2013 SHASS Research Fund recipients announced
 

 
             

              The SHASS Research Fund supports research in the humanities,
              arts, or social sciences that shows promise of making an important
              contribution to the proposed area of activity.


 




Congratulations to the 2013 Recipients

 
Chris Capozolla | Associate Professor of History
Support for archival research and interviews in the U.S. and the Philippines for Brothers of the Pacific, a history of Filipino soldiers in the U.S. Armed Forces from the 1890s to the war on terror. The book uses the history of several hundred thousand forgotten soldiers to trace the relationship between U.S. foreign relations and global migrations from Southeast Asia. 


Michael Scott Cuthbert | Associate Professor of Music, and Homer A. Burnell Career Development Professor
Support for the creation of the Electronic Medieval Music Score Archive Project (EMMSAP), a database of all (non-chant) music from the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries allowing scholars to analyze large repertories of pieces quickly with computers and find unknown fragments and unidentified quotations within other works. The EMMSAP database has already been used to complete two previously incomplete works by locating matches between isolated vocal parts found in manuscripts scattered throughout Europe. 


David Donaldson | Gary Loveman Career Development Assistant Professor of Economics
To support data collection for a project concerning the impact of tariffs on economic activity. The proposed research will exploit quasi-experimental features of the Tokyo round of global tariff negotiations under the GATT in order to arrive at estimates of the causal impact that tariff liberalization events can have on manufacturing output, employment and productivity in both GATT member and non-member countries.


Jeff Ravel | Professor of History
Support for research for a book-length project on playing cards and political regimes in France. Will also support continued work with HyperStudio on the Comédie-Française Registers Project. This project is developing tools to enhance research in seventeenth and eighteenth century French theater practices. When complete it will provide access to unique records for the period. It will also result in a long-term book project that will rely in part on the findings of this collaboration to study the many uses of theater in print and performance in eighteenth-century France.  


Jay Scheib| Associate Professor of Theater Arts
To support "Platonov, or the Disinherited,” a new work for live performance that re-mixes the traditions of Shakespeare-in-the-park, the ribald nostalgia of the drive-in-movie, and recent MIT design experiments in environmentally sustainable and affordable housing, in order to write, direct, and present a live-drive-in-cinema performance based on Anton Chekhov's unfinished, first full-length play. 


Natasha Schüll | Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society
Support for research into contemporary technologies and practices of self-tracking, particularly the “Quantified Self” movement. In an era of big data and heightened public concern about the ways that citizens and consumers are tracked by governments and corporations, how to better understand the growing phenomenon of digital self-tracking, in which individuals take their own habits, bodies, moods, and thoughts as objects of scrutiny, analysis, and intervention.  


Hanna Rose Shell | Leo Marx Career Development Associate Professor of Science, Technology, Society
Support for "Days of Shoddy," a documentary film that uncovers a most unlikely history of recycling, in the context of 200 year old untold history of sustainability and technological reuse. The film is also a direct complement to a current book project, a historical and theoretical investigation of textile recycling. 


Christopher Warshaw| Assistant Professor of Political Science
The foundation of representative democracy is the assumption that citizens’ preferences should correspond with, and inform, elected officials’ behavior. Thus, in order to understand how well our democracy is functioning, it is crucial to know the degree to which legislators actually follow the views of their constituents. Fund will support research to build an original dataset of state-level public opinion on over one hundred important issues that were considered in the United States Senate over the past three decades. This dataset will allow for the examination of the relationship between public opinion and Senators' roll call votes over this entire time period. 

  

About the SHASS Research Fund