2015 Seed Grants

Recipients:

  • John Chen (Former Graduate Student, Department of History)
  • Angela Giordani (Graduate Student, Department of History)

Description:

  • This grant will support a graduate conference at Columbia in spring 2016 with the aim of encouraging greater dialogue between postcolonial and circulationist approaches to the history of science and knowledge transformation.
  • Such an event would reflect and synthesize important recent trends in fields including history of science, intellectual history, and Middle Eastern, East Asian, South Asian, African, and Eurasian studies, as well as international and global history.
  • The event will be held as a standard one-day conference format, with panelists representing different disciplines along with varied periods, places, and methods of study. Results of the meeting will be encapsulated in a special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Recipients:

  • Luciana de Souza Leão (Graduate Student; Department of Sociology)
  • Moran Levy (Graduate Student; Department of Sociology)
  • Joan Robinson (Former Graduate Student; Department of Sociology)

Description:

  • Building on Columbia’s current and historical strength in the Social Studies of Science,  this grant will support a two-day Graduate Student Conference titled, “Expertise from Margin to Center: Science, Politics, and Democracy” in February 2016.
  • Presenters will be graduate students, while faculty members (Faculty advisors Gil Eyal and Alondra Nelson) will serve as moderators, discussants, and keynote speakers. The conference will be open to graduate students and aims to strengthen Science and Technology Studies scholarship by promoting research and network building among early career scholars.
  • Following the conference, we aim to produce a special journal issue or an edited volume based on a selection of the conference papers.

Recipients:

  • Cara Rock-Singer (Former Graduate Student; Department of Religion)
  • Joseph Fisher (Graduate Student; Department of Religion)

Description:

  • This grant will support an interdisciplinary reading group on the intersection of science, technology, and religion in America. It will draw students from multiple departments at Columbia as well as from other graduate schools in the New York area.
  • The funding will be used to provide a space for graduate students to read and discuss central texts in the field, workshop dissertation chapters, and articles, and bring a speaker each semester who is a scholar working at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Religion.

Recipients:

  • Frankie Pavia (Graduate Student; Earth and Environmental Sciences)
  • Jason Bell (Former Graduate Student; Department of English Language and Literature; Yale University)

Description:

  • This grant supported a colloquium at Columbia University designed to facilitate dialogue among educators in the greater New York City area about teaching at the crossroads of environmental science and humanistic inquiry.
  • The Working Group prepared a workbook of syllabi and hosted a symposium to share research and experiences about instruction in this new interdisciplinary field.

Recipient:

  • Casey Primel (Graduate Student; Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies)

Description:

  • This grant supported a workshop that helped initiate a dialogue between emerging scholarship on the environmental and economic history of regions with the fields of critical geography, intellectual history, and science and technology studies. Select geographic regions will include the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and Europe.
  • The workshop aimed for something more fundamental than a remapping of regions – a chance to rethink the connection between theory and disciplines, and a more urgent reformulation of ecology and economy.