Competition Now Open for Franke Interdisciplinary Research Awards for Graduate Students

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Friday, August 27, 2021 - 9:00pm
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The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities at Yale

Franke Interdisciplinary Research Awards for Graduate Students

Academic specialization increasingly leads to isolation among scholars and the disciplines they study, resulting in misunderstanding and the erosion of common intellectual goals.  We hold that this isolation is also a barrier to research progress on interdisciplinary questions situated between traditional areas of study.  The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities is founded on the twin convictions that the fundamental questions that engage humanists must be informed by basic insights of science and that meaningful scientific inquiry in turn deepens with humanistic knowledge. The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities at Yale is excited to announce the Franke Interdisciplinary Research Awards for graduate students.  This summer, the Program plans to select up to five interdisciplinary research projects to receive funding of $2,000 each to be held during the academic year 2021 – 2022.  We welcome proposals that advance our mission of fostering communication, mutual understanding, collaborative research, and teaching among diverse scientific and humanistic disciplines.  Research proposals are required to have two faculty members from different departments/disciplines as intellectual mentors.  Letters of recommendation will be requested from these faculty mentors for short-listed candidates.  Awardees are required to attend two dinners, which at this point we expect will be virtual, in fall 2021 and spring 2022 and present their projects.  Previous awardees and projects including the following:

Cera Smith – Getting Blackness in the Body: What Sculpture and Literature Teach Each Other about Confronting Anti-Black Racism

Clio Doyle – Shakespeare’s Virtual Environments

Cody Musselman – CrossFit’s Messianic Medicine: Evaluating Moral Imperatives and Scientific Authority in the Wellness Industry

Diego Soto – Flocking Pigeons Orchestrate Music for a Machine:  Translating Animal Collective Behavior into Music Theory through Artificial Intelligence

Rosie Aboody – How do I Know What You Know?  Building a Theoretical Framework of Epistemic Inference

William Kwok – Mass Killings as a Coordination Problem in the Shadow of War

Please complete and submit this document electronically to the Program’s Assistant Director, Ty Kamp (ty.kamp@yale.edu), along with your project proposal by August 27, 2021.