When I first joined the CLA Dean’s Office in 2014, I was asked to manage the CLA Research Award program.  The fund is provided by the OSU Research Office.  The Dean’s office and the Schools match to bring the total available funding to $40,000.  The funds are to support Liberal Arts research activities.  After learning the details and the process, I am grateful for the opportunity to manage the program.

As stated on the CLA Research website, the awards are primarily intended to assist faculty members in the initiation of new creative or scholarly activities and for projects that will result in further external funding, or improve the position of the faculty member in applying for funding.  Furthermore, the project must culminate in a concrete result (a peer-reviewed journal article submitted for publication, a performance, a professional exhibition, a grant proposal).  And moreover, preference is given to projects that enhance the status and visibility of the College and the University. The program helps highlight the research and scholarship efforts of our fellow faculty members. Because at the end of the day, there’s actually quite a lot of liberal arts research happening here at OSU.

2016 CLA Research Awards

In 2016, we received eleven applications.  After a review by a four-member committee, eight proposals were selected for funding.  The projects included research about a film director, another about perception and cognition, others  about identity, pollution, and how cultural capital can help college student success.   We even selected a creative writing project to help an author meet a publisher’s deadline, and a project to collect scholarly essays by OSU CLA researchers on coastal culture resiliency to be published by a leading academic press.  All very exciting and much needed work!  Here is the list of the 2016 funded projects, with links to the researchers’ websites.

• Nabil Boudraa, Algeria on screen: The Films of Merzak Allouache
• Nick Dybek, The End of a Perfect Year: A Novel
• Allison Hurst, Measuring the Acquisition and Deployment of Social and Cultural Capital among First-Generation College Students
• Christina Leon, Dusty Skin: Manuel Ramos Otero’s Queer Self-Translations
• Lisa Price, Heritage and Resilience of Coastal and Marine Culture: Views from the Liberal Arts
• Christopher Sanchez, Enhancing creative cognition via manipulations of perceptual fluency
• Adam Schwartz, Talking about race with white-identified, U.S.-born Spanish faculty
• Bryan Tilt, China’s Air Pollution Crisis:  Public Perceptions and Responses

Several of the 2016 awardees have already submitted their reports.  So far, I can say that the award program is doing what it’s supposed to do.  I am looking forward to receiving the other reports.  And I look forward to writing a future blog post detailing the success of some of those projects.

What’s next?

I am looking forward to announcing the 2017 CLA Research Awards.  The deadline just passed.  While I can’t say much about the proposals now, I can say that we received eleven applications again.  Is eleven a magic number?  I thought it was three?

Look for a future blog post on the 2017 awardees.

-Eric Wayne Dickey, CLA Research Program Manager