FRAP Awards FRAP Awards Fall 2011

The following faculty members received funding awards in fall 2011 through the College’s Faculty Research Award Program (FRAP), which supports the research activities of all regular full- and part-time tenured and tenure-track Amherst College faculty members. Since 2000, FRAP has been endowed by the H. Axel Schupf ’57 Fund for Intellectual Life.

SMALL GRANT AWARDS
Small grants are for $6,000 or less.

Professor Tariq Jaffer
Department of Religion
Title: Al-Razi (d. 1210) and the Consolidation of Islamic Thought

Professor Jaffer's research project focuses on Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1210), a towering Muslim intellectual whose writings greatly influenced the post-classical tradition in Islam (ca. 1200-1900). Razi was the first Muslim intellectual to use the rich heritage of Hellenistic and classical Islamic philosophy to interpret the Qur'an. In his research, Professor Jaffer charts the complex process through which Razi integrated philosophical ideas into the genre of Qur'anic exegesis. He also explains how Razi harmonized Qur'anic ideas and philosophical wisdom to forge an original worldview in medieval Islam.  During Spring 2012 Professor Jaffer undertook research at the New York Public Library, where he translated, analyzed, and elaborated upon Razi's Arabic works of theology, philosophy, and Qur'an commentary. His manuscript on Razi is a product of this research.

Professors Austin Sarat, Tom Dumm, and Martha Umphrey
Departments of Political Science and Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought
Title: Imagining Legality in Popular Culture

This workshop will bring to Amherst six scholars to discuss and analyze the current state of research on law and popular culture, share examples of their own work in this area, and help Professors Sarat, Dumm, and Umphrey chart a direction for their own work. This workshop begins with the simple premise that law today exists in a world of images whose power is not located primarily in their representation of something exterior to themselves, but instead is found in the image itself. On television and film, images of law are ubiquitous. As the critic Samuel Weber observes, at the start of the twenty-first century “the `world’ itself has become a `picture’ whose ultimate function is to establish and confirm the centrality of man as the being capable of depiction.” This age of the world as picture demands that we take seriously the possibility that the proliferation of law in film, on television, and in mass market publications has altered/expanded the sphere of legal life itself. “Where else, “ Richard Sherwin asks, “can one go but the screen? It is where people look these days for reality...Turning our attention to the recurring images and scenarios that millions of people see daily projected on TV and silver screens across the nation...is no idle diversion.” Today we have law on the books, law in action, now perhaps, law in the image. The organizers’ workshop is designed to explore this third domain of legal life.

Professor Jason Robinson
Department of Music
Title: Tiresian Symmetry

“Tiresian Symmetry” is a new seven-movement composition and recording for nine piece creative music ensemble that features prominent figures in New York’s creative jazz community, including bassist Drew Gress, guitarist Liberty Ellman, percussionists George Schuller and Ches Smith, tuba players Marcus Rojas and Bill Lowe, and reed players JD Parran, Marty Ehrlich, and Assistant Professor Jason Robinson.  Recorded in February 2012 in Brooklyn, New York, the piece articulates various numerical relationships between values of two and seven and theorizes porous boundaries between reality and myth, pathos and ethos, balance and unbalance, composition and improvisation.

LARGE GRANT AWARDS

Large grants are for more than $6,000 and up to 30,000.

Professor Luca Grillo
Department of Classics
Title: Conference: Caesar: Writer, Speaker, Linguist - Amherst College, September 2012

Professor Grillo (Classics) will use this FRAP grant to organize a conference on “Caesar: Writer, Speaker and Linguist” (September 13-16, 2012, Amherst College). The conference will bring together the contributors to The Cambridge Companion to Caesar, which he is co-editing with Professor Christopher Krebs (Stanford University, Classics). Contributors, coming from seven different countries, have been invited to present their theses, circulating ideas and engaging both the general public and each other’s research. In accordance with the aim of the prestigious Cambridge series, the conference has as its goal simultaneously to advance the research on Caesar and to make it available to a broader public. Specifically, Professors Grillo and Krebs want to further and spread the appreciation of Caesar as a versatile intellectual, by taking a multi-disciplinary approach—narratological, rhetorical, linguistic, and historical—to his oeuvre. In fact, Caesar, the general and politician, still fascinates the common public and scholars alike, as he has for generations. But contemporaries also celebrated him as a leading intellectual, whom we can still grasp in the fragments of his orations, linguistic treatises, and polemic pamphlets, letters to friends and the senate, and, of course, his famous Commentaries (on the Gallic War as well as the Civil War). This Caesar has most recently started to enjoy a much-deserved comeback; but much more work remains to be done.

Professor Susan Niditch
Department of Religion
Title: Companion to Ancient Israel: Research Assistant

This grant has allowed Susan Niditch, a scholar of ancient and early Judaism, to hire a graduate student in the field of biblical studies to assist in the preparation of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Ancient Israel, a volume for which she is serving as editor and contributor.  This exciting volume is an anthology of thirty essays by a distinguished list of international scholars. Contributors are each preparing a 9,000 word chapter on a particular area in the history and culture of ancient Israel, applying a diverse set of methodological approaches that allow us to examine and appreciate the settings, groups, and worldviews that frame, reflect, and animate the writings of the Hebrew Bible. The research assistant, a PhD candidate at Yale who is trained in all the necessary linguistic and analytical tools, will help Professor Niditch with a variety of logistics and details including copy-editing to suit Wiley-Blackwell’s guidelines, proof-reading, cross-referencing, preparation of bibliography, and, towards the end of the project, the preparation of indices.

Professor Paul Rockwell
Department of French
Title: The Promise of Laughter

Professor Teresa Shawcross
Department of History
Title: Cosmopolitan Networks in an Age of Revolution: Ruling the Mediterranean at the End of Empire, 1274-1348

Professor Shawcross’s project considers the consequences of the collapse of imperial regimes, focusing on the crisis the Byzantine Empire and the Holy Roman Empire faced as Mediterranean powers in the late Middle Ages.  Comparing these two empires, she will look at transregional contact and exchange in what are today Italy, France, Turkey, and Greece, highlighting the emergence of new ideologies and allegiances, and the formation of new governmental structures.  This was the age in which polities formed that might be described as the first nation-states.  She will also examine the spread of revolutionary activity and investigate the nature and efficacy of long-distance networks.  Above all, Professor Shawcross will trace the creation of a new cosmopolitan elite that was responsible for reshaping both the theory and the practice of government. The life and travels of a key representative of that elite, Theodore Palaeologus, also known as Theodore of Montferrat (b.1291/2-d.1338), will provide her with a way into the larger questions.  Palaeologus moved effortlessly between the eastern and western Mediterranean; his web of personal contacts stretched even further afield. Her work identifies the particularities of each political milieu in which Palaeologus was active, while at the same time drawing attention to, and explaining the significance of, the exchanges of information and ideas that occurred across these milieux.  The project has two phases: an edition followed by a monograph. The grant from the Faculty Award Program will fund a series of essential research trips to consult manuscript and archival collections in Europe.  

Professor Robert Sweeney
Department of Art and the History of Art
Title: Gesture and Animation in the Boston Landscape

This is a subject that Professor Sweeney has painted over the last forty years, so there is much embedded meaning for him in areas of the city that have not significantly changed. This in turn dramatically highlights for him the artistic potential of painterly motifs created by the post “Big Dig” elements of the city. Since returning from his recent painting campaign in Tuscany, Professor Sweeney has developed a much stronger interest in the gesture of the landscape and the need to push this aspect to the forefront of the painting. This new direction in his work will be richly supported by the Boston landscape—with its odd clusters of buildings presenting bizarre shapes, its spiraling overlapping planes that rise and fall on steep hills, and its industrial formations and warehouses crowding the waterfront. The sense of gesture and animation here are palpable to him, and he will explore it in a series of paintings worked from life over the four seasons. 

Professor Joel Upton
Department of Art and the History of Art
Title: Opening the Classroom

Professor Upton’s FRAP project has three goals: To open his classroom literally to a wider audience by publishing two illustrated manuscripts based on forty years of teaching at Amherst College; to open the academic classroom generally by challenging the conventional notion that the artist is a special kind of person with the conviction that each of us is, or ought to be, a special kind of artist; to open a way toward a sacral classroom in which an integrated, non-ecclesiastical spirituality would animate human imagination of all kinds in the deliberate act of contemplative reconciliation of contradictory realities. The first manuscript, based on a collaborative First-Year Seminar taught with Professor Arthur Zajonc is tentatively titled, Via Amor: Entering the Threshold of Love by Embracing Erôs and Insight. The second manuscript, “Peace: A Contemplative Guide to the Art of Beholding,”  draws directly on classroom presentations developed and refined during Professor Upton’s teaching life at Amherst (e.g., “Art and Architecture of Europe: 300-1500 C.E.,” “The Monastic Challenge,” “Dutch and Flemish Painting: 1400-1700 C.E.,” “Constructing Space in Japan”). This manuscript will extend the methodological foundation of the first manuscript in a series of directed occasions of artistic contemplation, centered on the accomplishments of Netherlandish painters from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century: Jan van Eyck to Rembrandt van Rijn. The organizing principle of both of these manuscripts is based in Professor Upton’s teaching experience. Although one might have thought that art and contemplative beholding would have been the most natural of partners, the contemporary discipline of art history has moved in the direction of increasingly objectified observation, analysis and interpretation, including ever expanding informational coverage, critical theory and the idea of the work of art as a social, political and economic construct. The ancient tradition of slow, deliberate disciplined contemplation, comparable, as one example, to monastic lectio divina, has been neglected and even discouraged by many museums and college curricula. As an alternative, Professor Upton’s teaching and his FRAP project aim to reaffirm, define and extend the value of artistic contemplation generally as a genuine basis of knowing and being. In short, the immediate purpose of this project is to re-imagine the animating art of works of art. Realization of the contemplative artistic idea and practice of intimated reconciliation of contradictory realities (i.e., the art of beholding) offers broad potential for social, political, economic and environmental understanding and action as a particular form of a more general aspiration to truth and reconciliation. Specifically, this active art of beholding might replace “killing as a form of our wandering mourning” (Rilke) with the conceptual, emotional and behavioral equivalent of the poet’s definition of a love, “that consists in this, that two solitudes protect, border and salute each other” (Rilke). This “more human love” (Rilke), grounded in the identical ontological condition that results in Rilke’s “killing” (“wandering mourning”), assumes an unexpected efficacy, not as a softer, weaker version of a singular epistemology, doomed to failure, but as an equally muscular alternative way of knowing and being. If, as Parker Palmer suggests, epistemology is ethics, then an “epistemology of love” (Zajonc) might also diminish acts of “killing” in other forms: selfish neglect, bias, prejudice and personal denigration. Such an art of beholding might even open the closed boundaries of rational duality (e.g., the so-called law of the excluded middle) with a love ignited within the very thrall of contradiction embodied in works of art. The overarching goal of this project is to envision an embodied art that would open wide the space of a shuttered classroom to release the healing radiance of higher education grounded in moral imagination.

Professor Sandra Burkett
Department of Chemistry
Title: Tailorable, Modular Routes to Polymer Brush–Clay Nanocomposites

Hybrid materials that combine inorganic (mineral) and organic (carbon-based) components at the smallest of length scales are appealing because of the potential for combining the unique properties of the different constituents, such as the hardness or magnetic properties of minerals and the flexible or moldable character of polymers.  In biogenic minerals such as bones, teeth, and shells, integration of organic macromolecules (proteins) in very low concentrations imparts remarkable enhancements in mechanical properties compared to the analogous non‑biogenic minerals, calcium phosphate and calcium carbonate (limestone or chalk).  In synthetic materials, addition of a few weight percent of clay can enhance the mechanical strength, thermal stability, and barrier properties of a polymer if the individual layers of the clay, which are only a few atoms thick and thus nanometer scale, are well dispersed in the polymer matrix.  Professor Burkett’s research develops a novel route to polymer–clay nanocomposites that uses synthetic magnesium aminopropylsilicate, zirconium hydrogen phosphate, and magnesium-aluminum layered double hydroxide clays as substrates for the controlled growth of polymer “brush” structures.  The modular approach accommodates a variety of initiator motifs that permit the synthesis of different types of polymer “bristles” of controlled length and packing density.  The resulting nanocomposites are of interest for their unique materials properties and as model systems for elucidating fundamental features of polymer–clay nanocomposite structure and polymer chain dynamics.  Nanocomposites of this type may find applications as lightweight, high-performance, flame-resistant materials in the airline industry or as components of medical implants and drug delivery systems in the biomedical field.