Spring 2025 Faculty Grant Awardees
The McGillicuddy Humanities Center notified faculty recipients of its funding decisions for the Spring 2025 Faculty Research Awards cycle. MHC Faculty Grants provide up to $5,000 (plus 1 grant of up to $10,000 for projects meeting additional criteria) to UMaine faculty (including lecturers and adjunct instructors) for financial support of research, community engagement, or innovative teaching proposals. This year’s recipients were:
Don Beith (Associate Professor of Philosophy) and Susan Bredlau (Assistant Professor of Philosophy) were awarded an MHC faculty grant to host the 49th annual meeting of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle at the University of Maine in September 2025. The International Merleau-Ponty Cirlcle is a prestigious international society specializing in applying Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to contemporary issues. Beith and Bredlau will use MHC funding to support the conference and its 2025 theme: “Health and Healing: Personal, Social and Environmental.”
Rebecca Dewan, Libra Assistant Professor of Choral/General Music Education, was awarded an MHC faculty grant to present “Considering Matthew Shepherd” with the University Singers and Maine Gay Men’s Chorus. Dewan will use MHC funds to work with the UMaine School of Performing Arts and the Maine Gay Men’s Chorus to present the Maine premiere of Craig Hella Johnson’s “Considering Matthew Shepard,” a choral work that addresses themes of love, loss, and social justice through the lens of the tragic murder of 21-year-old Matthew Shepard near Laramie, WY, in 1998.
Robby Finley, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, received an MHC faculty grant to support travel to present two related projects that examine how applications of logic to reasoning and the gamification of reasoning can provide a fruitful frame of analysis for classic philosophical problems. Finley will present “The Value Capture Argument for Logical Pluralism” at The First Paris-Chicago Joint Conference in the Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics and “Logic as Game: Wittgenstein, Suits, and the Concept of ‘Game’” at The 52nd Annual Meeting of the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport.
Sarah Harlan-Haughey, Professor of English, was awarded an MHC faculty grant for travel to Areley Kings and the Severn Valley in England for work toward the completion of their second book project. Harlan-Haughey will ubicate their study in the specific landscape in which the poet Layamon would have been working.
Susan Pinette, Professor of Modern Languages and Director of Franco-American Center, was awarded an MHC faculty grant for the project Digitizing Peter Archambault’s “Beau-frog” drawings. This grant will complement an NEH Humanities References and Resources Grant received by UM Franco American Programs to digitize many of Peter Archambault’s iconic 1970s/980s political cartoons including nearly 500 oversize drawings that require special attention. This grant will fund digitization of these oversize drawings by the USM Osher Map Library.
Judith Rosenbaum-Andre, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication and Journalism, was awarded an MHC faculty grant for the project “A deep dive into media engagement : Morality and neurodiversity.” The awarded MHC funding will assist with travel to the annual convention of the International Communication Association held in Denver, CO where Rosenbaum-Andre will advance two separate projects: one addressing how violations of morality impact people’s parasocial relationships with media influencers and another on how neurodiversity impacts people’s engagement with media narratives.