GEOGRAPHY, PHILOSOPHY, ROMANCE LANGUAGES - Three CAS faculty members—Mark Carey, Diana Garvin, and Colin Koopman—were awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
CINEMA STUDIES - Assistant Professor Masami Kawai gained insight into the importance of story last spring at the Sundance Institute in Utah. She was among those selected for a two-week workshop during which—under the eye of talents such as actor Ed Harris, a four-time Academy Award nominee—filmmakers rehearsed, shot, and edited scenes from working projects.
LINGUISTICS - Over the past 50 years, hip hop has grown from a popular music genre to a cultural revolution that spans the globe, affecting everything from fashion to language. Linguistics Professor Rachel Weissler explores the profound influence of hip hop on the English language.
ENGLISH - English Associate Professor Courtney Thorsson's new book, The Sisterhood, explores a group of influential Black women writers and thinkers—including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Margo Jefferson—who met during the late '70s to talk about writing, culture and liberation.
EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES, ASIAN STUDIES - Fulbright Scholar and CAS Professor Alisa Freedman is chronicling the rise of women’s scholarship during a five-month trip to Vietnam, where she's helping women professors find their footing in the academic publishing world.
LINGUISTICS - The first volume-length work dedicated to awakening languages is now available for open access in the journal Living Languages Lenguas Vivas Línguas Vivas. The volume includes case studies about Kusunda in Nepal, African contexts, Coatec Zapotec in Mexico, and Brorán in Costa Rica, the last two written in Spanish, along with chapters on the US and Australia.
ENGLISH - Four of the seven Humanities Undergraduate Research Fellowship (HURF) recipients during the 2023 program were English majors. A HURF fellow is awarded a $2,500 stipend to explore their scholarly interests over 16 weeks, beginning in January, and receives support from a faculty advisor.
PHILOSOPHY - Barbara Muraca, a philosophy associate professor, participated in United Nations-organized research focused on “relational values” between humans and nature. She hopes to emphasize the importance of viewing humans and nature as connected rather than separate entities. Muraca and a team of academics appear as authors in an article published in the August 2023 issue of Nature.
ENGLISH - In The Sisterhood: How A Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture, Courtney Thorsson, an associate professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, tells the story of a group of Black feminist writers and thinkers in a critically acclaimed book that has been called a model for literary histories.
NORTHWEST INDIAN LANGUAGE INSTITUTE - The Northwest Indian Language Institute, a part of the College of Arts and Sciences, received more than $1.7 million in funding from the US Department of Education to establish a resource center aimed at the revitalization of Indigenous languages.