Barnard College Office of Institutional Funding August 31, 2021 Grant Opportunities & News You Can Use Hello, faculty, Welcome back and welcome, if you’re new. This is Barnard’s Grant oppor- tunities Newsletter, produced by the Institutional Funding and Sponsored Research team. We are a five-person team, consisting of Kayla McCaffrey (Executive Director), Mark Godwin (Director of Sponsored Research), Pamela Tuffley (Sr. Associate Director of Sponsored Research), Kari Steeves (Associate Director of Sponsored Research), and Liane Carlson (Manager of Institutional Funding and Sponsored Research). We are your stop for all things grants—research grants, curricular or programmatic grants, and anything in between. If you want to learn more about us, check out our newsletter from this time last year, which links to some col- umns explaining our services and provides introductions to each of us. Inside this issue This newsletter comes out monthly and offers a combination of articles, Featured Funders............ ........ 2 deadlines, opportunities, and news. You can read back issues here. There Sage Advice ............................. 3 are three regular columns. The first, “Featured Funder,” profiles the histo- ry and opportunities of a different grant maker each month (this month, History of Philanthropy…………..4 the New York Public Library). The second column, “Sage Advice,” gives tips News ........................................ 5 on grant writing, mostly geared toward people new to the process. We’ve Grant Opportunities talked about technical terms, like “cost share” and “indirect costs,” given General.. .................................. .7 advice about how to write your first budget, and, in this issue, passed along writing tips from the ACLS. The final column is “The History of Phi- Humanities………….……………….10 lanthropy,” which looks at the legal history of professional philanthropy in Creative Arts………………………….14 the United States. I like a little room to spread out when telling a story, so Social Science .......................... 15 we’ve only just gotten to the legally recognized charitable entity in the Languages and Area Studies…..17 colonies (Harvard), even though we started back in February. STEM ....................................... 17 We also have links to news stories. This is where we publish policy chang- Deadline Reminders es announced by federal agencies, so be sure to keep an eye on it. It’s also where we publish stories related to research. After that, we have brief General Interest ...................... 19 thumbnails of opportunities coming due in the next six weeks or two Arts & Humanities ................... 20 months. And in the back, we have six months’ worth of deadlines. It’s still Social Sciences……………………….24 too early for the Internal Grants Deadlines for 2021-2022, but when they start getting released, I will add them here. Language & Area Studies ......... 25 STEM ....................................... 27 That’s it for us! Please do reach out if we can help in any way or even if you just want to say hi. And good luck! Library Science……………………….30 Liane Carlson, [email protected] Featured Funders The New York Public Library I was hoping for a little more whimsy when I decided to write about the New York Public Library for today’s Featured Funder profile. Maybe find a few fun facts about Patience and Fortitude, the iconic marble lions outside the main branch on Fifth Avenue, and cruise into the end of summer with a few pending opportunities. Instead, we have to talk about opium smuggling and the fur trade. Onward? The New York Public Library has a couple of key founders, but most everyone agrees that John Jacob Astor was the first. He was born in 1763 in a southern German town named Waldorf, where his father worked as a butcher. For the first sixteen years of his life, he worked in his father’s shop and as a dairy salesmen. In 1779, he moved to London to work with his older brother in his uncle’s factory for manufacturing flutes and pianos. There he changed his named from Johannes Jakob to John Jacob and learned English, which proved handy when he moved to the newly independent United States in 1783. Once in the United States, he married his landlady’s daughter, a shrewd woman whose business acumen, he wrote admiringly, was better than that of most men. He also stumbled into the fur trade, buying pelts from indigenous people, preparing them himself, and selling them back in Europe for astronomical profits. That worked beautifully for Astor (with a few bumps, like being forced to petition President Jefferson for special permission to trade with Canada after the U.S. Embargo Act of 1807), until the War of 1812 disrupted his business. That’s when Astor took up smuggling opium to China. I can’t say how much of the Astor fortune came from opium. He’s certainly not the last benefactor of the NYPL to profit from drugs of various sorts - the Cullman Center comes from the Phillip Morris family fortune. Between his initial fortune in fur, opium profits, and his speculation in NYC real estate, Astor died as the wealthiest man in America and possibly one of the wealthiest people who ever lived. A portion of his fortune went to found a public library—$12 million by today’s standards—and in 1854, six years after his death at the age of 90, the Astor Library on Lafayette Street opened. And maybe that would be the end of the story, except, as it turned out, the library wasn’t very good as a library. It was a grand building with an enviable reference section that never circulated and, as a salty New York Times article in 1872 put it, “might almost as well be under lock and key, for any access the masses of the people can get thereto." The Astors and other wealthy families kept contributing to it, but the library languished financially until in the 1890s the executors of the estate left by Samuel J. Tilden, a former New York Governor, decided to honor his request that his fortune establish a network of public libraries in New York by combining the Astor Library with the Lenox library. I plan to include a whole article on Tilden’s will in The History of Philanthropy, but suffice to say that his money, combined with another big donation by Andrew Carnegie, did the trick. Today the New York Public Library offers a wide range of residencies and fellowships, some of which are listed below. “The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers is an international fellowship program open to people whose work will benefit directly from access to the collections at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building—including academics, independent scholars, and creative writers (novelists, playwrights, poets). Visual artists at work on a book project are also welcome to apply.” Due: September 24. Funding: Up to $75k. “The Schomburg Center Scholars-in-Residence Program offers long-term and short-term fellowships to support scholars and writers working on projects that would benefit from access to the Center's extensive resources for the study of African diasporic history, politics, literature, and culture.” Due: December 1. Funding: $3k/month for short-term, $35k for six months. 2 Return to table of contents Sage Advice Tips on Proposal Writing from the ACLS, Part II I promised last issue that I would be back with a final(?) article on tips from the ACLS. If you’ll recall, I covered advice and insights from John Paul Christy, the Senior Director of U.S. Programs, on the changes that the organization is undergoing here. For today’s column, I want to pull out a few insights from a guide on proposal writing that he specifically recommended: A Guide for Writing Proposals for the ACLS, by Christina Gillis. There are various tips in there for how to write for ACLS in particular and what type of audience to expect. I thought the most interesting and widely applicable part of the article comes in the Appendix, when Gillis outlines a few strategies for how to write an engaging, effective proposal. Gillis offers three options, though just this week I’ve been reviewing faculty proposals that combine all three, so don’t think of these as mutually exclusive. Questions in the Field “All proposals should in some way address questions raised in the field of study, whether defined as the discipline, some particular territory within the discipline, or an area that moves across disciplinary boundaries. Perhaps the most common strategy is the effective reference to focused, easily recognizable, and previously unaddressed or inadequately addressed questions in the field: State the question and explain how the project will answer that question. It is not sufficient to identify an important question that has not been asked before or that has been inadequately answered, or to propose a new perspective on an old problem: one must note why the question has been inadequately answered to date, or why a new perspective is needed.” Snapshots and Stories “Snapshots and short stories can be very effective in attracting a reviewer’s attention to a proposal. In a proposal on hidden dimensions of a ritual, a religious studies scholar might offer a vignette of Central American women praying to a surrogate deity; a geographer might offer a snapshot of a leisure fishing community in urban New Jersey to show how members of a working class immigrant group retain connections with their natural environment….In these examples, the snapshot or story is short (rarely longer than one paragraph) but dramatic— setting the stage for the investigation to come by giving the reviewer a concrete reference point.” Intellectual and Scholarly Trajectory “An emphasis on the intellectual and scholarly terrain previously covered by the writer may serve as an effective framework for presenting the proposed research and writing project.