Faculty Research Awards Fall 2021
SMALL GRANT AWARDS
SMALL GRANT AWARDS ARE FOR $6,000 OR LESS.
Professor Jonathan Obert
Department of Political Science
Title: Aiming the Body Politic: The Economic Origins of American Gun Rights
Professor Obert's project involves procuring original archival materials at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, as well as other materials in service of a book project titled “Arming the Body Politic: The Economic Origins of American Gun Rights.”
Professor Eleonora Mattiacci
Department of Political Science
Title: Volatile States in International Politics
The grant will support Professor Mattiacci as she finalizes her first book, titled “Volatile States in International Politics,” which is under contract at Oxford University Press. Leveraging time series analysis, text analysis, and archival research, the book offers an in-depth account of why countries' treacherous foreign policies often have harmless origins, what this means for international politics, and what to do about it. In addition, Professor Mattiacci will travel to the Harvard University Library to conduct archival work for her second book. This book, tentatively titled “Nature Wars,” will explore when and why countries fighting wars opt for employing scorched-earth techniques aimed at destroying the environment where their enemies live.rofessor Katsaros’s book explores
Professor Karamatou Yacoubou Djima
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Professor Amy Coddington
Department of Music
Title: How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: A Book Workshop
Professor Coddington plans to invite three scholars to participate in a book workshop for her in-progress manuscript titled “How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Rap, Race, and Commercial Radio,” which is under contract with the University of California Press. The book examines how rap transitioned from a New York City-based Black and Latinx subculture into an integral part of the American mainstream in the 1980s and 1990s, by focusing with sustained critical attention on commercial radio’s influence on the genre’s sound and racial identity.
LARGE GRANT AWARDS
LARGE GRANT AWARDS ARE FOR MORE THAN $6,000 AND UP TO $30,000.
Professor Jen Manion
Department of History and Department of Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies
Title: Queer Resistance to Policing: A History
Professor Manion will research the history of LGBTQ resistance to policing from the American Revolution to the Transgender Revolution. The project will identify LGBTQ people, organizations, and networks that worked on issues of criminalization, police violence and harassment, and imprisonment throughout American history. Very little is known about the people who resisted harassment, arrest, violence, and imprisonment for transing gender and/or engaging in same-sex intimacies for nearly two hundred years, from 1776 to 1966. This project will offer a re-periodization of queer and trans resistance by shedding light on these lesser-known figures and moments. The post-1966 era of LGBTQ movement-building and resistance to policing has been the subject of important research. This project will focus explicitly on the rise and fall of police violence and incarceration as explicit issues of concern for LGBTQ organizations. In the face of mass incarceration of Black and Latinx Americans, the question of when and why these issues were dropped as visible LGBTQ movement priorities is an urgent one. How did this shift affect those LGBTQ people who were still routine targets of the carceral state throughout this era? In launching this new project, Professor Manion will travel to LGBTQ community archives all over the country to examine one-of-a-kind records focusing on those targeted by police, including Black and Latinx LGBTQ communities, transgender women, homeless youth, and those assigned female at birth who identify as LBTQ—all groups whose histories are woefully understudied.