Passport to research
Graduate students win travel grants for global research
5:56 p.m., May 2, 2012--Eight University of Delaware doctoral students have won competitive travel grants that will support their studies in locales ranging from North Dakota to Nigeria this summer.
Offered by the Office of Graduate and Professional Education, in collaboration with the Institute for Global Studies and UD’s seven colleges, the 2012 Global Research, Internship and Performances Grants Program has awarded more than $25,000 to help send graduate students to three continents to do dissertation research.
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“These grants provide graduate students the opportunity to conduct research and expand their scholarship beyond the UD campus. The new knowledge they develop will impact the cultures and communities in which they interact and the experience will position them to make continued contributions to their fields as they grow as scholars,” said Charlie Riordan, vice provost for graduate and professional education.
Christine Croxall, doctoral candidate in art history from Ithaca, N.Y., will pore through archives in Paris and Lyon, France, for information on the French priests who became missionaries in the Mississippi River Valley at the turn of the 19th century. Her dissertation examines how this U.S. region’s diverse populations -- European, Anglo-American, African American and Native American -- reacted to and appropriated the religious habits and beliefs of others.
Sanjay Gopal, doctoral candidate in energy and environmental policy, who resides in Newark, Del., will travel to Thane, India, to conduct in-depth interviews and focus group discussions for his project, “Urban Renewabilization in India through Public-Public Partnerships: Feasibility Assessment of City of Thane as a ‘Solar City.’” India is the only country that has a Ministry of Renewable Energy at the federal, as well as state levels, and has announced the “Development of Solar Cities” program to renewabilize its cities.
Lily Lamptey, doctoral candidate in energy and environmental policy from Rockville, Md., will head to Ghana to explore the issue of energy poverty. Through a case study in Kumasi, she seeks to unveil conventional top-down approaches in organizing energy systems and propose the adoption of alternative energy paradigms centered on bottom-up efforts that draft local knowledge, technologies and institutions in addressing the needs of the energy poor in environmentally sustainable, socially equitable ways.
Chiedo Nwankwor, doctoral candidate in political science and international relations, who resides in Newark, Del., will analyze the representation of women as cabinet ministers in Nigeria. Her work, combined with her other case studies in Rwanda and South Africa, will investigate whether women cabinet ministers in sub-Saharan Africa further women’s interests through their policy agendas, as well as inspire women to participate more in politics.
Josh Probert, doctoral candidate in art history who resides in Newark, Del., is working to fill a gap in scholarship about Louis Comfort Tiffany’s works. Scholars have paid little attention to Tiffany’s stained glass windows in churches despite the fact that at the turn of the 20th century, Tiffany Studios’ Ecclesiastical Department had over 300 employees. Probert will travel to the Louis C. Comfort Tiffany Museum in Nagoya, Japan, to examine catalogs and design books the company loaned to churches for design ideas.
Dawn Rogala, doctoral student in preservation studies from Alexandria, Va., will travel to Fargo, N.D., to take the short course, “Fundamentals of Coating Science,” at North Dakota State University. The course is a detailed discussion of modern paint chemistry, a topic particularly suited to her dissertation on the late-career materials and techniques of Abstract Expressionist painter and teacher Hans Hoffman.
John Sharpe, doctoral student in history from Carrollton, Va., will conduct archival research at the universities of Leeds, Hull, Sussex and Bradford, and King’s College, Cambridge, and examine private collections of archival materials in Ditchling, London and Oxford. These materials are directly related to his dissertation theme of property ownership and non- or anti-Marxist opposition to capitalism.
Clayton Zuba, doctoral candidate in English from Havre de Grace, Md., will pursue research at the British Museum and the British Library in London for his dissertation, which examines how, between King Philip’s War (1681) and the U.S. Civil War (1861), the American identity formed in tension between American conceptions of Native American and English identities. His focus is on how literary and visual representations of Native Americans were constructed and manipulated to form an American identity founded in imperial expansion, both requiring and legitimating dispossession and genocide toward Native Americans themselves.