Fall 2019 RESEARCH GRANTS
Laura Brown (English), Region and Remembrance: Public Memories of Civil Rights in Greensboro, North Carolina Brown will work on her book, Region and Remembrance: Public Memories of Civil Rights in Greensboro, North Carolina, which explores the complicated relationships between regional identity, race, and public memory. Region and Remembrance demonstrates the significant, sometimes detrimental consequences that attachments to place and public memory hold for a community’s attempts to confront racism.
Julia Dominguez (World Languages & Cultures), Cervantes and Memory in Early Modern Spain Dominguez will write a book which contends that Cervantes’ work responded to and shaped the cultural ideas on memory in early modern Spain. By exploring the interdisciplinary nature of memory and its centrality in his fiction, her book reveals the prominence of memorial practices and their representation in Cervantes’ world. Her project will fill a gap in Cervantes’ scholarship by offering the first extensive analysis and comprehensive study of the history of memory in early modern Spain while simultaneously examining memory’s influence in its most representative author.
Maggie LaWare (English), Be Bold and Dance on the Edge of the Roof: Voices and Visions of Leadership, Relationship, and Liberation in Commencement Addresses by Women at U.S. Women’s Colleges LaWare will continue work on her book project, which focuses on women’s commencement addresses at women’s colleges in order to better understand the key components of the “rhetorical situation” that shape possibilities for women challenging the terms often associated with commencement speeches such as success, friendship, citizenship and especially leadership; the speeches highlight the limits of cultural norms of achievement as well as the masculine image of leadership.
Debra Marquart (English), Schizophonia: Notes on a Life in Music — An Acoustic Ecology Marquart will continue writing a memoir as she weaves together narratives of her coming-of-age-to-music and her youthful career as a traveling road musician against a larger meditation on music as a social phenomenon. She will explore the themes of music as a conveyor of ideas and an organizer/disrupter of social order, as well as music as an emotional placeholder as it travels from coffeehouse to bar to concert halls, from car radios to elevators to ear buds.
Gregory Oakes (Music), Musical Compositions for Microtonal Clarinet Oakes has collaborated with an instrument craftsman in Denmark to develop a new kind of clarinet that facilitates performance of a particular kind of music called “microtonal” music. This award will enable him to showcase this instrument and demonstrate its capabilities to the academic music world. Six established composers have each agreed to write solo works for this new instrument. Oakes will perform a concert of the six new solo pieces on the instrument, documenting it for publication and exposure to the musical community.
Olivia Valentine (Art and Design), Mediate/Equivocate: An architectural scale installation project at the Des Moines Art Center Valentine will continue an on-going project which is the culmination of several threads of creative research to be presented at a public exhibition in the Fall of 2020 at the Des Moines Art Center- Iowa Artist: Olivia Valentine. Tying together work in drawing, textiles, sculpture, and sound, this project consists of a new large scale installation Mediate/Equivocate, the sculpture and photographic series The shadow is my body, and a new chapter of between systems and grounds, an ongoing collaboration with composer Paula Matthusen.
Fall 2019 SYMPOSIUM GRANT
Michele Schaal (World Languages & Cultures), 10th Biennial International Women in French Conference “Margins: Voices and Pathways” The Department of World Languages and Cultures will bring the 10th Biennial International Women in French (WIF) Conference “Margins: Voices and Pathways” to Iowa State University from May 14-16, 2020. The three-day conference will bring 90 established scholars, junior faculty, and graduate students to our campus. Scholarship will highlight areas that remain marginalized within the field of French and Francophone Studies such as disabilities, aging, works by women of color or LGBTIQA+ authors, and underrepresented Francophone regions such as Oceania. The top-tier Women in French Studies journal will publish a selection of peer reviewed papers, made available through the Parks Library repository.