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Associate Professor Research Initiative Archives

This grant program is designated for associate professors, who undertake a large share of teaching and committee work but rarely have resources for research and course development committed specifically to them. Faculty involved in this initiative devote Winter Quarter of the academic year to a research project that will benefit from expertise in another area. Each chooses a faculty counterpart — in any department, discipline, or school other than the applicant's own — with whom she or he would value regular conversation and guidance.

2008-2009
2007-2008
2006-2007
2005-2006
2004-2005
2003-2004
2002-2003

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2008-2009
Leah Ceccarelli (Communication)
The Frontier of Science Metaphor: The Rhetoric of Exploration and Exploitation in a Postcolonial Transnational Context

Ceccarelli examines the use of the “science is a frontier” metaphor in speeches, popular books, and op-ed essays by American scientists, and what happens when this familiar figure of speech encounters audiences from other nations, or purposes that conflict with its connotations, or ambiguities of public memory regarding America’s frontier history. Assisting Ceccarelli is Celia Lowe (Anthropology), who brings expertise in postcolonial and transnational science studies.

Madeline Dong (History, International Studies)
Stories from the Wilderness: Unofficial Histories of the Qing Dynasty

Dong’s project examines popular narratives of the history of the Qing and the significance of this genre in the creation of historical consciousness among the general population. Alys Weinbaum, (English), will provide her with direction in literary interpretation of text and with information about debates in contemporary theory and criticism.


Glennys Young (History, International Studies)
The World the Refugees Made: The Niños de la Guerra in the USSR and Beyond

Young is working on the first transnational study of the political, social, and cultural consequences of the evacuation, during the Spanish Civil War, of Spanish Republican children to the Soviet Union, their return to Spain (whether immediately after official permission was granted in 1956 or in the 1980s and beyond), and the participation of a few of them as advisors during Castro’s Cuban Revolution.  In consultation with Professor Tony Geist (Spanish & Portuguese Studies), she will acquire expertise in the literature about the Spanish emigration during and after the Spanish Civil War, and of how issues of Spanish identity were treated in twentieth-century Spanish literature.
2007-2008
Michelle Habell-Pállan
American Ethnic Studies, Women Studies

Beat Migration: Chicano Roots of Contemporary American Popular Music
Michelle Habell-Pallan Habell-Pállan will attempt to fill the gap in literature regarding the function of pop music narratives that exist in mainstream American pop culture by demonstrating the influence of Chicano communities through migration throughout the nation. Collaborating with Habell-Pállan is Associate Professor Shannon Dudley (Ethnomusicology), who brings his music background to help develop a new model of musical analysis for cultural studies scholars who approach music without a background in musical structure analysis.


Míċeál Vaughan
Comparative Literature, English

An Electronic Piers Plowman: Implementing an Edition of a Six-Hundred-Year-Old-Poem for Twenty-First Century Students
Miceal Vaughan Vaughan is working on an electronic “edition” of the influential fourteenth-century Middle English Piers Plowman which will bring the “underused” text into the twenty-first century. Vaughan will provide electronic resources complimenting printed classroom text that will lay the foundation for a student-oriented archive in the expanding digital environment which students inhabit. Collaborating with Vaughan is Associate Professor Terry Brooks (Information School), who brings expertise in the construction of textual data structures and effective delivery to modern users.

 

2006-2007

Ann Anagnost (Anthropology)
Embodiments of Value
Anagnost's project is to examine the changing relationship between conceptions of value and the physical body in China’s economic reforms (1990-present). With the assistance of Phillip Thurtle (CHID), she will examine a literature at the intersection of science studies and feminist theory exploring how new conceptions of life itself have become central to the emergent logics of capital accumulation in the global economy.

Katherine Beckett (Sociology)
Discourses of Banishment, States of Exception, and Spaces of Exclusion
Beckett’s project explores discourses of banishment as they relate to the reconstruction of urban public space in Seattle. In particular, she will explore how discourses surrounding the debate over Seattle’s parks exclusion law construct a public norm against a banished other, how they invoke assumptions about subjectivity that allow for the curtailing of liberal public access rights, and how those alienated from the resulting spaces of exclusion are understood given the ostensibly universal embrace of liberal civility. Beckett will be working with Katharyne Mitchell (Geography) on this research.

2005-2006

Gordana P. Crnković (Slavic Languages & Literatures), with Anthony Geist (Spanish & Portuguese)
"Something Strange and Valuable": The Spanish Civil War, Yugoslav Literature, and Visions of Socialism and Anti-Nationalism in the Former Yugoslavia
This project looks at the ways in which Yugoslav literature "read" and incorporated in its own production a vision of socialism originated in or related to the Spanish Civil War. It also explores how and why the broader Yugoslav-Spanish literary connection enforced the anti-nationalist tendencies of Yugoslav literature and culture and why Yugoslav writers returned to the topic of the Spanish Civil War. Anthony Geist, Professor and Chair of Spanish and Portuguese Studies and one of the foremost American experts on the Spanish Civil War, will be Crnković's faculty counterpart for this project.

Steven Herbert (Geography) with Gail Stygall (English)
Protest, Space, and Law: The Territorial Containment of Speech
Herbert's work will examine the jurisprudential history of key legal cases that address the spatial regulation of speech as a part of a larger project focused on the increased territorial containment of political protest. With the assistance of Gail Stygall, Associate Professor of English, he will read these cases as narratives of place, to ascertain the geographic imaginations in play in legal contests that seek to define whether and what kind of speech is allowable in particular spaces.

Lucy Jarosz (Geography), with Sandra Silverstein (English)
Defining Food Security in a Time of Insecurity
Jarosz's project examines the power of language in redefining world hunger as "food security" and "food insecurity" within the contexts of mainstream ideologies concerning global poverty and international development. She will be collaborating with Sandra Silberstein (Professor, English) who will assist her in bringing the lens of critical discourse analysis to bear upon how the strategic deployment of language in the service of particular visions of globalization, international development and poverty have specific political and economic implications and material consequences.

2004-2005

Kathie Friedman (Jackson School of International Studies), with Sarah Stein (History)
After Ethnic Cleansing: Bosnian Refugees and Transmission of Historical Memory
Friedman's project explores emerging forms of collective belonging and identifying among Bosnian refugees and their children through the interpretation of in-depth interviews. Sarah Stein, Assistant Professor of History, is assisting her in developing a greater understanding of historical memory, its mediations and transmission, and how the representation of cultural traumas or repressed memories of genocide may relate to the formation of Bosnian refugee identities in the United States.

Mark Patterson (English), with
Matthew Sparke (Geography)
From the Day Before the Day After Everyday
Patterson's book project conducts an archaeology of the "everyday" from two complementary perspectives. He first investigates the 19th-century construction of the everyday (the day before everyday): that is, the prototypical form of modernity that conceptually organizes our world in its accepted and repetitive forms, including the separation of production from consumption, the division of modern life into work and leisure, and the emergence of panoptical surveillance as the prevailing form of power. Matthew Sparke from Geography will be collaborating on this project by introducing current critiques of the everyday emerging from poststructuralist perspectives on the global circulation of neoliberalism (the day after everyday).

Albert Sbragia (French & Italian Studies), with Katrina Deines (Architecture and Urban Planning)
Modernity in Rome
Sbragia's book project examines the evolving discourse on cosmopolitanism and modernity in Rome from the time of the European Grand Tour in the 18th century to the present. He will be collaborating with Katrina Deines, Associate Professor in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies,to examine the role played by architecture and urban planning in the debate on the modernization of Rome once the city became the capital of the Italian nation state in 1870.

2003-2004

Ellen Garvens (Art), with John Fergason (Division of Prosthetics-Orthotics)
An Artistic Investigation in Prosthetics

Garvens' project involves researching, observing and photographing prosthetic devices used at the University of Washington Medical Center. John Fergason, Director of the Division of Prosthetics-Orthotics, is assisting her in a greater understanding of the possibilities and workings of the devices. This research will offer creative solutions to her sculptural works fusing biological and mechanical elements.

2002-2003

Lou Cabeen (Art), with Martha Kingsbury (Art History)
Contingent Subjects: Gender, Place, and the Construction of Meaning
Cabeen's project involves the development of a body of artwork exploring the ways that construction of meaning is influenced by gender and locale. Cabeen will consult with Martha Kingsbury (Professor, Art History), an historian of 19th- and 20th-century material culture. The work will be displayed at Marylhurst University, and Kingsbury's essay accompanying the works will add to the current debate on gender, place, and meaning in culture, placing these artistic works in cultural and historical context.

Jeanne Heuving (Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, Bothell), with Stephen Hinds (Classics)
Restive Eros: Poetic Possession and Dispossession in the 20th Century
Working with Professor Stephen Hinds (Professor, Classics), an expert on Ovidian love traditions, to address how 20th-century poets are utilizing and altering prior conceptions of eros, Heuving's project will study the relationship between cultural, erotic, and poetic production.

Katharyne Mitchell (Geography), with Walter Parker (College of Education)
Citizenship Formation and Historical Memory in the Wake of 9/11
Mitchell will study how adolescent students develop the concept of citizenship through the learning surrounding moments of national crisis, examining in particular the terrorist events of 9/11 and their aftermath. She will consult with Walter Parker (College of Education), whose field of specialization is social studies curriculum and instruction K-12, with particular emphasis on democratic citizenship education.


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