Supported by the Mellon Foundation and The Eugene M. Lang Foundation, the Periclean Faculty Leadership (PFL) program aims to foster and support committed scholars dedicated to incorporating civic engagement into the curriculum while empowering students to use their academic knowledge to tackle real-world problems through deliberative dialogue.

Read on the Carleton Grants Office page.

The award will enable Nusaibah, a chemistry and economics double-major, to work with a surgeon and medical students to teach Bangladeshi women to conduct breast self-exams and help those in need navigate the treatment system. Her project also includes hiring patient navigators and providing funding for diagnostic tests, ensuring women receive follow-up support beyond initial screenings.

“Stigma surrounding women’s health is deeply ingrained in Bangladeshi society, affecting access to medical information and care,” said Nusaibah. “Conversations about reproductive and breast health are often avoided, leaving many women uninformed about their own bodies. In rural areas, these challenges are compounded by poverty and limited healthcare access.”

Connecting her project to the mission of the Projects for Peace program, Nusaibah added, “For me, peace means freedom from this shame. It means creating a world where women can talk about their health without fear, where seeking help is not a source of embarrassment but empowerment.”

Projects for Peace is a global program that partners with educational institutions around the country to identify and support young peacebuilders. They grant $1.25 million each year to 125 student leaders to develop innovative, community-centered, and scalable responses to the world’s most pressing issues.

Read the announcement on the Carleton Grants Office page.

Learn more about this year’s grantees.

Learn more about this year’s grantees.

Read on the Carleton Grants Office page.

Read on the Carleton Grants Office page.

Read on the Carleton Grants Office page.

Support from the Minnesota Historical Society will allow Braker and a team of contractors to build on research conducted during a prior MHS grant and complete the book by June 2026, in time for the Arb’s centennial celebration during the 2026–27 academic year. Carleton’s 800-acre arboretum is the oldest in Minnesota and the second-oldest in the Midwest. 

The Minnesota Historical and Cultural Heritage Grants program — also known as Legacy Grants — is a competitive process created to provide financial support for projects focused on preserving Minnesota’s history and culture. This state-funded program is made possible by the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund using sales tax revenue resulting from the Clean Water, Land, and Legacy amendment created through the vote of Minnesotans on November 4, 2008.

Read on the Carleton Grants Office page.

Read on the Carleton Grants Office page.

Read on the Carleton Grants Office page.

Learn more about recent SEMAC grant awards.

Throughout this project, Gómez-Gonzáles will lead research experiences for undergraduate student researchers by building on emerging work that includes exploring phenomena via data-scientific approaches and translating classical literature on resolvent degree, with the goals of informing ongoing research and developing pedagogical materials towards broadening perspectives in math education. Support from this grant will also enable Gómez-Gonzáles to spend a term at the University of California, Irvine, where they will advance existing collaborations with associate professor of mathematics, Jesse Wolfson, and develop new relationships with other researchers.

Read on the Carleton Grants Office page.

Read on the Carleton Grants Office page.

Read on the Carleton Grants Office page.

Formed in wells drilled to obtain oil, gas, and water, borehole breakouts can be used to understand stresses within the Earth’s shallow crust. Together with Jacqueline Reber, associate professor at Iowa State University, Titus and Davis will employ a two-pronged approach to study how rock layering impacts stress breakouts from boreholes. The research team will utilize materials such as sand, gelatin, and wax to create models in the lab where rock layering conditions can be controlled, while also studying well logs — information collected at the time wells were drilled — from central California to assess how breakouts across an area relate to rock layering. A graduate student at Iowa State and several Carleton undergraduates will support these efforts, as well as the development of new statistical tools to compare datasets from the project.

Read on the Carleton Grants Office page.

Along with collaborators Jabari Jones ’15 of Bowdoin College and Dyanna Czeck of University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Huyck Orr and McDaris were awarded an NSF Geoscience Opportunities for Leadership in Diversity (GOLD-EN) grant for the Cultural Change in Geoscience (C-ChanGe) project. The project will empower faculty members to work toward an academic geoscience environment that welcomes and recognizes the contributions of all and will also raise the visibility of other projects working on geoscience cultural change.

Along with collaborators Jennifer Wenner ’92 of University of Wisconsin–Oskosh and Cheryl Manning of Orbweaver Consulting, Huyck Orr was also awarded an NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) grant titled, “Belonging in Geoscience Education Workshop: Planning to Enact Cultural Change” to begin mapping new directions for professional development based on the lived experiences of geoscientists from historically excluded groups, and those with experience in institutional change in geoscience education.

Working across a range of media—including moving-image installations, sound, performance, and poetry—Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s artwork centers themes of collectivity, resilience, and memory. The exhibition will feature three bodies of artwork from research spanning the past decade and will be designed in close conversation with the artists.

Its centerpiece, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth: Only sounds that tremble through us (2020–22), merges video fragments of communal song and dance from Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and Yemen culled from social media and mixed with filmed performances created with a dancer and three musicians in response to these videos. The exhibition will be laid out across the Perlman’s two gallery spaces.

Sara Cluggish, director and curator of the Perlman Teaching Museum, will develop a robust events program seeking out collaborations across the college. Programming with faculty and student groups will extend the interdisciplinary, political, and cultural value of the exhibition. Plans include an artist talk; curator- and student-led tours; an Arabic poetry workshop; and parallel screening program. A workshop for Dance students will be led by Twin Cities-based Palestinian-American dancer Leila Awadallah. The museum will also collaborate with its staff of student workers to produce an audio tour of the exhibition.

The Teiger Foundation supports U.S.-based, curator-led initiatives in contemporary visual art. It affirms the importance of visual art and experimental practice to culture and society at large, and therefore positions its work in support of racial justice and against white supremacy, in support of free expression, and toward an equitable transition from fossil fuels amidst the climate crisis.

Read on the Carleton Grants Office page.

According to project director and history professor Bill North, the grant will fund two half-day workshops on reflective writing for instructors of the required first-year Argument & Inquiry seminars. The workshops will book-end the one-year grant, which will also support sessions at the Learning and Teaching Center’s December 2024 conference and a significant number of course-development grants. These mini-grants will enable faculty to learn about and implement pedagogical strategies related to reflective writing and sustained dialogue in their own current or future A&I seminars. 

The Educating Character Initiative, part of Wake Forest’s Program for Leadership and Character, is funded by the Lilly Endowment.

Read on the Carleton Grants Office page.

Read on the Carleton Grants Office page.

The U.S. Army Map Service distributed maps produced by Imperial Japan to 36 American libraries following World War II; Carleton was among a few small liberal arts colleges to receive these “captured” maps. While large institutions have begun organizing and digitizing similar collections, smaller institutions often lack cartographic expertise and Japanese-speaking librarians, causing their collections to languish. 

Here at Carleton, Asuka Sango, John W. Nason Professor of Asian Studies and Religion, recently discovered our collection and immediately determined to use them for teaching and research through collaboration with Academic Technology, Digital Humanities, and Gould Library staff.

An Institutional Project Support Small Grant from JFNY will fund digitization of the first nine sheets of Carleton’s 1,800-sheet collection. As project director, Prof. Sango will use grant funds to produce two articles on the collection and develop curricular resources about them. Prof. Sango’s “Mapping Japan, the Real and the Imagined” project will also allow Carleton to acquire several premodern Japanese maps to both complement current holdings and expand the college’s non-Western holdings in its special collections.

The Japan Foundation, with 26 offices worldwide, promotes international cultural exchange and mutual understanding between Japan and other countries.

Read on the Carleton Grants Office page.

Beginning in late summer 2024, the grant will first support faculty retreats to consider and address key issues such as course scheduling, faculty coordination, and funding for collaborative teaching. During winter break 2024, the grant will support a course-development workshop on multidisciplinary teaching. Then, during the first half of 2025, it will support stipends to develop multidisciplinary courses at Carleton. 

The resulting Curricular Bridge courses will aim to encourage students to think across academic boundaries and discover a wealth of overlaps and mixtures between subjects — exactly the goal of the NEH’s Humanities Connections program, which aims to expand the role of the humanities in undergraduate education by fostering partnerships between humanities faculty and counterparts in other areas of study, such as the physical and natural sciences.

“The traditional liberal arts emphasis on curricular exploration, while requiring a breadth of academic study, only goes so far toward showing the potential of interdisciplinary work,” said Jarman. “It leaves students to find for themselves connections and resonances between their courses. We hope these Curricular Bridge offerings will demonstrate exciting interdisciplinary work fueled by combinations of humanities and STEM fields. In turn, we hope this encourages students to see their declared majors less as silos of knowledge and more as hubs of activity.”

“I am especially excited for the opportunities provided by this grant to think deeply about strategies for enabling more and deeper links between STEM and humanities disciplines in our course offerings,” added Whited. “I know many STEM faculty are eager to partner with humanist colleagues in this work.”

Like other recent grants, such as art history professor Ross Elfline’s Mellon-funded ACM fellowship, this NEH award will enable Carleton to work toward two goals of the College’s strategic direction, Carleton 2033: The Liberal Arts in Action:

• Goal 4: Carleton will model the interdisciplinary approaches needed for students to address the complex challenges of the future.
• Goal 5: Carleton will create space for experimentation, exploration, and intellectual risk-taking inside and outside of the classroom.

The Curricular Bridge courses launched with grant support will help expand Carleton’s collection of inter-divisional courses, especially for students beyond their first term. The NEH grant will augment existing institutional support for this kind of teaching and learning, but also allow Carleton to better understand challenges to interdisciplinary teaching and to coordinate long-term solutions to those barriers. The project will thus strengthen the foundation for continued progress on teaching and learning across departmental and divisional lines.

Read on the Carleton Grants Office page.

Cox received a $3,000 Emerging Artist Grant to create a comic book for young and young adult readers in collaboration with Chérif Kéita, William H. Laird Professor of French and the Liberal Arts. The comic book will focus on Nokutela Mdima Dube, a forgotten hero of South Africa who had an unmarked grave until Kéita discovered it. Cox will draw the pages of the comic book and assemble around 100 copies by hand to give out in the community for free. To print the books, Cox will use the risograph printer in Carleton’s print studio — and she invites any students with experience using the printer to contact her if they would like to experiment alongside her.

“I am very excited about collaborating with the Northfield Municipal Library, connecting with the community, and sharing our excitement about the connection Northfield has with this visionary woman and the school she founded with her husband, John Langalibalele Dube, which was central to the training of Black South African intellectuals and artists and prepared them to fight against Apartheid,” Cox said. “We are also eager to have conversations with young readers about their experience of having big dreams. In the end, their feedback on the book will help improve the story for its intended audience: the South African school children Chérif is eager to reach.”

Hong received a $5,000 Advancing Artist Grant to create a new composition for pipa and cello, which she is specifically writing for Anthony Ross, principal cello player of the Minnesota Orchestra.

“I am planning to invite Anthony Ross to Carleton to perform the world premiere of this new work, and he will also give a cello master class to our Carleton students,” Hong said. “The master class and recital will benefit all Carleton cello students, Western music students, non-Western music students, and the whole Carleton community, providing an opportunity to experience East-meets-West, cross-cultural classical music with world music fusion creativity.”

The SEMAC Board of Directors awarded 21 grants for a total of $89,000 in funding to individual artists throughout southeastern Minnesota, including thirteen Advancing Artist Grants and eight Emerging Artist Grants. Recipients were selected through a competitive process with applications judged on artistic merit and community impact, as all granted activities will culminate in a public capstone event. SEMAC congratulates the award winners and looks forward to celebrating the creativity these grants will bring to southeastern Minnesota.

This activity is made possible through a grant from the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council in cooperation with a private foundation. SEMAC is designated by the Minnesota State Arts Board as the regional arts council for eleven southeastern Minnesota counties: Dodge, Fillmore, Freeborn, Goodhue, Houston, Mower, Olmsted, Rice, Steele, Wabasha, and Winona.

For more information about SEMAC’s grant programs, visit semac.org.

Read on the Carleton Grants Office page.