Barnard College Office of Institutional Funding September 30, 2020 Grant Opportunities & News You Can Use Hello, faculty, Welcome to our September Newsletter. We hope you and your students are settling into the semester, strange as it is. We are back with our normal format this month. For our Featured Funder column, we have a profile of The John Templeton Foundation (a perennial source of fascination for me). Since we are deep into fellowship season, our Sage Advice column offers advice on “How to Make Your Fellowship Application More Concrete.” After Sage Advice, we have a few news stories, including an advertisement for a webinar for new and early career investigators, co-hosted by the Inside this issue NSF and the University of Florida. After that, we have brief profiles of upcoming opportunities. A few new Featured Funders............ ........ 2 have come our way, including a residential fellowship at The Center for Sage Advice ............................. 3 Ballet and the Arts at New York University, open to “artists and scholars News ........................................ 4 across disciplines (history, theater, philosophy, and music, among many Grant Opportunities others) to work on projects that expand the way we think about the history, practice, and performance of dance.” And, as always, we have a COVID-19…………………………..…...6 calendar of opportunities coming due in the next six months. General.. .................................. .8 The next Internal Grant deadline is October 19, for Barnard Faculty Arts & Humanities .................. .9 Research Grants. Creative Arts ............................ 12 As always, if you need assistance finding grants or beginning an Social Science .......................... 12 application, please feel free to email any of the members of the Language & Area Studies ......... 14 Institutional Funding and Sponsored Research team. We love to hear STEM ....................................... 16 from you! Deadline Reminders General Interest ...................... 18 Liane Carlson Arts & Humanities ................... 19 212-870-2524 Education ................................ 24 [email protected] Social Sciences……………………….24 Language & Area Studies ......... 26 STEM ....................................... 27 Library Science……………………….31 Featured Funders The John Templeton Foundation Have you ever wondered what it would be like to lounge on a Caribbean island on some moonlit night, discussing the theological implications of extraterrestrial intelligence with…Richard Dawkins? Someone at The John Templeton Foundation clearly did, because in 1998 the Foundation gathered together a dozen of the most prominent philosophers, theologians, and scientists in the world (Dawkins included) for a conference titled “Many Worlds: The New Universe and its Theological Implications.” That conference is just one of many eclectic projects The John Templeton Foundation has bankrolled since it was founded in 1987 by the billionaire investor, Sir John Templeton. John Templeton was born in 1912 in Tennessee. His mother was a housewife, by all accounts stable and kind, but his father, Harvey Maxwell Templeton Sr., bounced around careers throughout Templeton’s early life. He started as a small-town lawyer, then eventually expanded his business to include owning a cotton gin, speculating on the Cotton Exchange, and buying foreclosed houses to rent out. His father’s entrepreneurial spirit inspired Templeton and helped him, to a point, allowing him to enroll at Yale. But his speculations also got the family into trouble. When the Great Depression struck, Harvey Templeton told his son that he would have to pay for college himself. With money from a family loan, a part-time job, and poker winnings, he did, graduating near the top of his class. After college, Templeton was awarded the Rhodes Scholarship and then began a career as an investment banker. His real break came at the outbreak of World War II. Convinced that the market was unreasonably depressed, he persuaded his boss to lend him $10,000 and used the money to buy stock trading at less than a dollar. His gamble worked. Stocks rebounded and Templeton became rich. The rest of his career was success building on success, interrupted by the tragic death of his first wife in a car accident, and his decisions in 1964 to renounce U.S. citizenship and move to the Bahamas to avoid paying income tax. Throughout his life, he gave lavishly to causes that interested him, libertarian politics—and perhaps above all else, projects that probe the line between religion and science. Today, the Templeton Foundation reflects those interests, with current calls in the following areas: The Science of Purpose Initiative seeks “to identify and fund the development of novel theoretical, philosophical, or scientific concepts useful for advancing the study of goal-directed, goal-seeking, or goal-suited phenomena in nature.” LOI Deadline: November 30, 2020 “The Genetics Funding Area seeks to advance genetics research by supporting novel approaches and contrarian projects, especially research that is undervalued by traditional funding sources. In addition to basic and translational research, this Funding Area supports educational programs that increase public awareness concerning the ways in which genetics-related research and its applications can advance human flourishing at the individual, familial, and societal levels.” Deadline: August 20, 2021 Mathematics and Physical Sciences seeks projects capable of “(1) advancing the conceptual frontiers of physics… (2) Situating scientific research within a broader interdisciplinary inquiry into human thought and culture; (3) Cultivating dynamic and demographically diverse collaborations involving multiple teams, disciplines, or institutions; (4) Providing career continuity for young scholars...whose physics- related research has been disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic.” LOI Deadline: August 20, 2021 Programs in Latin America. “How do the insights of scholars and religious leaders beyond the Global North and West inform our understanding of profound concerns at the intersection of science, philosophy, and spirituality? And how can such voices be brought into the conversation?” LOI Deadline: August 20, 2021. 2 Return to table of contents Sage Advice How to Make Your Fellowship Application More Concrete As I am sure you all know, we are in peak fellowship season, so we are seeing a lot of applications right now. Which is great! We love reading about your projects and we love offering any help we can to strengthen your application, whether that means copyediting for typos or, if you’re up for it, giving you more substantive feedback on the structure of your proposal. The influx of proposals is also great for me, because it gives me lots of ideas for columns. Today I want to talk about just one of them—adding concrete detail to your project plan. Everyone writing a fellowship understands the importance of clearly explaining a project and explaining its stakes, both within the scholarly community and the broader world. But it is remarkably easy to forget to tell the reviewer what you plan to do with your time on the fellowship, I think because it can feel so obvious. Here are some easy solutions to that problem. Tell the reader if you are writing a book. This suggestion can feel a little silly if you’re in the humanities, because what else would you be doing on a fellowship year, if not writing a book? Still, a lot of the big humanities fellowships, like the ACLS, are also open to fields where articles are the norm (philosophy, certain social sciences), so it’s best to err on the side of being explicit. Tell the reader how long the project is. If you are writing a book with five chapters, say so. Tell the reader how much you have already done. If you have written three of five chapters, great. If you haven’t written any chapters but have published some articles on related topics, say that. The key thing is to give the reviewer enough detail to convince them that your project is underway and will reach its destination no matter what. Everyone likes giving a boost to projects bound to succeed; no one likes giving away highly competitive fellowships to a project that might turn out to be a bust. Tell them which sections of the book you plan on working on. Make sure you say something doable. No one is going to believe you’ll write the whole book from scratch in a year (though email me your tricks if you can do that!), so delineate something reasonable. And don’t say something vague like you’re “doing background research on the book.” This project is already well underway, remember? So tell them you’re filling out the section on medieval guild records in Chapter 3. Tell them where you plan to go, if it’s a travel fellowship. If you plan on going to a particular library or archive, name it and say how long you’ll be there, even if it’s just an estimate. And if it’s a fellowship from a library, be sure to foreground how important its collection is for your work. Explain why you need to travel to do your research. An increasing number of artifacts and archives are available online. It may be that your material isn’t, that the scans are imperfect, or that you have questions about the material object that can only be answered by examining it in person. Those are all fine reasons to travel to Italy. Be sure to mention them. Name any potential collaborators at the university you are visiting. If you can say that you are already in conversation, even better. If you plan on presenting in public, research some possible venues. Could you give a talk to the host department or participate in a regular workshop? You don’t need to have confirmed plans, but showing you’ve thought about it proves that you’re serious and that the opportunities exist. Give a timeline. I know, I know. It’ll probably be wrong, but at least show them you’ve thought about how long you plan on spending on each chapter.