Fall 2020 Faculty Grant Awardees

Katherine Glover (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)
“Women and Climate Change Speakers Series”

Dr. Glover, a research associate at the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, was awarded funding to support a speakers series in conjunction with her Spring 2021 women’s, gender, and sexuality studies (WGS) course. Speakers discussed gender-climate change intersections, and feminist solutions to the climate crisis in events open to the public.

Justin Wolff (Art History)
“Terrible Sights: American Art and Catastrophe”

Professor of Art History Justin Wolff received research funding support for his book manuscript project, titled Terrible Sights: American Art and Catastrophe. Wolff’s book promises to make a significant contribution to scholarship at the intersection of art history and American studies by analyzing iconic American artworks in the context of “catastrophe” broadly construed.

Judith Rosenbaum (Communication and Journalism)
“Black Bear Analytics Project”

Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication and Journalism Dr. Judith Rosenbaum worked with advanced undergraduate students in a computer science capstone course to design and implement a data collection tool called “Black Bear Analytics.” The social media scraping tool collects publicly available social media posts into an
easily accessible spreadsheet for people with minimal knowledge of data science.

Anne Kelly Knowles (History)
“Capturing Place-Base Experiences in Holocaust Survivor Testimony”

Funding was provided to support the place-based experiences in Holocaust survivor testimony project that McBride Professor of History Anne Kelly Knowles continues to research. The “ultimate goal” of Knowles’s project “is to map Holocaust victims’ experiences in the larger context of the Nazis’ genocidal policies and actions
as they were implemented across Eastern Europe.”

Kathryn Swacha (English)
“Coping with COVID: A Public Story-Telling Project”

The “Coping with COVID: A Public Story-Telling Project” examines how people negotiate public health guidelines and incorporate COVID-related public health recommendations into their daily lives. The project provides a forum for participants to share their stories and will leverage these stories to help shape and develop public health resources that are attuned to lived experiences.

Laura Cowan (English/Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)
“Entangled: People and Ecological Change in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay (2018): Book Discussion Group”

Written by an experienced field biologist and wildlife manager, Entangled both celebrates the awe-inspiring nature of Alaska and also mourns the inevitable changes this region has experienced since the time of its original peoples. Dr. Cowan convened a public book discussion group from around the United States to engage the themes explored in Entangled, many of which parallel experiences here in Maine.