Spring 2025 Grant Recipients
Research Grants:
Julia Badenhope, Professor, Landscape Architecture
An exhibit is proposed in McGregor, Iowa to serve as a site for place-based community design. The design project addresses resident experiences of place identity, place attachment, and community sentiment to drive a place making project in two historic river towns with strong ties to surrounding environment of bluffs and Mississippi river. The exhibit
will provide a living representation of the project area that marries and intertwines objective technical depictions of the project area with local photos, videos, stories and artifacts associated with the communities and landscape. The purpose of this exhibit is to transcend the boundaries of knowledge and perception that exist between residents and the design team. This is a departure from conventional methods of drawing used by community designers, as models, drawings and other representations typically used in this mode of practice depict place interpretations formulated by the designer, in products produced solely by the designer. Through facilitated engagement activities, the design team will flesh out dimensions of place with residents and directly embed findings/contributions in an objective base model/drawing/image. Following our collaborative construction of the place exhibit, all design workshops and proposals will be developed and displayed adjacent to or located within these depictions, so that residents and designers can understand how Place is synergized in design proposals for new infrastructure, parks and trails. This exhibit is proposed in conjunction with a funded National Endowment for The Arts “Our Town” Project entitled “Mending/Bridging: Reconnecting Historic River Towns to the Mississippi River and the Blufflands.”
Ritwik Banerji, Assistant Professor, World Languages and Cultures
Conventional wisdom presumes a positive relationship between freedom and knowledge: that is, that greater freedom enables greater knowledge and vice-versa. So powerful is this conventional wisdom that it effectively erases the possibility of recognizing the pursuit of social, cultural, or political freedom that works with an inverse conception of this relationship (i.e., that reduced knowledge enables greater freedom, or that increased knowledge jeopardizes freedom).
Through an ethnographic study of free improvisation scenes in Berlin, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay Area, my monograph examines the relationship
between freedom and knowledge for a community of avant-garde artists in pursuit of creative freedom. Through an analysis of their social practices, I show how this artistic milieu is rooted in a conception of freedom based in the negation of knowledge rather than its affirmation, and thereby constitutes an important counterexample to conventional thinking on the relationship between freedom and knowledge. The project focuses on three registers of social life in particular: 1) the avoidance of instruction, direction, or critique as a means of facilitating each improviser’s experience of freedom, 2) their ideas about what forms of listening in musical interaction constitute the ideal experience of egalitarianism (understood as a freedom from hierarchy), and 3) the claim that such scenes are “open to everyone” (Corbett 2016, 1) despite the fact that they are each dominated by white, cisgendered men with an upper class background.
Corbett, John. 2016. A Listener's Guide to Free Improvisation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Xavier Dapena, Assistant Professor, World Languages and Cultures
This project, titled Cinematic Commons: Landscape and Commonality in Spanish Films, is a comprehensive historical analysis of cinema production in Spain, examining the intertwined cultural impacts of both the praxis and theoretical
frameworks related to commonality and grassroots collectives. In light of the contemporary prominence of the commons in activist and social collective movements, this study explores and critiques the cinematic portrayal of the commons, as well as the forms and processes directly or indirectly influenced by them. Drawing on Martin Lefebvre’s concept of cinematic “landscape,” the book’s central hypothesis posits that the films and practices under analysis extend, through the landscape, both the visual strategies for representing the commons and communal filmic practices, while also engaging with screen aesthetics, national ideology, cultural geography, and, ultimately, radical democratic experimentation.
Sarah Dees, Assistant Professor, Philosophy and Religious Studies
Prof. Dees is planning to complete her manuscript The Materialization of Native American Religions, focusing on the collection, organization, and exhibition of objects with religious significance. She has secured an FPDA for the 2025-6 academic year to finish the project. The book manuscript looks at the history of a Smithsonian research agency, the Bureau of American Ethnology, from its founding in 1879 until 1910. This book project is under contract with the
University of Nebraska Press, as part of their series “Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology.” She argues that the Bureau played an important role in expanding the definition of religion, which used to generally refer to the belief systems of monotheistic or “world religions.” First, Bureau researchers broadened the term to include Indigenous traditions. Second, Bureau researchers described "religion" as something more than belief, faith, or spirituality. They documented aspects of religious materiality—the use of sacred objects as well as religious embodiment, emplacement, and enactment. This book examines the origins, mechanisms, and applications of Smithsonian research on Indigenous religions and three case studies. It also discusses the complicated legacy of this research. She plans to conduct final archival research at the National Anthropological Archives and Smithsonian Institution Archives. Ultimately, documenting this history will promote a more accurate awareness of Indigenous objects and traditions today, enabling scholars of religion and museum professionals to better understand historical and contemporary pressures facing Indigenous knowledge, traditions, and material culture.
Firat Erdim, Associate Professor, Architecture
The Field Harp is an electric, wind-actuated harp distributed across a field of harpists, each operating a single string. Unlike conventional musical instruments, it is designed to curtail our sense of autonomous expression and unlike conventional aeolian harps, it is played in active collaboration with the wind. It is a sensory device
and collective practice of attunement with the ocean of air we inhabit, enabling us to act together in relation to the atmosphere, our shared existential medium. The research grant will support the development and customization of the Field Harp components informed by two forms of output, one live and one with recordings. The live output will be a dozen monthly “public rehearsals” of the Field Harp in Iowa, in collaboration with public rehearsals organized by other aeolian ensembles worldwide. The other output will be an “imaginal atmosphere” installation assembled with solo recordings with individual Field Harp components. The sound of the installation will develop and change monthly with the addition of new recordings, and will be open to the public once a month over the course of a year. These iterative forms of practice and output will build a stronger network of participants and community of collaborators around this work, enabling it to be developed further through sustained collective engagement.
Cason Murphy, Assistant Professor, Music and Theatre
This project seeks to provide the resources for completing an archival research manifest for Rude Mechs, 
a renowned experimental theatre collective based in Austin, Texas, and conducting a first round of oral history interviews with the company’s founding members. By accessing their archives and engaging with key members of the collective, I aim to document and analyze their contributions to the advance of theatrical practice to better enhance the discipline’s broader discussions on the necessity of collaborative creativity in the world of contemporary performance. This project would allow me to serve CEAH’s mission by employing a humanities-based approach to the study of an under-studied aspect of contemporary theatre through collecting unique direct evidence that is not currently preserved.
Craig Rood, Associate Professor, English
The word “protection” is central to so many of our private fears and public talk. Despite the commonsense appeal of protection, there is profound disagreement—often under the surface— about what protection means, who deserves it, and how to achieve it.
Craig Rood’s book project—tentatively titled the Rhetoric of Protection—tracks talk of “protection” throughout U.S. politics and culture, including debates about climate change, gun violence, trans folx, book bans, and immigration policy. As a rhetorical scholar, Rood looks at publicly available texts (e.g., speeches, social media posts, legislations, news images, etc.) as a window for seeing who or what “we” are asked to fear and why. Rood contends that protection is not simply an appeal to numbers; instead, protection depends on the stories we tell and are told, including who is imagined as a protector and the protected. Engaging with scholars throughout the humanities and appealing to engaged citizens beyond the academy, Rood offers a conceptual and critical guide for making sense of protection in the early 21st century. The book warns how the pursuit of protection can lead us astray while also offering advice for how protection might be productively reimagined.
Peter Scheidt, Assistant Professor, Art and Visual Culture
Peter Scheidt’s new studio work, Boolean Collisions, examines the contradiction between architect Bernard Tschumi’s ideal space and real space by juxtaposing CAD-generated geometric volumes with antique furniture. 
Drawing on CAD logic, Scheidt’s constructed assemblages explore how digital manipulations of form, which are impossible in reality, reflect a broader dialogue about spatial relationships and the meaning of objects. Inspired by the tension between mathematically created space and the physical reality of human-built and used objects, his sculptural work highlights the dynamic contradictions between these polarities. Creating artwork from the perspective of a furniture maker, he underscores the significance of furniture in defining how we interact with our environments. Scheidt’s brightly-colored, large-scale work encourages viewer interaction, inviting a deeper understanding of the complexities within the interplay of space, form, and experience.
Lindsay Preseau, Assistant Professor, World Languages and Cultures
The rise in affect theory across humanistic and social scientific disciplines points to affective polarization as a contributor to increasing political polarization in western democracies. This project explores how affectiv
e responses to the aesthetics of gender-inclusive language in public discourse serve as a case study of this phenomenon. While debates surrounding gender-inclusive language often center on rational argumentation concerning the grammaticality of gender-inclusive forms (for example, of singular ‘they’ in English), critical public reactions to gender-inclusive forms more often engage affective, aesthetic, and social questions. Special characters such as the German gender star, French point median, and Spanish @ (as in Latin@) often garner criticism for being typographically jarring or “ugly.” Likewise, opponents of gender-inclusive language invoke subjective affective responses to phonological features, for example repulsion to the guttural nature of the glottal stop pronunciation of the German gender star. Similarly, neopronouns often garner (psycho)affectively loaded labels such as “cringe,” “narcissistic,” or “unhinged” on social media.
This project asks the following research questions: (1) what are the prevailing (negative and positive) affective responses to the aesthetics of gender-inclusive German? and (2) how do these affective responses both reflect and shape gender-political positionalities? To answer this, I will assemble a corpus of affective reactions to gender-inclusive language in opinion pieces published in German newspapers and by non-profit and political organizations. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), I will identify taxonomies of common affective responses. Analyzing their occurrence in context will reveal how these affective responses shape and reinforce political and social meanings.
Symposium Grants:
Amanda Petefish-Schrag, Associate Professor, Music and Theatre
The 2025 Puppet Power Applied Puppetry Conference will bring together local and international collaborators to explore the transformative potential of puppetry in addressing complex global and local challenges. Organized in collaboration with WP Puppet Theatre (Calgary, CA) this hybrid conference (combining both in-person and virtual
activities) will focus on applied puppetry as a tool for fostering dialogue, resilience, and creative problem-solving in communities. The conference centers on tackling “wicked problems” through puppetry. Conference activities will include workshops, panels, performances, community puppet-building events, and an applied puppetry short film festival. By creating a space for interdisciplinary collaboration and knowledge-sharing, the conference aims to strengthen connections among applied puppetry practitioners globally while also educating local practitioners and communities on social, cultural, and practical impacts and potential of this dynamic art form. Conference content will integrate varied perspectives and approaches, promoting global collaboration while celebrating the hyper-local, community-based contexts that shape applied puppetry practice. The event serves as a unique and dynamic resource for practitioners, researchers, and community members, showcasing puppetry’s distinctive ability to engage conversation, animate change, and inspire innovative solutions to today’s pressing issues.