assistant professor of Russian and Eastern European studies, received a $30,000 grant from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) to support her research on "Soviet Scientific Atheism and Socialist Rituals" through Aug. 31, 2014.
Scott Holmes, associate professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, received a grant worth $374,150 from the National Institutes of Health. The grant will support a study on "Functional interaction of histone H1 with the core nucleosome" until 2015. Several Wesleyan undergraduates conducted experiments crucial for developing this grant proposal, including Samantha Schilit '10, MA '11, who is currently in her first year as a Ph.D. candidate at the Harvard School of Medicine. Histone proteins organize DNA into its basic organizational unit, the chromosome, and have a fundamental influence on the function of DNA. The four core histones assemble into the…
Wesleyan received a $10,000 grant from The Brown Foundation for the Wesleyan Fund for the Cardinal Scholarship and another $10,000 for the Women’s Ice Hockey Program in 2012-13.
Francis Starr, associate professor of physics, received a $100,000 grant from the American Chemical Petroleum Fund for his work examining the properties of extremely thin polymer films. These systems have important applications ranging from nano-electronics to artificial tissues. The work will be supported through August 2014.