Grants in Action

Celebrating Scholarship

Vassar Grants in Action highlights and celebrates the grant funding, principal investigators, and project leadership that enrich faculty research and scholarship, institutional programs and priorities, and the student experience at Vassar.

Lydia Murdoch Awarded an NEH Summer Research Stipend for Archival Research in London

Professor of History Lydia Murdoch is awarded an NEH Fellowship to undertake research for her book project, Children as Medical Subjects and the Early-Nineteenth-Century Global Spread of the First Smallpox Vaccines, which investigates the particular contributions of children to early nineteenth-century vaccination through microhistories of the London Foundling Hospital and East India Company programs in South Asia.

April M. Beisaw, Professor of Anthropology, Selected for a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to Austria

April M. Beisaw, Professor of Anthropology, was selected for a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to Austria, where she will serve as the Fulbright-Natural History Museum Vienna Visiting Researcher in academic year 2024–25. While in Vienna, April will be investigating the wild-domestic divide in species of rabbits and pigs and how certain species resist complete domestication while others become irreversibly changed by human interaction.

Seungsook Moon is Author of Civic Activism in South Korea: The Intertwining of Democracy and Neoliberalism

In Civic Activism in South Korea: The Intertwining of Democracy and Neoliberalism (Columbia University Press), Professor of Sociology Seungsook Moon offers new ways to understand the intricate relationship between democracy and neoliberalism as modes of ruling.

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert Selected as 2024–2025 John Carter Brown Library Long Term Fellow

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Professor of Hispanic Studies on the Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair, was selected by the John Carter Brown Library as a Long Term Fellow for her project entitled “The Mighty Ceiba: Sacred Tree of the American Tropics.” Her project explores this ubiquitous tropical tree, which has been a cultural and religious icon in the American tropics since pre-Columbian times, and its relationship to history, link to enduring religious traditions and practices, and possible role in the conservation of vital elements of the region’s environment.

English Professor Amitava Kumar Publishes New Novel

Amitava Kumar, Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair, is author of My Beloved Life, a new novel published by Penguin Random House, that traces a fictional life through 20th-century India.

Joshua de Leeuw, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, Receives NIH Funding

Joshua de Leeuw, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, has received grant funding from the NIH in collaboration with his colleague from MIT for the project “Psych-DS: A FAIR data standard for behavioral datasets.” This three-year project is an important step forward for scientific efforts that rely on behavioral data; the standardized representation of behavioral data into machine-readable formats is a critical first step for the development of new scientific tools that can accelerate the pace of neuroscience and biomedical research.

Catherine Tan Publishes Spaces on the Spectrum: How Autism Movements Resist Experts and Create Knowledge

Catherine Tan, Assistant Professor of Sociology, is author of Spaces on the Spectrum: How Autism Movements Resist Experts and Create Knowledge, newly published by Columbia University Press (January 2024). Spaces on the Spectrum takes on the autistic rights and alternative biomedical movements, which approach autism either as a difference to be accepted or as a medical condition to be treated.

Allison Puglisi, Assistant Professor of History, Awarded Newhouse Fellowship

Allison Puglisi, Assistant Professor of History, received a fellowship from the Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College for academic year 2024–2025 for her project entitled “Redefining Residency: Black Environmental Thought in New Orleans,” which will focus on how housing activists, particularly Black women, laid the groundwork for modern Black environmental organizing.

Colette Salyk, Associate Professor of Astronomy and Chair of Physics and Astronomy on the Marisa Mitchell Chair at Vassar College poses in the library.

Colette Salyk Secures Grant from Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)

Colette Salyk, Associate Professor of Astronomy and Chair of Physics and Astronomy on the Maria Mitchell Chair, has secured a Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) grant award in collaboration with her colleague from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in support of a research program titled "Building on ALMA: a James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) legacy survey of the chemical evolution of planet-forming disks."