FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The Office of Vice Provost for Research and Economic Development at the University of Arkansas has awarded seven faculty research grants through its Arts and Humanities Seed Funding Program.

The grants, totaling $25,000, are intended to enrich the research and professional growth of the faculty member and the university and result in new opportunities for research or other creative endeavors. The money will be used on items that will further a project such as materials, supplies and travel.

Those selected for the grants and their departments are:

• Todd Cleveland, Department of History
• Kathy Comfort, Department of World languages, Literatures and Cultures
• Kelly Hammond, Department of History
• Lisa Hinrichson, Department of English
• Jonathan Marion, Department of Anthropology
• Joshua Byron Smith, Department of English
• Lia Uribe, Department of Music

Cleveland, an assistant professor of history, will use his grant to travel to Portugal and Mozambique to conduct archival and oral research for a book project that examines the development of tourism in the Lusophone nations of Southern Africa – Angola and Mozambique – with a focus on African laborers’ experiences within the industry.

Comfort, an associate professor of French, will use her grant to travel to military archives in Paris and Meaux, France, where she will by analyze autobiographical and autofictional works written from divergent points of view, including those of a 41-year old volunteer soldier, a female war correspondent, and a member of a French colonial regiment. Her work will add to the body of research in the subgenres of recent critical studies in the subgenres of war literature and autofiction.

Hammond, an assistant professor of history, will use her grant for a research trip to Tokyo to gather additional archival sources in Japanese and Chinese for her book project, China’s Muslims and Japan’s Empire.

Hinrichson, an associate professor of English, will use her grant to review the Lillian Smith papers at the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia Libraries and the Carson McCullers papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin, for her book project, Hidden Pleasures: Intimacy in Southern Spaces.

Jonathan S. Marion, an associate professor of anthropology, will use his grant for travel, materials, and editing to facilitate choreography, filming, installation and website design for his project, Meanings in Motion. The project explores dance as non-verbal communication, the overlaps and co-constructions of meaning in and related to dance experiences, and various means of portraying and communicating the shifting meanings in and of dance.

Smith, an assistant professor of English, will use his grant to purchase digital images of 28 manuscripts of medieval English literature that contain both Old English and Anglo-Norman French. His project examines why these manuscripts include two languages that are often characterized as mutually exclusive.

Uribe, an associate professor of bassoon, will use her grant to record a CD that will include some of her commissioned pieces for the bassoon, as well as other existent works that haven’t been widely distributed or performed but hold great artistic and educational value, especially from the Latin American repertoire.