The Bohemian Flats Project: Re-making Musical Theatre
Margaret Werry, Chair, Associate Professor, Theatre Arts and Dance, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

This event centers around the creation of scenes for a new musical exploring the history of the Bohemian Flats, an immigrant enclave located on what is now the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, from 1870 to 1930. We will hold a symposium about new directions in American musical theatre; a workshop that pairs students with professional mentors in music, playwriting, dramaturgy and direction, and results in a final public showing of work-in-development; and a concluding round-table event discussing techniques and training in the development of new musicals. The objective is not only to produce a timely, original work about topical local history, but also to collaborate in formative dialogue with potential partner theatres in the Twin Cities community, building toward a new major in musical theatre, shared by Theatre Arts and Dance and the School of Music.

Dance On!: The Cultural, Sonic and Symbolic Legacy of Prince
Crystal Wise, Assistant Professor, Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Dance On!: The Cultural, Sonic and Symbolic Legacy of Prince is a new academic and fan conference that will mark the tenth anniversary of Prince’s passing. Through scholarly presentations, panel discussions, workshops and performances, the conference aims to illustrate and deepen our understanding of Prince’s legacy in Minnesota history. Presenters and attendees alike will explore the social and cultural impact of Prince’s legacy in Minnesota’s history. Academic scholarship on Prince and the Minneapolis Sound he created is a critical element of legacy building and keeping Prince’s profound connection to Minnesota at the forefront. This event will be free and open to the public.

Echoes and Equations: The Art and Archiving of Harriet Bart
Deborah Ultan, Arts and Performing Arts Librarian/Archivist/Curator, University of Minnesota Libraries

Curated from a newly acquired archive, the Echoes and Equations: The Art and Archiving of Harriet Bart exhibition offers a historical examination of this leading Twin Cities artist from the 1970s to the present. Championing the interdisciplinary nature of Bart’s work, the UMN Libraries exhibition lends to a campus-wide collaboration highlighting the intersection between art and science. Her recent publication Crescendo/Dimeuendo merges poetry of Robert Frost, an original musical score and equations born out of astrophysics studies. In partnership with the UMN Libraries, College of Design, School of Music, and School of Physics and Astronomy, an exhibition and program plans a dynamic selection of archival materials to join with an interactive installation of a “studiolo,” performance of the score written for the book, and lecture associated with the MN Institute for Astrophysics colloquium.

Kelly Wang: Impressed
Daniel Greenberg, Assistant Professor, Art History, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

This Imagine Fund Special Events Grant supports a program of student-centered curatorial practice linked to an exhibition entitled Kelly Wang: Impressed (Quarter Gallery, February 2026). Building upon the pedagogical, curatorial and public-facing successes of Layers of Joy (Quarter Gallery, December 2024), this project tasks a freshman seminar (ARTH 1906: Curating in Museums and Galleries) with curating an exhibition on the Chinese-American artist Kelly Wang, as well as developing a PR program and planning community-engaged events. This class was developed to support the Museum and Curatorial Studies (MCS) minor and will become a new model for annual exhibitions developed in partnership between the Art History Department and the Nash Gallery.

PERSON/a requiem
David Walsh, Associate Professor, School of Music, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

This three-evening performance will be the world premiere of a chamber opera, PERSON/a requiem, written and composed by Leyna Marika Papach, directed by David Walsh, presented by the School of Music. Leyna Marika Papach is a Japanese-American interdisciplinary composer whose work explores the bicultural East-West perspective and aesthetics. PERSON/a requiem is secularly modeled on the Western requiem with eight distinct chapters that contemplate life and death from a distinct intercultural lens. The music draws influence from various Western music as well as Japanese traditional music, opening a contemplative space that gathers Asian-American and cross-cultural communities across the Twin Cities, inviting the audience to contemplate humanity through a poetic, genre-defying opera, capable of housing multitude of perspectives as a concert experience.

Recording Oblivion: A History of Film and Nuclear Technology
Alice Lovejoy, Professor, Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Film and nuclear technologies have profoundly shaped one another, and both technologies have shaped the world we live in today. This series of 2026 events — rooted in Minnesota, and extending to New York, Paris and Berkeley — brings together members of the community, including high school students and educators, to explore this relationship. Drawing on the work of filmmakers, media historians and scientists, Recording Oblivion comprises an interdisciplinary series of events, including a formal discussion conducted by a media historian; a multi-media artist’s performance about science-based moving-image archives; curated film screenings; and a workshop for high school students and educators exploring film’s relationship to the material and physical sciences. The events offer a timely encounter with the hidden affinities between these two foundational technologies of the twentieth century.

Twin Cities New Music Festival
Sivan Cohen Elias, Assistant Professor of Composition and Music Technology, School of Music, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

In May 2026, 113 will partner with the University of Minnesota School of Music to present the sixth installment of the Twin Cities New Music Festival (TCNMF). The festival will be centered on works by living composers who merge electronic and acoustic instruments, exploring the complexity of humanity’s relationship to technology. The festival will feature music by Steven Takasugi, Sivan Elias Cohen, Elizabeth A. Baker, Scott Miller, Ted Moore, Schuyler Tsuda, Maya Bennardo and the composers of 113, with performances by Bennardo, Kyle Hutchins, Talea Ensemble and dozens of local musicians. The festival will include ten events: seven concerts at acclaimed venues throughout the Twin Cities, including a concert of new works by University of Minnesota composition students; a lecture by Takasugi, an educational initiative facilitated by Baker at Walker West Music Academy; and a celebration of the life and works of Schuyler Tsuda.
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7th World Conference on Remedies to Racial & Ethnic Economic Inequality: Expanding the Dialogue and Solution Development through Community-based Cultural Activities
Samuel Meyers Jr., Roy Wilkins Professor of Human Relations and Social Justice, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

The 7th World Conference on Remedies to Racial & Ethnic Economic Inequality will feature four events that will encourage participants and the public to consider issues of inequality through different lenses: 

1. Northrop Mall Murals: Local artists will create murals in real time to highlight the conference themes and help the public and conference participants reflect on tackling inequality. 
2. One Night Film Festival: A screening of short films and Q&A will encourage attendees to explore inequality from various perspectives.
3. Lake Street Mural Tour: Participants will learn about the history, contribution and rebuilding of Lake Street and the fight for equality.
4. East 7th Street Corridor Outdoor Art and Cultural Tour: Artists from Indigenous Arts Cultural Center will guide attendees through the collaborations among communities of color that have influenced the East Side of St. Paul.

Chicana/Latina and Indigenous Women Summer Institute 
Jessica Lopez Lyman, Assistant Professor, Chicano and Latino Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

We are hosting five public events accompanying the 2026 Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS) Summer Institute, to be held July 15–18 on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities’ Minneapolis campus under the theme Movements along Bdote: Disruption and Solidarity Sin Fronteras. Framing Bdote as an analytic of convergence, the Institute highlights interconnected Indigenous, Latina/x, Afro-Latina/x and Afro-Indigenous histories, geographies and movements in and beyond Minnesota. Centering Midwestern Chicana/Latina and Indigenous women — often underrepresented nationally — the Institute responds to recent attacks on Latino and Indigenous communities by offering space to gather, learn and heal. Beyond traditional conference formats, MALCS features workshops on wellness, leadership and mentorship, alongside research presentations, performances, film screenings and community dialogues on urgent issues.

Designing Memory at George Floyd Square: A Student Memorial Competition
Anjali Ganapathy, Associate Professor of Practice/Instructor/Director of Undergraduate Studies — Architecture, College of Design, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Designing Memory at George Floyd Square is a spring–summer 2026 public design and dialogue series centered in Minneapolis. Co-led by Rise & Remember and faculty from the University of Minnesota School of Architecture, the event invites Minnesota college students to develop proposals for a permanent memorial honoring George Floyd. The series includes a public launch, structured and mentored workshops with design professionals and designated community leaders and a culminating exhibition and finalist forum. Community dialogue informs the design process, and the public exhibition creates space for reflection and civic engagement. By combining guided student work with community stewardship, the event supports thoughtful memorial design at a site of national significance.

“Part of ourselves:”: An Exhibition of and Symposium on Prisoner Artworks from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba
Helen Kinsella, Professor, Political Science, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Our multidisciplinary team will curate a public exhibit of the artwork created by individuals formerly detained by the United States in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The goal of this exhibit, along with its accompanying academic and public scholarship and education, is to bring attention to the massive violations of international law experienced by former detainees; to underscore the creative agency, human rights and collective humanity of those who created this art; and to further identify and highlight the material, artistic culture developed to process and express their own experiences of harm, trauma and resilience. We will also host a public symposium on past and current operations at Guantánamo Bay, highlighting their relationship to current immigration detention in the United States and a workshop addressing the thematic issues of detention, artistic expression and dignity.

Prairie Lights Film Festival
Barbara Burke, Associate Professor, Communication, Media & Rhetoric, Humanities Division, University of Minnesota Morris

​​The Prairie Lights Film Festival is a five-week public film series held at the historic Morris Theatre, a cooperative-owned venue and cultural anchor for Stevens County and the surrounding region. Each week of the festival, Weekly, one selected film will be screened and followed by a moderated community discussion led by University of Minnesota Morris faculty and community partners. The festival brings films of regional, national and international distinction — works rarely accessible in rural West Central Minnesota — to a broad public audience, including University students and faculty, K-12 families, Spanish-speaking agricultural community members and lifelong residents. By pairing each film with structured discussion, the festival transforms passive viewing into active civic dialogue, building connections across the cultural and generational diversity that defines contemporary Stevens County.

“Luja tahto vie läpi harmaan kiven” (A strong will will carry you through the gray stone)—Persistence at the Core of Finnish Identities in Minnesota 
Christina Faupel, Director of International Affairs, International Programs and Services, University of Minnesota Duluth

These events celebrate the Finnish spirit of persistence. Minnesota has the highest population of Finnish ancestry of any state in the United States. Finnish culture is integral to popular Minnesota culture. Finnish culture, in contact with Anishinaabe culture, has produced new art and culture. Minnesota is home to the reawakening of Saami (arctic Indigenous) culture. At a time when coming together has never been more important, we can look, in part, to our Finnish roots and their transformations as sources for “strong will to carry us through the gray stone.” Events include poetry and music by Susan Perala-Dewey/Lindsay Schlemmer, poetry by Sheila Packa, a lecture by Government of Finland Professor Jussi Jauhiainen, performance and sharing of cultural artifacts by the Saami Circle North America, and performance and reading of works held in the Sámi Cultural Center at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

Merciless Exhibition Opening and Convening
Kendra Greendeer, Ihlenfeld Curator of Collaborative and Community Exhibitions, Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota

The event is a day-long exhibition opening and supporting a public convening. The one-time events are to mark the opening of Merciless Indigenous Lands Since 1776, an indoor and outdoor exhibition celebrating Indigenous resilience for the past 250 years. The exhibition includes local Indigenous women artists Natchez Beaulieu, Marlena Myles and Missy Whiteman, who all incorporate community within their artistic practices. The September 26, 2026 opening will be a celebration of the Indigenous community, featuring Indigenous performers, artist vendors, chefs and artist demonstrations. Following the exhibition opening, the Weisman will host a public convening on October 12, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and on October 13, 2026. The Weisman will contract and work with a designer to create a distinct identity and shared design vocabulary, tying these programs together with WAM promotions.

Twin Cities in Sound: Music, Community, Dialogue
Alaba Ilesanmi, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, School of Music, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Twin Cities in Sound: Music, Community, Dialogue is a public humanities and artistic initiative of the University of Minnesota School of Music that engages music as discourse and examines its role in shaping civic, cultural and communal life across the Twin Cities. In a region defined by Indigenous histories, global migration and generations of artistic innovations, the project convenes local artists, educators, students, scholars and community members to reflect on and engage with the individuals, histories, communities and musical practices that define Minnesota’s vibrant soundscape and identity. Structured as a participatory forum featuring dialogues, listening and performances, the initiative extends beyond campus through partnerships with Twin Cities arts organizations and strengthens long-term University-community relationships. All events are free and open to the public.
 

• Alison Aune — Swedish Folk Painting Exhibition
  The grant will fund travel to Sweden to prepare the exhibition.
• Sara Blaylock — Scholarly Study of Riot Grrrl
  The grant will fund travel to the Getty Research Institute and the Fales Library to conduct research needed to complete the writing of a full scholarly study.
• Qiang Fang — A Historical Review of Taiwan-China Relations
  The grant will fund travel to Taipei in winter of 2026 or summer of 2027 to read, study and complete the research project.
• Paula Gudmundson — New Flute and Electronic Works
  The grant will enable the commission of a new flute and electronics work by Zachery Meier to be completed in fall 2026 and performed at the 2027 National Flute Convention.
• John O'Neill — Non-Normative Speech Communication App
  The grant will support the design and development of an app that provides a multimodal interaction framework for users with non-normative speech to make web-based communication more human, dignified and efficient for all.
• Jamie Ratliff — Contemporary Global Exhibitions
  The grant will fund travel to Berlin, Kassel, and Munster, Germany to attend three exhibitions.
• Jeffrey Rop — The Greek and Persian Wars
  The grant will fund travel to Greece for three weeks to conduct research for an in-progress monograph.
• Matthew Wagner — International Artist Collaboration
  The grant will fund travel to Barcelona to work with respected international artists Sharon Lavi and Leela Petronio.
• Mark Whitlock — World Association of Bands and Ensembles International Conference
  The grant will fund travel to Rio D
   

• Lisa Bevevino, French — Developing and Launching Mollisol: A Journal of Literature and the Arts
  Mollisol, a journal of literature and the arts, is a proposed new literary and arts journal highlighting regional, national and international creative writing, visual art and other art forms focusing on issues of place-ness, landscape, lands and community.
• Emily Bruce, History — Regional Oral History at UMN Morris
  This project will document the history of migration to west central Minnesota. The researcher will speak with recent immigrants to the region who are safe recording their stories, and aims to contextualize present-day politics of migration within a longer history by interviewing the descendants of 19th- and early-20th-century migrants about their family stories and identities.
• Barbara Burke, CMR — Media and Information Literacies: Students’ Message Awareness and Interpretations of TikTok
  This research will investigate college students who are avid TikTok users but may not have “problematized” the implications of their consumption on their abilities to access, analyze and act regarding mediated experiences.
• Mark Collier, Philosophy — Using Vector Similarity to Measure the Influence of Scottish Philosophers on the Founding Fathers
  This research will create a map (using VSA – Vector Similarity Analysis) of how and where the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, who shaped the political thought of America’s Founding Fathers, appear in documents like the Federalist Papers.
• Adam Coon, Spanish — My Father Cuauhtemoc Defended: Tseltal Inter-Indigenous Dialogues vs. Mestizo Settler Colonialism in Mexican Education (1922)
  This research will produce an article for publication in the NAIS Journal on 1920s Indigenous educational activism in Mexico, by examining how Indigenous educators negotiated and resisted settler colonialism in Post-Revolutionary Mexico. It is part of a larger book project on Nahua activism. 
• Ann DuHamel, Music — Grussing solo piano music recording on the Neuma Label 
  This grant will assist with post-production and distribution costs for releasing DuHamel’s recording of Mitch Grussing’s solo piano music, his album-length set “Piano Tarot.”
• Janet Ericksen, English — Pages and Spaces in Early Medieval English Books
  This research, conducted in the UK, will focus on how books containing Old English poetry are put together, with particular attention to page layouts and unwritten or unillustrated spaces. There will also be a collaboration with scholar Thomas Bredehoft concerning 10th-century English books.
• Michael Lackey, English — World Biofictionalists as Intellectual Activists
  This grant supports research for a forthcoming book on world biofiction, which names its protagonist after a real person. Research will be conducted in Latin America about the real people in their historical context, thereby replicating what authors did when writing their works. Thus the resulting book will be able to illuminate how the novelists metaphorize the lives to expose the conditions leading to injustice and offer healthier and more socially just alternatives.
• Benjamin Narvaez, History — Understanding Cuban Sinophobia, 1850s-1940s
  Archival research on Sinophobia and Chinese exclusion policies in Cuba during the late 19th and 20th centuries will result in a journal article for Cuban Studies.
• Nadezhda Sotirova, CMR — “Not-yet European”: Balkan Theorizing from a Bulgarian Perspective
  This study focuses on the idea of theorizing communication in, of and from the Balkans. It expands on such “Balkan” theorizing from the perspective of Bulgaria by further exploring ideas, and will address the following question: How is communication shaped by and how does it shape creative, educational, civic and political activities and processes?
• Yulene Velasquez, Music — A New Multi-Ensemble Work for UMN Morris Music Ensembles 
  This work entails a collaboration between the choirs and the instrumental ensembles directed by another UMN Morris music faculty member. We are planning a tour to Ireland in May 2027, during which we hope to present a musical work that reflects the many positive qualities of Minnesota. A 15-minute work will be commissioned from composer David Walters, who has extensive experience writing for choirs and orchestras and it will evoke the soundscape of the prairie, the lakes and the rich Indigenous musical traditions of this region. 
   

College of Design

• Tejas Dhadphale — Eco-Friendly Packaging for Small-Scale Minnesota Fruit Growers
  This project will develop eco-friendly packaging solutions with Minnesota small-scale fruit farmers, focusing on soft fruits, human-centered design, material experimentation and participatory co-design.
• Gail Dubrow — Image Acquisition for Book Manuscript: Practicing Architecture Under the Bamboo Ceiling
  This project recovers the overlooked contributions of Japanese-American architects through rigorous archival research and collaboration with descendants to access previously unavailable materials. The project integrates unpublished family photographs with commercial and archival images to produce a cohesive, visually compelling narrative.
• Lucy Dunne — Freeze: An Exhibition Exploring Clothing for Extreme Cold
  This grant supports an exhibition of extreme cold weather clothing from 1980–2000, when several high-profile polar expeditions led by Minnesotans catalyzed the development of innovative cold-weather gear that integrated Indigenous approaches with emerging fabric technologies.
• Karl Engebretson — Risograph Expansion
  Risography combines digital and analog printmaking methods, hybridizing craft and mechanical design approaches. This project aims to develop creative tools, methods and curriculum support to explore new approaches and expand the use of Riso in different design disciplines that reflect artistic printing methods practice.
• Brad Holschuh — Hybrid Shape Memory + Pneumatic Artificial Muscles for Wearable Tech Applications
  In this project, we will develop a novel hybrid actuator for soft robotic applications by incorporating shape memory alloy (SMA) wire into the shell of pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs). These actuators have many potential wearable-tech use cases.
• SunMin May Hwang — Designing for Degradation: Investigating Climate-Positive Concrete Through Imaging and Material Transformation
  This project explores “designing for degradation” by visualizing how climate-positive concrete transforms through CO₂ capture, imaging and material weathering, reframing decay as a creative and ecological design process.
• Zenas Seiji Ikeda — Symbolic Revival: Reclaiming Nikkei Identity Through Kamon Design
  Reimagining Japanese family crests (Kamon) through contemporary design to reclaim Nikkei (Japanese diasporic) identity, combining archival research, translation and prototype creation for future community collaboration.
• Lauren Kim — Mitigating Message Fatigue in Sustainability Communication
  This project examines how repetitive sustainability messages cause consumer fatigue and disengagement, aiming to identify key design factors and strategies to create more effective sustainability communication.
• Carlye Lauff — Designing and Executing Field Deployment for Octo, a Play-Based Educational Toy for Children with Congenital Heart Disease
  This project engages in a two-week home field deployment of Octo to explore how children with congenital heart disease and their caregivers use the tool, examining its impact on understanding, support and everyday usability.
• Jacob Mans — Reading Rivers: Exploring Building Through the Lens of Watershed Conservation
  This project seeks funding to take a course on wilderness guiding to gain knowledge and skills that will better equip me to both teach and conduct research on the land. This type of engagement is critical to establishing a land ethic for building.
• Alex Maymind — Skyline: Rereading an Architectural Tabloid
  This project documents archival records and oral histories as foundational material for an anthology about the forgotten newspaper Skyline (1978–83), a publication that voiced changes in architecture culture.
• Bill Moran — Letterfish Exhibition
  Letterfish is a new series of letterpress prints that uses art nouveau letterpress typography to create anthropomorphic creatures. Unlike conventional uses of letterpress printing, the work is not word-based or narrative in nature. It engages histories of print and typography while exploring design fundamentals like line, shape, color, scale and materiality. I experiment with letterpress design through physical prints and interactive digital tools that hybridize manual, mechanized letterpress and digital manipulation, enabling anyone to experiment with this medium. 12 Letterfish will be exhibited at the Vatican Library, along with an interactive web page that allows visitors during and after the exhibit to make and save their own Letterfish.
• Jessica Rossi-Mastracci — Well, That Didn’t Work! Embracing Failure as Productive in Experimental 3D-Printing Processes
  This project seeks to reconsider traditional “failures” in clay and experimental material 3D-printing processes as opportunities, embracing inconsistency, collapse, disassembly and instability as productive designed conditions.
• Ji Youn Shin — Developing Storytelling Platforms to Facilitate Health Communication Between Patients and Providers
  Building on community-engaged workshops with Hmong community members, we will develop a high-fidelity prototype of a patient–provider communication platform that incorporates storytelling to support outpatient health management.
• Benjamin J. Smith — Make it Strange: Exhibition, Archival Placement and Publication of Coy Howard’s Work
  This project explores Coy Howard's influence on postmodern and contemporary architecture in Los Angeles, as a prolific but less widely known member of the 1970s group of architects known as the LA School. I will interview Howard and explore his expansive personal archive of drawings, mixed media, performance, furniture, buildings and teaching materials to contribute new material to late-20th- and early-21st-century postmodern architectural histories.
• Quinessa Stibbins Pierce — Civilian Civil Engagement Protective Apparel
  This project considers apparel design as a tool for social progress through protective apparel for protestors, to prevent injury from less-lethal crowd control methods.
• Frances Trice — Discovery to Recovery (D2R): The Role of Private Facebook Groups in Developing a Public Information Campaign Supporting Teens, Tweens, Tykes and Tots Diagnosed With Tarlov Cysts
  Discovery to Recovery (D2R) will be the first public-service campaign using data from private Facebook groups related to Tarlov Cyst Disease (TCD) in children. It will aim to raise awareness of this disabling illness in the local medical community.
• Cecilia Xi Wang — Connected Meals, Connected Lives: A Systems Approach to Equitable, Healthy Communities
  This project designs future-ready care models that connect food, health and community through a Meals on Wheels partnership, transforming meal delivery for seniors into a platform for equity, connection and holistic well-being.
• Juanjuan Wu — Chinese Fashion: The Embodiment of Evolving Aesthetics and the West-East Dynamic
  This project aims to construct a chronology of Chinese fashion from 1978 that includes interviews with fashion designers and professionals and field observations in Shanghai, China.
• Dingliang Yang — Documenting Imagining Future Cities: Global and Minnesota Visions, Past and Present
  The grant supports a publication transforming Imagining Future Cities at the Weisman Art Museum into a lasting scholarly catalog, translating its multimedia design research on global and Minnesota urban futures into a permanent, widely accessible record.

College of Liberal Arts

• Hakim Abderrezak, French & Italian — Color-Bound Injustice in the Words and Works of Writers and Artists: A Book Project
  This grant will support the remaining research for my new manuscript. This funding will be crucial to bringing the project to fruition. The book-length interdisciplinary study is timely, as it examines writers’ and artists’ works that address and redress the ethnic and racial injustices that have both precipitated and emerged from the contemporary refugee crises in the Mediterranean and North America. The successful completion of this manuscript will be critical to my forthcoming application for promotion to full professor, which I intend to submit next year.
• Christine Baeumler, Art — Field Notes of a Changing Climate: A Riparian Phenology Journal
  Climate change is gradually reshaping northern Minnesota’s seasonal rhythms. Floodplain forests and wetlands are especially sensitive to shifting temperatures and water levels, yet many changes unfold gradually and often go unnoticed. This place-based art project will document phenological change along Wakpa Waḳaŋ (Rum River) and adjacent lands through years of seasonal observations. Through video, photography and audio recording, this seasonal journal of ecological change culminates in a multimedia installation that illuminates altered seasonal patterns in floodplain ecosystems. My artistic practice is durational — grounded in repeated visits to particular sites — and relational, shaped by attentiveness to ecological interdependence.
• Ananya Chatterjea, Theatre Arts & Dance — Love, Present Occupation: A Creative Investigation
  Love, Present Occupation is a creative investigation of Love as public practice, inspired by the Twin Cities movement against occupation by federal forces. The arc of the work pushes through a dystopian reality, rage, resistance and communal grief to energize practices of care. The exploration will result in an original, evening-length dance theater work. Participants in free community workshops will be invited to learn a song of resistance and love accompanied by simple gestures. Audiences will be invited to join dancers in song and gesture during the performance, journeying together toward a transformational embodiment of public love.
• Gabriela Currie, Music — Between the Rivers and Across the Steppe: Harps in the Middle Asian Interaction Sphere
  Current diffusionist hypotheses propose that the ancient harp originated in Mesopotamia and then disseminated to ancient Egypt and the South Asian continent. Drawing on archaeological, iconographic and documentary evidence from the vast ancient region of the Middle Asian Interaction Sphere — stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indus River and from the Persian Gulf to the Central Asian steppe — my project challenges these monogenetic and quasi-linear diffusion theories. It does so by focusing on Bronze Age harps not only as individual musical artifacts, but also as representatives of Eurasian material culture contingent upon contemporaneous cultural, social, technological and ethnic transcultural dynamics.
• Carl Flink, Theatre Arts & Dance — Choreography as Fast Architecture / Architecture as Slow Choreography: An Embodied Conversation About Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin
  The Taliesin Preservation has commissioned me to create a new TED-like presentation about architect Frank Lloyd Wright to premiere July 26, 2026 at the newly renovated Hillside Theater designed by Wright and located on the Taliesin Preservation in Spring Green, WI. This 15-20 minute presentation will be an embodied conversation between UMN Minnesota Design Center Director Tom Fisher, an eminent Wright expert, me and the movers of my professional dance company focused on Wright's groundbreaking architectural contributions, his iconoclastic artistic journey and the aesthetics and philosophies that framed a life of innovation, pathfinding and daring.
• Njeri Githire, African American & African Studies — At the Fortress Gate: African Experience of Migration in 21st-Century Literature and Film
  At the Fortress Gate considers the ways African creative artists grapple with the death of a vision: that of the United States as a refuge for those escaping oppression, a country where openness to the world’s oppressed was a moral virtue and civic expectation deeply ingrained in the foundational values of American society. This vision, which long dominated artistic imaginary and social discourse, transformed the dream of immigration into an ideal that propelled migrants out of their conflict- and poverty-stricken homes and illuminated the path of their lives.
• Serra Hakyemez, Anthropology — The Indigenous Environment of Foreign Aid in Somalia
  This project is based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mogadishu and examines a new generation of local aid workers who express ambivalence toward standardized development packages designed by the Somali federal government in collaboration with foreign aid agencies. At the same time, these actors are actively experimenting with alternative forms of mutual aid. By analyzing their efforts to reduce dependence on foreign assistance while responding to recurring environmental crises in rural Somalia, the project contributes to ongoing debates about decolonizing humanitarianism, an approach that too often frames African crises and their solutions through Western-centered development paradigms.
• Margaret Hennefeld, Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature — Archives of Feminist Film Comedy
  Archives of Feminist Film Comedy reveals the uproarious history of crucial feminist works that have been long unseen, poorly preserved, and even unrealized. Comedy is often taken less seriously than other genres in film theory and historiography, while female-centered comedies are routinely overlooked in the canons of slapstick cinema. As an archival film curator and feminist comedy scholar, I have worked extensively with the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) members to identify, restore and curate their collections. This project will go well beyond my previous scholarship on silent-era cinema (1890s–1920s) and extend to the present day.
• Alice Lovejoy, Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature — Part and Particle: A History of Moving-Image and Nuclear Technologies
  Part and Particle is an interdisciplinary, collaborative project that explores the complex relationships between nuclear and moving-image technologies, particularly film. The project approaches this topic from historical, aesthetic, environmental, social and cultural perspectives, and includes three closely related outputs — research, curatorial and media-production — that consider a wide time period: from the early development of the atomic bomb through a present defined by debates about the role and safety of nuclear energy in the context of the climate crisis, the resurgence of nuclear arms testing, and a growing threat of nuclear war.
• S Douglas Olson, Classical & Near Eastern Religions & Cultures — Two stays at the Fondation Hardt
  This grant will support two three-week sessions at the Fondation Hardt, a residential classical studies research center in Vandoevres, Switzerland. The Fondation Hardt brings together scholars of all nationalities and levels, from advanced PhD students to senior university faculty. The library is extremely good, and the primary emphasis is scholarship. But there is also an expectation that guests will eat together as a group two times a day, work cooperatively across linguistic barriers and engage in substantial intellectual exchange and international community building. In addition, I am requesting funding for US–Europe roundtrip travel to make these visits possible.
• Yuichiro Onishi, African American & African Studies — Afro-Asian Feminist Literary Translation 2.0
  This project makes anew the aesthetics of Afro-Asian feminist literary translation. This is a collaborative project, at its core, because it invites the scholars of Black feminist thought to respond to Japanese women writers’ thoughts and perspectives about Black women’s writings in the United States, which were originally written and published in 1981–1982. I will translate these essays from Japanese to English and craft short biographical essays on these Japanese authors that forged the Afro-Asian feminist literary translation project. These translations will then become the basis for enfolding Black feminist scholars into what I call Afro-Asian Feminist Literary Translation 2.0.
• Bula Wayessa, African American & African Studies — Artisanal Gold Mining and Jewelry Making in Wollega, Oromia State, Ethiopia
  The Horn of Africa’s gold trade is recorded in Egyptian texts from the Old Kingdom, and gold still plays a crucial role in the region’s socio-economic life. Wollega, in Oromia State, is one of the few areas where artisanal mining and traditional smelting are still practiced, although this knowledge is declining because of the government’s preference for mechanization. In Wollega, men and women mine gold, but men smelt, and women preserve their ethnic identity by wearing gold ornaments. As these practices are rapidly declining, this project will document technological tradition to ensure their preservation through visual, audiovisual and written documentation.
• Mathew Zefeldt, Art — After Malvinas: Painting Architectures of Proxy, Simulation, Surface and State Violence
  This project supports the creation of an immersive, large-scale painted installation that weaves together military propaganda, contemporary video game imagery and architectural sites tied to the Malvinas/Falklands War and Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976–1983). Through layered compositing strategies informed by analytical Cubism and Futurism, the work examines how war is mediated through simulation, spectacle and national mythmaking. A research trip to Buenos Aires, Rosario, Tierra del Fuego and El Calafate will inform the project’s visual language. The project includes mentorship of BFA painting students as studio assistants, integrating research, pedagogy and collaborative production.
   

Yuko Taniguchi, Center for Learning Innovation, University of Minnesota Rochester

Imagination Studio: A Collaborative Art Exhibition with Alternative Learning Center and University of Minnesota Rochester Students

Imagination Studio is a community-engaged program where University of Minnesota Rochester (UMR) students, as “Creative Companions,” connect with Alternative Learning Center (ALC) students facing personal, academic, and mental health challenges. Together, they create art in a studio setting, fostering mutual learning and growth. This program aims to empower both ALC and UMR students to discover their creative potential and cultivate a creative culture within the UMR community through public and virtual exhibitions and programming.

Krista Sue-Lo Twu, Department of English, Linguistics and Writing Studies, College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Minnesota Duluth

The Book of the North

Made entirely by hand, The Book of the North will bring medieval book arts to life through immersive programming exploring the relationship between the cultures of Minnesota and the ecology of the region. It will feature paper crafted from native milkweed, cultivated flax, and invasive nettles; and ink brewed from oak, walnut, and buckthorn. Participants will provide historical texts and scientific analysis. The resulting book will embody the fragility and the resilience of the Northland.
 

Age-Friendly University Day 2025

Rajean Moone, Faculty Director, Health Policy and Management, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

As we age, we all deserve the opportunity to access lifelong learning and stay connected to our community. Sadly, older adults are often marginalized, and their valuable contributions to society are overlooked. At the University of Minnesota, the state's first age-friendly university, we are committed to engaging lifelong learners, retirees, and older Minnesotans through meaningful conversation and camaraderie. Imagine Funds will help support the 2025 Age-Friendly University Day, a flagship event that will bring together more than 500 older adults to explore finding purpose in later life. This in-person event, held at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and streamed statewide, will unite the University community with older adults to promote an age-inclusive, intergenerational campus.

El Vaivén: 21st Century Art of Puerto Rico and Its Diaspora

Terez Iacovino, Assistant Curator, Katharine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

From September 9 through December 6, 2025, the Katherine E. Nash Gallery will present El Vaivén: 21st Century Art of Puerto Rico and Its Diaspora, a multidisciplinary exhibition, accompanying bilingual catalogue, and a series of related public programs, which explore the physical and psychological ebb and flow of decades of migration that has resulted in more persons of Puerto Rican descent living across the fifty United States than in Puerto Rico. For the run of the exhibition, related events will include an opening lecture with the exhibition curators and a traditional Afro-Puerto Rican Bomba drum and dance performance by Boriken Cultural Center (September 2025); a hybrid panel discussion with select exhibition artists based in Minnesota, Puerto Rico, and New York (October 2025); and a presentation and discussion with a local scholar on Minnesota’s Puerto Rican diaspora (November 2025).

Great World Texts, MN Student Conference

Lee Fisher, Director, Writing Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

The Great World Texts in Minnesota Student Conference connects high school teachers and students across the state with scholars at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities through the shared project of reading and discussing a classic piece of world literature. The Student Conference will bring together students from six participating schools to share their creative responses to the text and hear from distinguished speakers, including the text’s author. The conference provides high school students, their teachers, and community members an opportunity to think deeply about current social issues that connect them to each other and communities around the world. Great World Texts, MN, is a collaboration between the Minnesota Writing Project, University of Minnesota Libraries, University of Minnesota College Readiness Consortium, University of Minnesota English and Writing Studies Departments, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison Center for Humanities.

International Summer Institute for Reggae Studies 2025

Scott Currie, Associate Professor, Music, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Reggae music lovers unite! The University of Minnesota International Summer Institute for Reggae Studies (ISIRS) brings together outstanding artists, scholars, students, and community members for a week-long summit designed to foster the study and performance of reggae and related musical genres, as world-renowned cultural expressions of the Jamaican people that warrant greater academic attention and appreciation. Through an immersive daily schedule of scholarly lectures, moderated discussions, instrumental clinics, ensemble rehearsals, and jam sessions with acclaimed guest artists, ISIRS offers America’s first and only university-based program of intensive instruction in the art and techniques of reggae music. Join us as we immerse ourselves in Jamaican music history, instrumental/vocal conception, and ensemble performance—from roots, mento, ska, and rocksteady, to reggae, dancehall, raggamuffin, and beyond.

La Llorona: Exploring Human Rights and Justice for the Mayan Victims of the 1982–1983

Genocide in Guatemala with Jayro Bustamante
Edward Eiffler, Senior Teaching Specialist, Spanish and Portuguese Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

This event is a presentation and screening of the movie La Llorona (2019) by Guatemalan film director Jayro Bustamante. Mr. Bustamante, whose work focuses on human rights issues in Guatemala, is an award-winning director who has received wide attention in the international film festival circuit. He will present his work in general, but especially as it pertains to the truth commissions seeking justice for the victims of the genocidal civil war of the 1980s and ’90s. This movie focuses on the search for justice for the victims of atrocities committed during the conflict through the spirit of the Mayan people as personified by the folkloric character of La Lorona, even in the face of official efforts to indemnify the perpetrators. The audience will have the opportunity to participate during the event in the form of a panel discussion following the screening.

Mapping Parallel Trauma: The Colonized and Colonizers, an Indigenous-led Approach

Rebecca Krinke, Professor; Architecture, Landscape, and Interior Design; College of Design, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

This Imagine Faculty Research Grant will be used to fund an innovative, collaborative, interdisciplinary, and publicly engaged series of workshops on “Mapping Parallel Trauma.” This proposal builds on two years of our IAS Research Creative Collaborative, “Two-Eyed Seeing and Third Spaces” comprising three settlers in academia and three Indigenous community leaders. Partner Jewell Arcoren (behavioral health specialist, community artist-activist, and enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Nation) created the term “parallel trauma,” referring to the fact that both the colonized and colonizers suffer trauma from genocide, though clearly in different ways. Her thesis work in intergenerational trauma led Jewell to create and pilot the Mapping Parallel Trauma workshops with her long-time collaborator Onryu Laura Kennedy, a white, converted Buddhist settler on Dakota and Anishinaabe homelands.

Ports Festival of History

Steven Matthews, Associate Professor; History, Political Science, and International Studies; College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Minnesota Duluth

The fourth annual Twin Ports Festival of History runs April 2025 at multiple venues in Duluth and Superior. The event serves the diverse communities of northeastern Minnesota and northwestern Wisconsin. The festival shares lectures, artifacts, tours, performances, events, and multimedia exhibits with the public to encourage participants to reflect upon and share their heritage. The festival creates opportunities to listen and discuss topics with authors and historians of local, regional, national, and international renown.

Royal Shakespeare Company Residency

Margaret Werry, Chair and Associate Professor, Theatre Arts and Dance, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

In spring 2025, Theatre Arts and Dance will welcome artists from the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) for a five-day residency. The RSC is recognized globally for its daring and diverse productions, its reimagination of the Shakespearean legacy, and its world-class training programs that serve more than half a million young people and adults. We plan a series of public-facing events—a masterclass, training workshop, design panel, and screening—to make the artistry of this dynamic company available to the broader Twin Cities performing arts community. The goal is to spur dialogue about race, relevance, and activism in producing Shakespeare; offer a unique training opportunity to colleagues from less resourced institutions, including K–12 educators; disseminate theatrical techniques that enhance the accessibility of Shakespearean texts; and to build community with arts non-profits in the Twin Cities.

From Polarization to Solidarity: Activating Theatrical Dialogues on Health Care and Homelessness

Sonja Kuftinec, Professor, Theatre Arts and Dance, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Theater of the Oppressed (TO) activist Chen Alon will lead a three-day public workshop and four-week performance-making process with zAmya homeless/housed Theater and EqualHealth’s Campaign Against Racism (CAR). This event builds on a long-term collaboration between zAmya and CAR to identify health care disparities and co-create solutions through the interactive tools of Forum Theater. Alon will share principles and practices of TO to create scenes focused on public health challenges of being unhoused, including those with lived experience. The four-week process will develop these interactive “forum” scenes with zAmya ensemble members towards public performance. Invited stakeholders will include policy makers, health care workers, housing advocates, and those with lived experience of housing insecurity. The event builds on a successful template with TO expert Adrian Jackson in May 2024.

Climate Literacy Education Symposium

Nick Kleese, Education Specialist, Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

The Climate Literacy Education Symposium is a two-day event that will bring together teacher leaders, teacher-educators, school and district administrators, and community educators from across Minnesota to share insights, resources, and strategies for teaching climate literacy in preK–12 classrooms. The symposium uses engagement with stories, literature, and media—in short, the humanities—as a portal to advancing climate literacy education. The symposium itself will be held on Friday, May 8, 2026, in the President’s Room at Coffman Memorial Union. Over the course of six sessions, all eighteen Fellows from the Center for Climate Literacy’s inaugural Climate Literacy Teacher Leadership Fellowship Program will present the specific climate literacy curriculum they implemented in the 2025–2026 academic year. The following day, May 9, will feature a working meeting among all Fellows and invited community partners to be held in Peik Hall 330. Together, participants will reflect on the symposium and set goals for the upcoming year.

Place and Community in the Twin Ports

Jennifer Webb, Associate Professor; Art and Design; College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Minnesota Duluth

Join Ryan Smolar, Director of Placemaking US, at a series of events exploring the centrality of placemaking to community resilience. He will offer a public talk at the University of Minnesota Duluth that will focus on the connection between food, social infrastructure, and community resilience. In addition to this talk, his workshop for students will empower them to be catalysts for change in their own communities. Ryan’s second public talk will be at Zeitgeist Center for Arts and Community. This event connects with Zeitgeist’s ongoing programming that brings together members of the Twin Ports communities to imagine a brighter and stronger future that is designed for all.

Shades of Africa Festival

Rudy Perrault, Professor; Music; College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Minnesota Duluth

The “Shades of Africa Festival” was started in the fall of 2013 to celebrate African heritage in the Northland. As the population of the United States, including Minnesota, continues to shift towards a non-white majority, the need for BIPOC representation at all layers of our society becomes crucial. In the Minnesota Northland, there is still that fear of the “other,” the unknown stranger that looks different. The more we know about the “other,” the less we will be threatened by “them.” By presenting art and artists with African ancestry, the population of northern Minnesota will learn that not only is there incredible art coming from, and inspired by the African continent, but that many of the music, dance, graphics, and rituals that we/they have come to love and cherish have their origins in Africa and African traditions. Requested funds for this project will be used to bring in a variety of artists, a variety of voices, to the Minnesota Northland for the benefit of mending our fractured society. Our goal is to educate through entertainment and conversations. Expenses will cover artists’ fees, travel and hotel expenses, and promotional materials.

A Space for Community—Minnesota Movement @ Northrop

Carl Flink, Nadine Jette Sween Professor of Dance, Theatre Arts and Dance, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

The Minnesota dance community is one of the most vibrant in the United States. Recently, it has experienced significant changes like the closures of the Cowles Center for Dance, Zenon Dance Company, and Minnesota Dance Theater. In spring 2026, the University of Minnesota Dance Program will host the 2026 American College Dance Association North Central Regional Conference. In partnership with Northrop, the Dance Program will present the choreography of its faculty and a select group of area dancemakers for the conference’s opening event "Minnesota Moves." "Minnesota Moves" celebrates the still robust Minnesota dance scene, brings it regional and national attention, engages conference and local audiences, reveals how the dance program’s faculty are a vital engine for the scene, and builds bridges to local high school dance programs and dance studios with college dance programs.

Spatializing Reproductive Justice

Terresa Hardaway, Associate Professor, Design Innovation, College of Design, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Spatializing Reproductive Justice is a one-day forum for design researchers and practitioners, public health leaders, and policy makers to discuss the intersection of reproductive care and the built environment in a post-Roe world. The forum will feature two leaders in design and reproductive justice, Lori Brown (FAIA) and Jordan Kravitz (AIA), and a panel of local experts and facilitated conversations among participants to discuss the state of design for and limitations to establishment of reproductive care environments. The forum will be accompanied by the traveling exhibit “Spatializing Reproductive Justice,” a history and analysis of reproductive networks and strategies for countering threats to bodily autonomy. The event’s purpose is to educate, inspire, and connect designers with public health and policy for safe, equitable, and accessible reproductive care in their communities.

Eric Castle 

Associate Professor, Agriculture and Natural Resources Department

Perceptual Geographies in the Red River Valley of the North Project 

This project creates and engages visual interpretation(s) of the Red River Valley. The Imagine Fund Grant award of $1,000 supports regional travel for museum and gallery visits, outreach, and networking to facilitate this visual arts project’s potential to encourage collaboration in the areas of arts, humanities, and/or design.

Alison Aune 

The project will be the development of new paintings and the creation of a limited-edition exhibition booklet for the upcoming exhibition Colors from the North at the Prøve Gallery in Duluth during 2026.

Aparna Katre

The project is to create a short documentary to disseminate the research findings on local values-based food systems (VBFS), which will include the voices of farmers, community partners, and members. The documentary will make the research relevant for the region and suggest actions others and policymakers could take to improve food access.

Christopher Mason

This recording project, based on research, will allow the awardee to conduct and record choral music from Baroque Latin America with a focus on the repertoire written for Mexico City Cathedral in the eighteenth century.

Cindy Rugeley

This project supports the development of a domestic research and study experience for UMD students interested in political science and journalism to visit presidential libraries and museums in the Midwest and Southern United States. [In collaboration with Jennifer Moore]

David Beard

I will build on past work in rural health and rural technology to collect data and stories about communication in rural Minnesota.

David Woodward

In collaboration with the Maya Area Cultural Heritage Initiative (MACHI) and the Julian Cho Society, the project seeks to engage with various stakeholders in the Toledo District of Belize to comprehensively interpret and preserve Maya heritage. The project will lay the foundation to develop interpretative narratives surrounding local archaeological sites, heritage sites, and document oral traditions passed down through generations to be used by the community to preserve and highlight their culture.

Elizabethada Wright 

With the recent “masking” of memorials dedicated to people of color and to women at the National Cryptology Museum, the issue of how parts of history are repressed and subsequently uncovered becomes of particular importance. This project builds on earlier work regarding memorialization to repressed peoples by doing a comparative analysis of memorialization regarding histories of enslavement and of the repression of native peoples.

Jenna Soleo-Shanks

This performance-based research project investigates the theatrical staging potential of the plays of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, a tenth-century canoness and playwright whose dramas represent the first dramatic literature after antiquity—and the first plays authored by a woman.

Jennifer Gordo

This project seeks to understand the landscape of Indian design through observation and interviews with hopes to discover how Indian design is both uniquely Indian and informed by design in the West—and how it has improved the lives of people.

Jennifer Moore

This project supports the development of a domestic study experience for students interested in political science, public history, and journalism to visit presidential libraries and museums in the Midwest and Southern United States. [In collaboration with Cindy Rugeley]

John Schwetman

This project studies the small-screen depictions of literature's long arcs and sweeping vistas of the US West.

Justin Rubin

I have been collaborating with Spanish cellist Carlos Vidal and Brazilian pianists Márcio Bezerra and Estibaliz Gastesi to craft my new multi-movement composition, titled Un Pavana y una Calata—Fantasía para el Maestro de la Luz, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida. This original composition is based on melodic fragments by the Renaissance musician Luis de Milán (c. 1500–c. 1561) from his collection Libro de Música de Vihuela de mano published in Valencia in 1536.

Maryam Khalegi Yazdi 

Through the art of quilting and storytelling, I propose a project that captures the strength and hope of communities in the Midwest as they navigate climate challenges.

Matt Dingler

Extant literature critiquing the dominant paradigm of K–12 economics education identifies curricular standards and instructional approaches that fail to directly address America's prevailing social problems of wealth inequality, poverty, and environmental destruction. This project takes the form of a workshop hosting Minnesota pre-service and in-service secondary social studies teachers who indicate a desire to learn more about critical, pluralistic approaches to economics education and implement attendant practices in their classrooms.

Matthew Olin

Album ARTificial is a multisensory art installation that explores the intersection of human creativity and artificial intelligence through storytelling, music, and visual design. This project leverages generative AI to reinterpret a single song across multiple genres while simultaneously generating corresponding album artwork and other visual elements.

Natalie Belsky

The project is an urban history of the city of Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan and the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic during the Soviet period. The project seeks to understand the city’s evolution through political, social, economic, and environmental lenses.

Paul Cannan

How did Shakespeare, regarded in late seventeenth-century England as a popular but flawed playwright, become a century later SHAKESPEARE the National Poet? My book-length study challenges existing assumptions by investigating the numerous attempts, from John Benson’s "Poems: Written by Wil. Shakespeare. Gent." (1640) to Malone’s "Plays and Poems" (1790), to package Shakespeare’s poetry and to fashion Shakespeare as a poet.

Paula Derdiger

My second book manuscript, Thresholds of War: Transnational Cultures of World War II, asks what we can learn from wartime texts that involve explicit border crossings. The book investigates a set of wartime texts that deliberately combine disparate aesthetic conventions or media; these texts, likewise, are produced by writers, artists, and filmmakers with notably hybrid, transnational identities and experiences.

Paula Gudmundson

Researching, performing, and recording works by Edith Borroff.

Ryan Bergstrom

This study will highlight how the intersection of historical events, contemporary municipal readiness, and public support in Sweden make this the ideal time for climate adaptation action.

Ryan Loken

This project will challenge and expand the traditional role of the Cajón, incorporating tabla-inspired phrasing, dynamic percussive textures, and the expressive fluidity of raga improvisation.

Susan Maher

"Authoring Landscapes: Literary Pilgrimage in the Interior of North America" is a work of narrative scholarship, a roadtrip venture to home sites of authors Laura Ingalls Wilder, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner, William Inge, and Horton Foote. The cross-section of visitors to places like Red Cloud, Nebraska; Walnut Grove, Minnesota; Eastend Saskatchewan; Independence, Kansas; and Wharton, Texas are drawn to them for varied reasons: nostalgia, critical interest, television and film (e.g. Little House on the Prairie; Inge's play-to-film versions of Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, Bus Stop, and Dark at the Top of the Stairs; PBS' presentation of Foote's The Orphans' Home Cycle), curiosity, and scholarly commitment, among others.

Bernabe Jorge

This project permits me to participate in the Band Director Academy at Jazz at Lincoln Center, which provides an invaluable educational experience that immerses educators in the rich tradition and innovation of jazz.

Sarah Buchanan

Short-Circuited Identity in Georgette! by Farida Belghoul

Sarah Buchanan will be traveling to Cape Town, South Africa, to present at the prestigious Congrès International d’Études Francophones (CIEF), where the paper, “Identité court-circuitée dans Georgette ! de Farida Belghoul,” will be featured. Drawing from psychoanalysis and ideology theory, Sarah's presentation—based on a forthcoming book chapter—analyzes the novel’s young protagonist as she navigates conflicting identities imposed by her immigrant father and French schoolteacher. She argues that this ideological clash forces her to hide behind shifting masks until they are stripped away, triggering a psychotic break that leaves her suspended between two irreconcilable worlds.

Mark Collier

The La Flèche Library Project: A Digital Humanities Approach to Hume's Intellectual Context

Mark Collier's project investigates the largely unexplored influence of the Jesuit College of La Flèche’s library on Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, who studied there before writing A Treatise of Human Nature. Using more than 900 digitized texts from the library’s original catalogue, researchers will apply AI-driven language analysis and graph-based visualization to uncover thematic and rhetorical links between these works and Hume’s writings. The study, conducted in collaboration with teams at the University of Quebec in Montreal and the University of Central Florida, seeks to reveal new insights into the intellectual currents that shaped Hume’s philosophy.

Dan Demetriou

Partner Selection and Nation

Dan Demetriou is developing a series of articles examining the ethical dimensions of romantic choices and their broader societal impacts. His past work addresses topics such as the bifurcated mating market’s cultural consequences, the moral duties of women war refugees in relation to national survival, and the social meaning of “creepiness” in dating norms. His upcoming essays will explore how ethnic and religious endogamy affects social cohesion and policy (“Fight, Fuck, Flee”) and how high-consumption lifestyles influence male desirability and environmental messaging (“The Problem of High Consumption Men”). He plans to present this work at major conferences to refine it before publication.

Ann DuHamel

2025 International Concert Tour—England 

Ann DuHamel will be traveling to London and Oxford in July 2025 for performances and presentations connected to her research and creative work. She plans to present “Piano, Electronics, and Eco-Poetry in Judith Shatin’s ‘Plain Song’” at the Eco-poetics and Environmental Artivism 2025 conference in London, following prior performances and an upcoming recording of the piece. In Oxford, she will return as an invited High Table speaker/performer at Trinity College, presenting a program drawn from her current projects, which may include works by Chopin, Brahms-inspired pieces, or new commissions on climate change. She is also exploring opportunities to add additional concerts during her UK visit.

Julie A. Eckerle

Tracing Dorothy Calthorpe's Authorial Choices...in Other People's Books

Julie A. Eckerle’s project examines a newly discovered seventeenth-century manuscript by Englishwoman Dorothy Calthorpe, focusing on an autobiographical fiction that incorporates phrases and sentences from three other contemporary works. While such borrowing was common at the time, Calthorpe’s intricate “cut and paste” method is unusual. Eckerle plans to study surviving copies of these source texts—beginning with those in England and Scotland—for reader annotations that could reveal whether Calthorpe’s selected passages were also noted by others, ultimately offering deeper insight into her reading practices and creative decisions.

Michael Lackey 

Asian Biofiction

Michael Lackey’s project explores the understudied field of Asian biofiction—novels that name their protagonists after real people—through research on Uzbek author Javlon Jovliyev’s Do Not Be Afraid and Chinese author Hong Ying’s K: The Art of Love. As part of a larger Bloomsbury book project featuring interviews with international biofiction authors, Lackey will collaborate with scholars from across Asia, travel to Uzbekistan and China for site-specific research, and investigate how these writers transform historical figures into metaphors for broader human realities.

Jennifer Rothchild

Gendered Experiences of Death and Dying

Jennifer Rothchild’s project collects oral histories from Midwestern women about their experiences of grief after caring for sick or dying loved ones. She examines how cultural, religious, philosophical, and familial beliefs shape coping strategies, and how gendered expectations influence women’s roles even during mourning. By situating these personal narratives within broader social, political, and economic contexts, the book will illuminate how gender roles in death and dying are socially constructed, fluid, and tied to larger patterns of power in American culture.

Nadezhda Sotirova 

Interference and democracy: The state of media literacy in Bulgaria

Nadezhda Sotirova’s project builds on prior comparative research on media literacy in Latvia, Bulgaria, and the United States by focusing in depth on Bulgaria. Using ethnographic methods—interviews, participant observation, and analysis of media content and policy documents—she will investigate how local media literacy institutions interpret and apply the concept, how authorities define “national enemies,” and how harmful media messages spread. Partnering with the Bulgarian Media Literacy Coalition during summer 2025, she will attend events, collect interviews, and analyze media and educational programs to reveal culturally specific understandings of media and their impact on public discourse.

College of Design

Gail Dubrow (Architecture) 

Creating Deaf Spaces in America: Architectural Innovations and Vernacular Inventions in the Progressive Era 

This project will document the lives and careers of the earliest deaf and hard-of-hearing (HoH) architects who practiced in the United States between 1880 and 1930, and investigate inventions that applied adaptive technologies to existing buildings used by deaf and hard-of-hearing people in the same era. These areas of inquiry offer insight into deaf agency through design in the Progressive Era by documenting the shift from personal medical devices to modifications of the built environment that made space for deafness as a normative condition, emphasizing visual and tactile rather than aural senses. Collectively, these designers, inventors, and ordinary users of the built environment imagined and ushered in deaf futures long before laws or public policies mandated equal access to public spaces for people with disabilities.

Jessica Rossi-Mastracci (Landscape Architecture) 

Resilient Infrastructures: Land-Based Infrastructures For Climate Change Adaptation 

Various landscape interventions that use local or on-site materials and simple construction techniques can be combined to create adaptable land-based infrastructures capable of modifying ecological, hydrological, and urban systems and increasing resilience. This project will document and disseminate more than 90 detailed drawings and descriptions of land-based infrastructure, creating a practical tool for designers to gather information on, locate, and effectively integrate land-based infrastructures into design work.

Ji Youn Shin (Product Design) 

Designing Safe and Ethical Technologies for Pediatric Care in Long-Term Hospitalization 

Pediatric chronic illness care commonly requires long-term hospitalization and follow-up. This can make addressing the socioemotional needs of young patients important and challenging. Large Language Model (LLM)-based chatbots have shown promise for providing comfort and engagement to patients and caregivers in chronic illness care, but these technologies remain largely unexplored in pediatrics. This project will design and test LLM-enabled technologies for pediatric caregiving, developed with input from end users to address the socioemotional needs of pediatric patients and their caregivers in healthcare settings and prioritize ethical, safe, and age-appropriate engagement for young children.

Brad Holschuh (UX Design) 

Animalia Technologia: Wearable Technologies to Calm Anxious House Pets 

Anxious pets can get non-pharmaceutical comfort and relief from garments designed to provide a passive, calming compression. However, these “low-tech” solutions suffer from limitations also seen in human-focused haptic garments, including habituation during prolonged use and lack of just-in-time stimulus delivery. This project will develop and deploy garment-based technologies and remotely-controllable thermal and compression systems designed specifically for housepets with anxiety issues to provide real-time, remote emotional support.  

Karen Lutsky (Landscape Architecture) 

Resilient Design through Landscape Management 

What if the design of landscapes was more fundamentally tied to the management of landscapes? This project aims to develop new resilient landscape approaches that are culturally/contextually engaged, adaptable, use less energy, and create less waste. Two sites will serve as case studies of successful “management as design”: the 1,500-year-old Usuzumi-zakura Cherry Tree and adjacent Usuzumino Mori Forest, and the contemporary Girona’s Shores.

Lucy Dunne (Apparel Design) 

A Better Future for T-Shirts: Reclaiming A High-Impact Source of Textile Waste 

What happens to unwanted novelty graphic tees, like those from sporting events and political campaigns? Many are donated, but most second-hand clothing donated from the United States is exported to other countries where up to 40 percent ends up as trash. This project uses an iterative design process to translate craft-based methods for removing graphics to batch processes that enable scalable reuse and recycling of graphic tees.

College of Liberal Arts:

Cawo Abdi (Sociology)

Public Education Quagmire and Refugee Families: The Somali Experience in Minnesota

This book project examines how recent refugee communities such as Somalis are partaking in the educational choice debate and by asking how new migrant and refugee communities relate to public institutions such as the education system and the role that their racial, religious, and class positions play in their dealings with these institutions. The aim is to advance our sociological understanding of structural inequalities that are embedded within our education system as well as the dilemmas around school choice and whether this expansion opens up new democratic spaces or simply more segregated ones.

Llana Barber (Immigration History Research Center)

Dark Waters: Centering Black Experiences in US Immigration History

Immigration history is vibrantly attuned to race and ethnicity and yet, within this rich field, Black immigrants are nearly absent. The vivid experiences of voluntary and forced migrants from Africa and its diaspora are inexplicably considered beyond the purview of immigration history. This exclusion denies us a full understanding of not only Black immigrant experiences, but also of the ways in which anti-Black racism has shaped nativism, xenophobia, and immigrant restriction. This edited volume will examine the long history of Black immigration to the United States, as well as Black experiences of nativism, exclusion, controlled mobility, and precarious citizenship.

Leslie Barlow (Art)

Us, Becoming

“Us, Becoming" is a multidisciplinary research-based art project exploring speculative identities, liminality, and radical joy through painting and participatory storytelling. Engaging communities within and beyond academic spaces, this project investigates the ways in which identity is constructed, expanded, and celebrated through embodied storytelling, collaboration, and costume. “Us, Becoming" collides “cosplay” subculture with the practice of portrait painting and addresses both the frictions and complexities of Black representation in nerd culture and the possibilities that come from imaginative play and speculative fiction. This faculty research grant will support material costs, community engagement efforts, and the development of new works for exhibition.

Lisa Channer (Theatre Arts and Dance)

An Ocean Away, a new play and film about Ukrainians in Minnesota

An Ocean Away is a new documentary play being created by me and my collaborator the playwright Andrei Kureichik. It is created from interviews with Minnesotans who have roots in Ukraine and the post-Soviet diaspora. An Ocean Away will premiere in the fall of 2025 and the following year a documentary film about the making of the play and the community members who were interviewed for it will premiere. I am director of both the plays and the films and this will be the completion of a four-year arc of my research and work on this subject.

Carl Flink (Theatre Arts and Dance)

The Mother—A Punk Rock Musical for Our Times

Twin Cities theater artist Luverne Seifert, composer/actor Annie Enneking, and dancemaker Carl Flink join forces with other local artists and UMN Theatre Arts and Dance students to create THE MOTHER, a punk rock musical for our times. Inspired by Maxim Gorky's novel Mother about the first unsuccessful revolution against Russia's power elite in 1905, the creative team will develop and present a first full draft of THE MOTHER at the C.S.P.S Hall in St. Paul, MN, a National Registry of Historic Places building. The musical is under consideration by Theater Latté Da in Minneapolis to premiere during its 2026–27 season.

Cindy Garcia (Theatre Arts and Dance)

Dollmaking and Decolonization: Networking our Futures in Tepotzlán

Contours ArteCalle, a collaborative performance and publication project based at the University of Minnesota, has been invited by an arts collaborative in Mexico to join them for dollmaking workshops in the pueblos around Tepotzlán. We will exchange arts techniques with local artists, youth, and anyone with a desire to participate. These artistic exchanges will expand our relationship-building networks in Mexico and open the door for interested participants to contribute to the third edition of Contours ArteCalle: Transnational Feminist Futures, through both digital and live performative offerings such as exhibits, dances, music, and storytelling.

Danni Gilbert (Music)

Measuring Joy: Reevaluating Music Education Assessment for Social Justice

The purpose of this qualitative, case-study, action-research project is to identify an alternative approach to music education assessment that includes measurements of social-emotional learning (SEL), student joy, and wellbeing, rather than meeting content-specific, standards-based benchmarks alone. Standardization in curricula means targeting majority benchmarks, which can actually increase disparities for students already at a disadvantage and is problematic from a social-justice lens. The outcomes of using SEL assessments could inform teaching practices and communicate the positive benefits of musical participation to stakeholders.

Raven Johnson (Art)

Ruby: Portrait of a Black Teen in an American Suburb

The Imagine Fund will support the hiring of five production assistants to work on my debut feature film, Ruby: Portrait of a Black Teen in an American Suburb, slated for production in summer 2026. This coming-of-age drama explores Black girlhood, friendship, and identity amid the George Floyd protests and COVID-19 pandemic. If full funding is not secured, resources from the grant will support a 10-minute proof of concept film to attract additional financing. This grant will provide emerging filmmakers with hands-on experience, career training, and mentorship while advancing independent, regional cinema in MN.

Chris Larson (Art)

Method/Practice

Method/Practice is an artist-made, collaborative journal of investigative long-form interviews aimed at revealing the often invisible intricacies hidden within the practices and processes of local and regional visual artists. We focus on habits and counter-habits, strategies, processes, dead-ends, failures, tentative movements, tangents, underlying currents, ambiguities, and the fundamental values that guide decision-making in the creative process. Our team of artists will publish one new issue featuring conversations with three individual artists every six months.

Hiromi Mizuno (History)

Valuating Damages: Critical History of Green Ammonia

Hydropower has been criticized because of social and environmental damages that dams cause, but scholars have not looked at hydropower’s major consumer, the chemical fertilizer industry. Although forgotten, hydroelectricity powered the chemical fertilizer industry in food-insecure countries with little fossil fuels well into the 1960s. Hydro-powered fertilizer manufacturing is now promoted again as “green.” This two-year project critically examines the history of hydro developmentalism in the twentieth century through the chemical fertilizer industry and aims to complicate and advance the existing framework of social and environmental justice. The outcome will be a special journal issue and an accompanying GIS map.
 

Elliott Powell (American Studies)

Erotic City: Minneapolis, Prince, and the Porn Wars

This project examines the intertwined worlds of music and sex in Minneapolis during the 1980s. It places two things into conversation: 1) the 1980s transgressive gender and sexual play of Minneapolis-born artist Prince; and 2) feminist social justice organizing around pornography in Minneapolis during this same period. By bringing these two moments into intimate contact, I illustrate how we cannot understand Prince’s subversive gendered and sexual artistry in the 1980s without also taking into account local Minneapolis feminist organizing, and that histories of 1980s Minneapolis feminist politics on pornography are inadequate if they do not include engagements with Prince’s work.

Jessica Pretty (Theatre Arts and Dance)

Producing “call and response,” an interdisciplinary performance project, at the Red Eye Theater

In December 2025, I will self-produce my performance project titled “call and response” at the Red Eye Theater in Minneapolis, a venue with a rich history of supporting performance work. Over three weeks, the production will include two weeks of technical rehearsals and five performances. This project explores Black life, community, memory, and belonging, examining how we gather, see, and connect with one another. With a team of collaborators and archivists, the work will serve as a living archive and love letter to community-building amidst systemic failure.

Jenny Schmid (Art)

Baby Witch: An Animation and Printmaking Project

Baby Witch explores historical notions of female power that reverberate at a crucial time of political rhetoric and restrictive health care. For this print and animation project I will research historical suppressions of bodily autonomy and sample and re-contextualize archival prints of midwifery and witchcraft to creatively respond to the current crisis in reproductive health care. The artwork will be exhibited and discussed in Chicago and Minneapolis and promoted for future exhibitions and major archival acquisitions.

Diane Willow (Art)

Drifters in the Intimate Immensity of Change

Drifters in the Intimate Immensity of Change proposes a sensory media portrait of plankton that brings our human imagination in close proximity to these minute ocean dwelling organisms. The context for considering the Drifters and ourselves is the immensity of global warming and climate change. Plankton are sensitive to and also modulators of these large-scale phenomena. While eliciting subtle ways that we might experience empathy with these more than human life forms, an immersive and participatory art environment will invite people into a poetic and visceral awareness of plankton and of themselves.

2024-26 Chair: Carl Flink (Theatre Arts and Dance, College of Liberal Arts)

Carl Flink is the UMN Dance Program’s director and its Jette Sween Professor of Dance. He is also the artistic director of the award-winning Minnesota-based dance company Black Label Movement. Flink’s dancemaking is recognized for its intense athleticism, daring, and humanistic themes. Commissioned by the 2014 and 2024 American Dance Festivals, other projects/commissions include: MADCO (St. Louis, MO), Bates Dance Festival (Lewiston, ME), TED, TEDMED, TEDxBrussels, The Guthrie Theater (Minneapolis, MN), VocalEssence (Minneapolis, MN), The Minnesota Orchestra, and Theater Latté Da (Minneapolis, MN), among many others. During the 1990s, he was a member of the Limón Dance Company in New York City. Flink also has a 14-year collaboration with UMN biomedical engineering professor David Odde called the Moving Cell Project. He holds a JD from Stanford Law School, a UMN Political Science and Women Studies BA summa cum laude, and was a social justice attorney for Farmers’ Legal Action Group, Inc., St. Paul, MN from 2001–2004. Flink is a recipient of CLA's Motley Exemplary Teaching Award and its 2020 Dean's Award.

BEING FUTURE BEING: Multidisciplinary Actions with Choreographer and Indigenous Rights Advocate Emily Johnson

This deeply collaborative two-year research project engages Emily Johnson, a leading Indigenous activist—and University of Minnesota alum—in a co-designed, multi-scalar initiative that demonstrates the transformative possibilities of performance practices rooted in justice and the civil and sovereign rights of humxn and more-than-humxn kin. The project, which centers the body as an essential medium for addressing complex and charged issues and questions, will include multiple performance happenings created and produced in collaboration with the Northrop, George Morrison Center for Indigenous Arts, and The Department of Theatre Arts & Dance; a hybrid undergraduate course built around Emily Johnson and her dance company Catalyst's Decolonization Rider; and a symposium created in thought partnership with Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists as an active process of re-worlding.

Fall 2023

• Mirrors of Oblivion (photographic exhibit)

Ofelia Ferran, Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities

This event features the world premiere of an exhibit by Spanish photographer Espe Pons (Barcelona, 1973) entitled “Mirrors of Oblivion” at the University of Minnesota Coffman Gallery in Spring 2024. “Mirrors of Oblivion” combines two previous photographic essays by Pons: Sota la llum del mar (Under the Light of the Sea) (2019) and Tierra (Earth) (2023). Both are part of a larger long-term research/art project by the artist through which she explores personal memory and traces collective memory in Spain, while at the same time intending to dignify the victims of the mass violence imposed throughout the country by the fascist military regime of Francisco Franco (1939-1975) after the Spanish Civil War. In these two projects, Pons photographs landscapes and spaces, as they are today, that are connected to Franco’s political repression. Her projects honor the memory of all those killed by the regime, and they reflect on the legacies of that violence, even in spaces where there are apparently no traces of it. 
 

• John Quincy Adams and the Subterraneans: A Public Concert Performance of a New Opera

Wes Flinn, Associate Professor of Music, Humanities Division, University of Minnesota–Morris
 

• Thinking In Community: Universities and Power Through Research and Practice

Yalile Suriel, Assistant Professor, Department of History, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities

Universities and Power is a community-engaged, two-day symposium that brings together archivists, public historians, student activists, and scholars to discuss the impact that universities have had and continue to have on issues of inequality, diversity, and justice. Over the course of the symposium, participants—who will both be invited and selected from a broader call for presentations—will engage with local communities on what paths should be pursued for equity going forward. The symposium, hosted at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, will feature nationally known keynote speakers, local student voices, and lively discussion that will enrich those interested in not just traditional research, but also pedagogy, mentoring, archives, activism, and reparative action.
 

• The Global Reach of Local Activism: Minnesota’s Human Rights Stories

Carrie Walling, Executive Director, Human Rights Program, Institute for Global Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities

The opening of “The Global Reach of Local Activism: Minnesota’s Human Rights Stories” exhibition in February 2024 at the Elmer L. Andersen Library will publicly introduce the newly established Minnesota Human Rights Archive (MHRA). The purpose of MHRA is to inspire and empower humanities scholars and those working in the field of human rights by chronicling the successes and challenges of the past. The exhibit and the public event to launch it represent MHRA’s commitment to make these collections accessible to the public. The exhibition is organized around women’s rights, racial justice, and anti-torture. The launch event will include a keynote speaker to reflect on the significance of Minnesota human rights activism to the international human rights movement and the importance of archives for human rights and justice work. The MHRA will provide a variety of benefits for research, education, and public engagement to faculty, staff, and students, researchers, human rights activists, community members, and impacted communities.
 

• Theatrical Jazz: Past + Present + Future

Margaret Werry, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre Arts and Dance, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities

The University of Minnesota, with Pillsbury House and Theater and a national network of

colleagues, will host a three-day conference in June 2024 to share, record, study, and honor the legacy of radical Black practitioners of theatrical jazz. The conference will include free, public-facing performances, keynotes, and workshops, as well as sessions dedicated to intergenerational knowledge sharing and archival gathering. The conference will build dialogue among practitioners, theaters, and academics in and beyond the Twin Cities dedicated to racial justice. It will also create opportunities for emerging artists and students to engage with established practitioners of this important art form, raise the national visibility of the Twin Cities and U of M as centers of Black theatrical innovation, and combat the marginalization and erasure of BIPOC narratives from the American stage and academia by creating an archive that will sustain the legacy and future of theatrical jazz as a vital performance practice.

Spring 2024

• Resilience and Resistance: The Art of Disability Justice in Minnesota

Angela Carter, Associate Director for Racial and Social Justice Education, Office of Equity and Diversity

“Resilience and Resistance” is a community-curated exhibition to open at The Mill City Museum on July 18th, 2024 for a three-month run. The exhibition is inspired by the principles of disability justice and foregrounds the leadership and experiences of community members who have been most marginalized from the mainstream disability rights movements. Uplifting the voices of multiply-marginalized disabled folk and spotlighting the work of nearly ten disabled Minnesota artists, “Resilience and Resistance” seeks to break down the divide between the University of Minnesota academic community and local Minnesota organizers. Debuting during Disability Pride Month, this free and public event will draw together communities from both inside and outside the University of Minnesota and is a collaboration between artists, activists, and community organizers from AmplifyMN: A Disability Justice Collective; University of Minnesota graduate and undergraduate students; University faculty and staff from multiple university units; and the Minnesota Historical Society.
 

• 2024 Indigenous Design Camp

Jessica Garcia Fritz, Assistant Professor, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Interior Design, College of Design, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities

The first Indigenous Design Camp for Indigenous youth (grades 9-12), hosted jointly by University of Minnesota’s College of Design (CDES) and the Dunwoody School of Design (DSOD) will be held in summer 2024. Although previous design camps have been hosted by both institutions, neither have directly focused on Indigenous representation in design. The Indigenous Design Camp intends to connect current Indigenous designers and educators with Indigenous youth to better integrate Indigenous knowledge and culture into design pedagogies and curricula and to create more accessible pathways into design education and professional practices. Through the experience and design practice-based dialogues, our goal is to encourage Indigenous youth to see a place for themselves in exploring knowledge and culture, and entering higher education through creative design professions.
 

• BLK ART in MINNEAPOLIS

Dwight K Lewis Jr., Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities

“BLK ART in MINNEAPOLIS” is an exhibition of Black artists in the Twin Cities organized by Dr. Greenberg (Art History) and Dr. Lewis (Philosophy) in collaboration with the Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota. The exhibition will be curated in collaboration with undergraduate students participating in curatorial courses, culminating in a November art exhibition at the Quarter Gallery. The courses and exhibition focus on local Black art, artists, and narratives while providing a platform for local Black artists, fostering a deeper appreciation of their work at the University of Minnesota and in the local community. The exhibition also seeks to promote cultural inclusivity and awareness at the University, bridging gaps between communities. Our aim is to give non-Black students and visitors from the Twin Cities community the opportunity to look behind the veil of Blackness, with the hope of inviting each visitor to be an essential part of MLK’s “Dream.”
 

• TRACES

Lynn Lukkas, Professor, Department of Art, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities

Throughout her storied career, French artist Sophie Calle (b. 1953) has made a name for herself through a wide range of controversial and famous feats. In recent years, much of her work has reckoned with death, its resonance only increasing in the context of COVID-19 and the polarization of United States politics. TRACES is an interdisciplinary, multifaceted, community-engaged project that brings faculty and students from multiple University of Minnesota departments together with professional artists from Minnesota and New York, plus local community partners including the Walker Art Center, Playwrights’ Center, and Hennepin County Libraries to present a unique immersive site-specific performance, video installation, and website inspired by the life, oeuvre, and widespread influence of Calle. TRACES will be presented by the Walker Art Center as part of their 2024-25 performing arts season, in partnership with their major exhibition “Sophie Calle: Overshare” in October/November 2024.
 

• Art and Artifact: Murals from the Minneapolis Uprising

Howard Oransky, Director, Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities

The exhibition “Art and Artifact: Murals from the Minneapolis Uprising” will be presented at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, September 10–December 7, 2024. The exhibition is a collaboration with the community organization Memorialize the Movement (MTM), founded in 2020 by Leesa Kelly, to collect and preserve murals that appeared across the Twin Cities after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis Police on May 25, 2020, and curated by Amira McLendon (BA, Department of Art, University of Minnesota, 2024) who has served as an intern at MTM for two years and at the Nash Gallery for one year. The exhibition will consist of 60 murals, the largest gathering of the murals ever presented in a gallery exhibition. The catalog will include images of 100 murals and several essays. 
 

• Shades of Africa Festival

Jean Perrault, Professor and Director of Orchestras, School of Music, University of Minnesota–Duluth

The Shades of Africa Festival is an annual music event offered by the School of Music at the University of Minnesota–Duluth. The first performance of the Shades of Africa (SoA) Festival took place in spring 2013, to celebrate African heritage in the Minnesota northland. Initially, the SoA was a music festival that centered on the influence of Africa and African culture on the music of other civilizations and cultures. The SoA Festival features BIPOC artists as performers, composers of African descent, and compositions inspired by African culture. After 10+ years, the SoA Festival is ready to branch out into other art forms and become a multidisciplinary festival. The 2025 SoA plans to offer opportunities to learn about ritual drumming, storytelling and dance. 
 

• Violence and the Shifting Politics of Knowledge Production in the Middle East

Sima Shakhsari, Associate Professor, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities

This symposium, Violence and the Shifting Politics of Knowledge Production in the Middle East, will take place May 6 and 7, 2024 at Walter Library and the Art Department building. The symposium will host conversations about how violence affects gendered lives in the Middle East by addressing state violence, economic violence, colonial violence, and the violence of local patriarchies, military interventions, refugee regimes, and human rights. It will feature an international, interdisciplinary roster of speakers and artists, and is aimed at students, faculty, and the larger community, with an expected overall attendance of 400. The event will also include an art exhibition/performance by the local Iranian artist Katayoun Amjadi, a film screening by local community partner Mizna, and a musical performance.
 

• Kumbayah: The Juneteenth Story

Maria Vorhis, Engagement Manager, Northrop, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities

Rose McGee’s Kumbayah: The Juneteenth Story, presented in collaboration by Northrop and the Minnesota Humanities Center (MHC), offers a unique opportunity for campus and community members to deepen their understanding of the significance of Juneteenth as a national holiday, and to spark meaningful dialogue about racial justice and our collective role in creating a more equitable future. Building upon the play’s 30-year history in the community, Northrop and MHC are thrilled to co-create this unique opportunity to bring students, educators, and community together to understand society’s social unrest through a historical lens. Through a two-act, 90-minute stage production sharing the story of Juneteenth, conversations around critical social and racial issues with community leaders, actors, and activists, the intersections between story, history, and our present become more defined. A core aspect of this partnership is its reciprocity, with both Northrop and Minnesota Humanities Center bringing crucial resources, audiences, and committed efforts to leverage the power of live performance as a catalyst for dialogue and social change.
 

• Prince on Screen: Images and Ideology: An Academic and Fan Conference

Crystal Wise, Assistant Professor, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities

Prince on Screen: Images and Ideology, a two-day academic and fan conference, will engage scholars and the public on the impact of Prince’s moving image. The goal of the project is to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Prince Rogers Nelson's debut film Purple Rain as well as his other filmed output. The project will focus on advancing academic scholarship and creative works that focus on Prince’s moving image presence, which is an under-explored aspect of his artistic output. This is not a traditional academic conference as we seek to host an interactive conference in June of 2024 that is open to the public and will feature panels, presentations, a film club (launched on the first day of the conference and subsequent meetings will run virtually on a bi-monthly basis), and a bus tour of key filming sites featured in the movie. Additionally, we aim to produce a peer-reviewed, academic publication of select presentations from the conference and online archive. The events are free and open to the public.

University of Minnesota–Crookston 

Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education Department

• Danielle Johannesen, Card-based Learning in Lower-Division College Writing Courses
   

University of Minnesota–Duluth 

College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences

• Alison Aune, Swedish Folk Art: Paintings, Textiles, and Hemslöjd
• Sara Blaylock, Archiving the DIY Feminist Movement
• Jen Brady, Beyond Pontevedra: From Practicing to Theorizing Placemaking in Spain Today
• Paul Cannan, Fashioning Shakespeare as a Poet 
• David Edmund, Sustainable Music Education in a Caribbean Community: An Embodiment of Social, Cultural, and Educational Values
• Qiang Fang, Selective Adoption of Ancient Legalism: Xi Jinping's Policies 
• Robert Frane, European Jazz and Musical Collaboration
• John Hatcher, Cultivating Change: Empowering Marginalized Voices Through Agricultural Storytelling
• Ryan Loken, Diverse Repertoires: Cello and Percussion Recordings
• Gideon Mailer, Beyond Beringia: Myth, History, and the Arctic Variant
• Kathryn Milun, The Solar Commons Research Project 
• David Syring, Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network Sites and the Humanities
• Shannon Walsh, Responding to Violence Against Women in Costa Rica  
• Jennifer Webb, Urban Planning and Public Spaces: The Da Varano Dynasty

University of Minnesota–Morris 

Humanities Division

• Stacey Aronson, Early Modern Spanish Recipes for Good Health
• Priyanka Basu, In the Aftermath: Haunted Landscapes in Contemporary Experimental and Artists’ Film
• Adam Coon, Yankuik ixtlachijchiualistli / Forging New Faces: Nahua Activism in Mexican Education, 1921-2021
• Dan Demetriou, Civil War Commemoration Given Secessionist Anxieties
• Ann DuHamel, Solo Piano Work “Endless Rain”—Commissioning Reinaldo Moya  
• Julie Eckerle, Virginia Archival Research on Early Modern Englishwomen
• Elliot James, AAA: An African/American Interrogation of Britain’s Black Cab
• Michael Lackey, African American Biofictionalists Abroad
• Jimmy Schryver, Study Season on MacDermott's Rock
• Ray Schultz, Performance Project: Austin Shakespeare’s Jane Eyre
• Simon Tillier, Idiomatic Performance of Contemporary British Wind Music
• Yulene Velásquez, Music at the Center of the River

University of Minnesota–Twin Cities 

College of Design

• Secil Binboga, Designers, Diversions, Delusions: Visualizing Land as Infrastructure
• Elizabeth Bye, Designing Transformable Apparel for Longevity
• Gail Dubrow, Following in the Footsteps of America’s First Deaf Architect: Tracing Olof Hanson’s Grand Tour of London
• Lucy Dunne, A Soft, Stretchable BiliOnesie
• Brad Holschuh, Remote Measurement of Garment Strain using Real-Time RGB Color Sensing
• Lisa Hsieh, Japanese Urban Space: Found in Translation
• May SunMin Hwang, Designing for Planned Obsolescence and Reconstruction: A Climate-Positive Approach to Using Concrete
• Lauren Kim, Hand-Me-Downs: Investigating Contamination Cues in Children’s Clothing
• Rebecca Krinke, Growing a Field Station Network
• Carlye Lauff, Evaluating the effectiveness of Octo: an educational toy to enhance support for families navigating congenital heart disease (CHD)
• Kristine Miller, Landscape Histories for Social Justice
• Eugene Park, Visualizing the Weisman’s American Art Collection
• Ji Youn Shin, A Design Probe Study with Hmong Farmers in Twin Cities: Exploring Design Opportunities for Farming Practices
• Benjamin J. Smith, More than Enough: The Ontology of Wilderness Huts
• Stephanie Zollinger, Let There Be Light: Documenting the Legacy of Stained-Glass Artisan Peter Dohmen

University of Minnesota–Twin Cities 

College of Liberal Arts

• Sophia Beal, A Roof of One’s Own: Feminism and Housing in Works by Brazilian Women Writers
• Bianet Castellanos, Tren Maya: Maya Communities and Megadevelopment Projects
• Sarah Chambers, Dominican Refugees to Cuba during the Haitian Revolution
• Ananya Chatterjea, Dreaming of dancing with you, in freedom
• Anna Clark, Moral Re-Armament: Cold War Cult or Racial Reconciler?
• Roy Cook, Christine Ladd-Franklin's Logic—Book Project
• Michael Goldman, Chronicles of a Global City
• Michal Kobialka, Staging Difficult Pasts
• Rachmi Diyah Larasati, In Tracing the Fade: Women's Narratives in Dance
• Mai Na Lee, The Hmong Kingdom At Dragon Capital: An Ethnic Alliance with U.S. Empire (1960-75)
• Hanne Levinson, The Use of the Bible in Contemporary Dystopian Literature
• Kym Longhi, Waking Miss Daisy
• Alice Lovejoy, Media for the “Modern” Child
• Michael Bennett McNulty, Making Philosophy of Science: The Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, 1953–1980
• S. Douglas Olson, Examination of three Greek manuscripts
• Laurie Ouellette, Wounded Citizenship: Women and True Crime
• Sonali Pahwa, Digital Performance and Immigrant Memory in Dubai
• Arun Saldanha, Prince from Minneapolis/A Materialist Theory of Race
• Suvadip Sinha, Cinema as Ruins, Ruins of Cinema
• Polly Szatrowski, Food sustainability language and stories in Japan and the US
• Igor Tchoukarine, Tourism Governance and the Making of Europe, 1900s-1960s
• Eva von Dassow, Dynamic Geography of the Ancient Near East
• Amit Yahav, Familiar Letters as Abolitionist Discourse
• Tetsuya Yamada, Mandala series
• Matthew Zefeldt, Pixelated Perspectives: Exploring Surface Textures in Contemporary Gaming

2023-25 Co-Chairs: Lorenzo Fabbri (French and Italian Studies, College of Liberal Arts) and Margaret Hennefeld (Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, College of Liberal Arts)

Maggie Hennefeld is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and McKnight Presidential Fellow at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia UP, 2018), an editor of the journal Cultural Critique (UMN Press) and of two volumes: Unwatchable (Rutgers UP, 2019) and Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (Duke UP, 2020). She is also a curator of the 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray set, Cinema’s First Nasty Women (Kino Lorber, 2022), which includes 99 archival feminist silent films. The project has been favorably reviewed by The New York Times, Silent London, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, Nitrateville, and Criterion. She has curated numerous silent film programs and festivals around the world in Italy, Mexico, Istanbul, London, Paris, Toronto, Los Angeles, Providence, New York, and throughout the Midwest.

Lorenzo Fabbri is Associate Professor and Director of Italian Studies in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He has published extensively in film studies and critical theory, with his work appearing in venues such as Screen, Diacritics, Res Publica, Critical Inquiry, and Radical Philosophy Review. His second book, Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon: Race-Making and Resistance in Fascist Italy is forthcoming with the University of Minnesota Press in 2023. A 2019-21 McKnight Land-grant Professor for his new project on “libertarian Fascism,” in Spring 2022 Lorenzo was a Distinguished Lecturer in Race and Ethnicity at the University of Toronto. From 2014 to 2019, Lorenzo programmed the Minneapolis-Saint Paul Italian Film Festival – as curator he hosted a series of community talkbacks with visiting filmmakers on the legacy of Italian colonialism in East Africa and created the “Building Bridges: Emerging Filmmaker Awards,” an initiative connecting artists from underrepresented backgrounds residing in Italy and Minnesota. 

Curating Diversity: Community Engagement through Film Programming 

This joint project will promote cultural education and social justice by screening rare, unseen, marginalized, and archival cinema at a range of venues across the Twin Cities and UMN campuses via two new film festivals: The Twin Cities Black Europe Film Festival and Il Cinema Ritrovato On Tour—Minneapolis. Fabbri’s project uses cinema to project a more diverse and inclusive understanding of contemporary Europe, as well as to inspire and empower local Black communities; Hennefeld’s project is dedicated to programming international archival films at cultural venues across the Twin Cities.

University of Minnesota–Twin Cities

• Kirsten Delegard, University of Minnesota Libraries; Department of History, College of Liberal Arts

Bridging Faultlines: Stories of Racism and Resistance 

“Bridging Faultlines” celebrated the launch of a new set of digital shorts created by Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) that was released in January 2023. These new “Jim Crow of the North stories” follow the ongoing impact of the partnership between Mapping Prejudice and its community collaborators; they serve as the next installment of Jim Crow of the North, the 2019 Emmy-award-winning documentary that introduced Mapping Prejudice to millions of viewers across the country. “Bridging Faultlines” screened the shorts, which were interspersed with performances by musicians and other artists who shared work related to housing justice in song and spoken word.

• Erin Durban, Anthropology, College of Liberal Arts

Queer and Trans* Ecologies Symposium

The Queer and Trans* Ecologies (QTE) Interdisciplinary Initiative hosted a symposium at the University of Minnesota March 23-25, 2023; the symposium advanced intersectional approaches to gender, sexuality, and the environment. Unlike a traditional academic symposium, the event included workshops (publishing, printmaking, fermenting, creative writing), art exhibits and performances, and trips to learn about local environmental justice efforts. More than two dozen established artists, activists, practitioners, and scholars from the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences gave presentations, participated on roundtables, and engaged in reflective conversations about the field of queer and trans* ecologies. The project’s goal was to foster dynamic interdisciplinary exchanges that cross-pollinate environmental justice efforts led by marginalized people.

• Margaret Hennefeld, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, College of Liberal Arts

Twin Cities Silent Film Project

This project brings archival silent film screenings to the Twin Cities, with an emphasis on programming events that facilitate dialogue between faculty/students at UMN in Moving Image and Media Studies (MIMS) and broader local film communities. With the support of the Imagine Fund, Hennefeld curated events throughout the Twin Cities over the past year, and teamed up with Arab Film Festival programmer Michelle Baroody to launch a new initiative called “Film Archives Without Borders.” Hennefeld is also working with an IAS Collaborative group on “Media Archives for the Future” to create future programming. Hennefeld will bring more archival films with live music to a range of new venues, sourcing digital scans of celluloid prints from all over the world, and continue the important work of community-building between the University and local film audiences.

• Jeanne Kilde, Religious Studies, College of Liberal Arts

Historic Artwork in a North Minneapolis Landmark;  Or, How Zodiac Paintings in a Former Synagogue Bridged the Jewish and Black Communities

This project will bring to public attention the unique, historic interior of the First Church of God in Christ (FCOGIC), which was erected in North Minneapolis in 1926 as Tifereth B'nai Jacob. The building's extant interior (dating to 1932), is a rare example of immigrant synagogue painting based on Bessarabian practices. The building is a testament to the lives and mutual engagement and interactions of Jews and African Americans in North Minneapolis in the twentieth century, and a symposium held in May 2023 explored those experiences and relationships. The project also developed a public traveling exhibition of photographs and interpretive material. Both the exhibit and the symposium featured participants from the Jewish and Black communities that have historical or current ties to the building, along with academic historians and art historians.

• Dingliang Yang, Architecture, College of Design

World Expo: An Experimental Field of Better Urban Future (Exhibition)

In the context of Minnesota’s effort to host Expo 2027, this project explores the World Expo both as a subject and object that is dedicated to making a better built environment for people; it also seeks to communicate this history to the wider audience through an exhibition on World Expos. The exhibition will focus on two paradigms through the lens of World Expo, one of the most influential megaevents globally: 1) as an experimental field of architecture and urbanism; and 2) as a contested terrain that contributes to social progress in equity, health, and wellness. Using multimedia, including graphics, models, projections, and videos, the exhibition will indicate the evolution of architecture through the lens of World Expositions from 1851 to 2020. Furthermore, by recognizing how important Expos have been in presenting alternate viewpoints and even opposing ideas, the exhibition will identify, reveal, and showcase specific Expos and particular buildings that created a platform for the negotiation and enhancement of new social relationships in a more open and equitable world that promotes the advancement of new values and social norms.

University of Minnesota–Crookston 

Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education Department

• James Foss and Katy Chapman, Dispositional Impacts of Music and Art on Sustainability Goal Commitment
• Rachel McCoppin, The Goddess Figure: Myth, Folklore, and On-Site Narrations
• Ali Saeedi, Enterprise Risk Management and Financial Distress: The Impact of Women Advisory Board Membership

University of Minnesota–Duluth 

College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences

• Alison Aune, Funding for essential travel in Sweden to prepare for upcoming exhibitions, workshops, and lectures on historic and contemporary innovations in Swedish Folk Art
• Scott Boyle, Design and build an automated lift system for use in theatre productions 
• Evan Brier, Investigate the idea of the "sellout" in 20th-century literature and the arts
• Jeff Kalstrom, Construct large artwork comprising multiple columns of thaumatropes (spinning discs) 
• Brett Linski, Make digital recordings of Nocturne and Fantasia by Mark Buller, and Visions and Memories by Justin Rubin
• Suki Mozenter, Community-engaged literary study of representations of marginalized communities in elementary classroom libraries  
• Tom Pfotenhauer, Learn Ableton Live, a digital audio workstation capable of being utilized in live performance, composition, teaching, recording, and mixing and mastering
• Justin Rubin, Recording music inspired by the intersection of Latinx and Jewish subjects through a collaboration with Latinx performers
• Diana Shapiro, Create, record, and publish original transcriptions of famous orchestra scores for piano duet for performances at schools, summer camps, youth assemblies, and libraries to promote accessibility of classical music 
• David Short, Work with psychologists and counselors to create and test the potential of personal mantras as a positive therapeutic benefit and community-impact device 
• Maureen Tobin Stanley, Investigate a double movement in cultural memory dynamics: remediation and premediation  
• Katie Van Wert, The Storytelling Project, a partnership between student volunteers and adults with cerebral palsy to produce finished stories (fiction or nonfiction)
• Matthew Wagner, Travel to Paris to study with Roxane Butterfly, protégé of American tap legend Jimmy Slyde   
• Becky Webster, Produce a book that will consist of: a map of the journey the Haudenosaunee Peacemaker and his partner took to bring the Haudenosaunee people together; Oneida/Mohawk vocabulary words; Oneida/Mohawk segments of the account; a full English translation of the story; and discussions about how the teachings remain relevant today 
• David Woodward, Research trip to the island of Inisheer off the coast of western Ireland to interface with the local community and lead an effort to develop a cultural interpretation plan for the island  

University of Minnesota–Morris 

Humanities Division

• Priyanka Basu, Attending Festivals and Screenings of Contemporary Experimental and Artists’ Film 
• Sarah B. Buchanan, Cemeteries as Sites of Confrontation in the Films of Ousmane Sembène 
• Dan Demetriou, Caesar Chavez and Comfort Women Monuments 
• Julie Eckerle, Early Modern Family Correspondence in the North Yorkshire County Record Office  
• Michael Lackey, A Battle against Mental Illness: Biofictions about Empress Elisabeth 
• Jason Ramey, Architectural Remnants of Domestic Interior Spaces
• Jennifer Rothchild, GUNS, SEX, AND MASCULINITY
• Nadezhda Sotirova, Mistrust and Public Health: The cultural negotiation of trust and public health communication in Bulgaria

University of Minnesota–Twin Cities 

College of Design

• Elizabeth Bye, Co-Designing Restorative Apparel Part 2
• Vincent deBritto, Visual representations of the destruction of Old Southside
• Gail Dubrow (with Laura Leppink), Mapping Disability Heritage on the National Landscape
• Lucy Dunne, A Blue-light Phototherapy Garment Prototype
• Jessica Garcia Fritz, Automated Colonization: Contemporary Specifications and the Dispossession of Indigenous Lands
• Tasoulla Hadjiyanni, When you can’t – Architecture and spirituality in displacement
• Terresa Moses, From Anti to Liberation X Design
• Julia Robinson, Investing with North Minneapolis
• Jessica Rossi-Mastracci, RESILIENT INFRASTRUCTURE: Testing Land-based Infrastructures (LBI) for Climate Change Adaptation
• Ji Youn Shin, Asset-Based Approaches to Supporting Mental Health: Co-Design with International Students and Mental Health Counselors
• Malini Srivastava and Brad Holschuh, Active knits as building shells for energy use reduction
• Dingliang Yang, World's Fair: An Experimental Field of Architecture and Urbanism

University of Minnesota–Twin Cities 

College of Liberal Arts

• Hassan Abdel Salam, The Great Reversal: How Nations in the Muslim World Went from Tolerating to Repressing Same-Sex Practices, 1750-2023
• Hakim Abderrezak,The Translation of a Book and the Making of Another
• Sinem Casale, Art, Diplomacy and Food Culture between Europe and the Muslim Mediterranean in Early Modernity
• Lisa Channer, Completion of Denim Shorts trilogy of short feminist Westerns
• Juliette Cherbuliez, Beyond Testimony: Early Modern Wartime and the Aesthetics of Violence
• Sivan Cohen Elias, Electroacoustic Improv Trio Album
• Penny Edgell, Religion, Spirituality, and Meaning in the Contemporary United States
• Ofelia Ferran, A Tiger’s Leap into the Past: The Long Shadow of the Spanish Civil War in the Work of Francesc Torres
• Carl Flink, Testing, Developing and Building the "Dirt Box" for Battleground
• Njeri Githire, Lights! Camera! Digital Revolution: East African Cinema in the 21st Century
• Jessica Gordon-Roth, Recovering and Reclaiming the Voice of an Early Modern Woman Philosopher: Catharine Trotter Cockburn
• Sarah Holtman, Kantian Justice as Civic Respect
• Michael Lower, Hakoah Vienna: A Jewish Sports Club’s Story of War, Holocaust, and Defiance
• Matthew Rahaim, Improvising Relationality
• Gabriela Spears-Rico, Mestizaje and Cultural Appropriation in Michoacan
• Bula Wayessa, Documenting Endangered Indigenous Technology: The Case of Pottery Making in Wollega, Ethiopia

The Arts, Humanities, and Design Chair Award is a two-year award in which the faculty awardee works with a group of faculty, staff, students, and other collaborators to create a program of activities for the University community and the community at large. The goal of these projects is to catalyze cross-departmental, intercollegiate, multi-campus, and collaborative work. 

The chair position supports an emergent process that includes a generative first year and a second year of visible public activities that engage the campus and local communities. The chair can either assemble collaborators, or groups can come together and name a chair from among the collaborators. The outcome of these activities should galvanize sustained intellectual dialogue around a particular academic theme. The program of interrelated activities typically includes: workshops, symposia, reading groups, speaker events, public engagement actions, partnerships across and outside the university, graduate and undergraduate classes, exhibitions, lectures, and performances.

This Award application and review process is administered by the Office of Faculty and Academic Affairs. 

• 2021-23 Chair - Tasoulla Hadjiyanni, College of Design
  Tasoulla Hadjiyanni is a Northrop Professor in the Interior Design Program. Her scholarship builds on interdisciplinary partnerships and community engagement to explore how the design of built environments can eliminate disparities and help create communities where everyone can thrive. Her specialties and expertise include residential environments; cultural aspects of space; displacement/emplacement; human trafficking; and mental health.
  
  Consider - A documentary on built environments and social exclusion
  Families without a home, children who cannot read, and parents in search of safety and stability are everyday realities in many of our diverse communities. CONSIDER follows Black single mothers in YWCA-St Paul’s supportive housing and University of Minnesota design students and educators as they consider what co-parenting homes could look like. In the process, they embark on introspections around the creation of built environments where everyone can thrive, reaffirming what it means to be human. More information can be found at: https://cec-design.com/documentary-film/

• 2022-24 Chair - Diane Willow, Department of Art, College of Liberal Arts
  Diane Willow is a Professor of Art, multi-modal artist, and a CLA Scholar of the College. Her creative research engages any medium necessary to create participatory modes of art that invite us to contemplate our relationships with nature, technology, and one another. With each of the interdisciplinary collaborations that she has initiated, including CHANT (Culture, Healing, Art, Nature, and Technology) and the ArTeS (Art + Technology + Science) Collaborative Research Studio, she centers the arts as a catalyst for creative interdependence.
  
  ArTeS as a Catalyst for Creative Interdependence
  The “ArTeS as a Catalyst for Creative Interdependence” initiative focuses on interdisciplinary collaborations that center equity and justice while generating collaborative art-centered research and inclusive processes that intersect with emerging technologies and science. The core ArTeS collaborative is composed of faculty in the arts, humanities, design, and computer science who share a commitment to reimagining our research and teaching toward shared yet varied approaches to inclusive, interdisciplinary modalities. The ArTeS initiative advocates for the arts and their transformational capacity to catalyze creative interdependence. The initiative will also expand collaborations across the university and with local community partners. ArTeS is intended to be a space for wholeness, a context in which creativity, equity, justice, and culture are integral to research and pedagogy at the nexus of art, technology, and science. 

The Special Events Grant Program seeks to support new and ongoing activities across the University of Minnesota system that promote profound understanding of the human condition, excellence, innovation, collaboration, interdisciplinary dialogue, and greater public engagement with the University.

Special Events Grants are highly competitive and must relate to the areas of the arts, humanities, or design. Awards rarely will be granted for traditional academic symposia or conferences—these types of events must be innovative and include a significant public engagement component. It is recommended, but not required, that applicants seek collaboration and co-sponsors through the IAS or other centers and colleges.

Special Events Grants are administered by the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), a systemwide institute for advancing interdisciplinary collaborations, including the arts, humanities, and design.

University of Minnesota-Duluth

• David Beard, Department of English, Linguistics, and Writing Studies in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences 
  
  Celebrating the Past and Moving into a Diverse Present with the Duluth Poets Laureate
  Imagine Funds will be used to support a reading series celebrating the past and looking toward the future of the Duluth Poet Laureate Program. The Duluth Poet Laureate Project was founded in 2005 as a way of honoring local poets and encouraging the appreciation of poetry. There have been six poets laureate previously selected over the years, including Bart Sutter, Sheila Packa, Deborah Cooper, Jim Johnson (twice), Ellie Schoenfeld, and Gary Boelhower. The Duluth Poet Laureate Project receives support from Friends of the Duluth Public Library; Lake Superior Writers; Arrowhead Reading Council; the English department at the College of St. Scholastica; the English, Linguistics, and Writing Studies department at UMD; and Lake Superior College. A twelve-person committee oversees the work of the Project. 

University of Minnesota-Morris

• Ann DuHamel, Music
  
  Prayers for a Feverish Planet: Music and Conversation About Climate Change
  This project is a musical response to climate change, featuring more than 60 works for piano and piano/electronics by composers on six continents. The project's public debut was made possible by a 2022 Imagine Fund Special Events grant: a multi-day series with eight concerts on the Morris campus, coinciding with Earth Day in April 2022. Each concert centered around a different theme, including water, grief and anxiety, human "progress," trees and hope, and more; DuHamel (Associate Professor of Music at UMM and IAS Faculty Fellow, Fall semester 2021) was joined on stage by a guest speaker for each event -- Kate Knuth, climate activist; Troy Goodnough, sustainability director at UMM; professors of Environmental Studies at UMM; and others. The project also includes an upcoming tree planting on the Morris campus (postponed from its original spring date due to storms). 

University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

• Shir Alon, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, College of Liberal Arts
  
  The Contemporary Piyyut: Global Networks of Middle Eastern and North African Music
  This grant will fund a symposium organized by the Center for Jewish Studies, the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and the School of Music, November 14-15, 2022. Piyyutim are Jewish liturgical poems traditionally sung in religious gatherings. This symposium, dedicated to piyyutim in contemporary culture, will include both public facing and academic talks on the recent shifts in the settings in which piyyutim are performed; the ongoing exchange between the piyyut archive and other art forms and media; the sociocultural and political contexts in which piyyutim function today; and the ways they connect various communities, sites, and identities. The symposium will also include a concert by an ensemble from Israel/New York together with local musicians, a keynote lecture by poet and translator Peter Cole, and workshops with choreographers, writers, and filmmakers who draw on the piyyut tradition.
   
• Bianet Castellanos, American Studies, College of Liberal Arts
  
  Indigenous Heritage Languages of the Global South Project
  This project will develop workshops and programming to support Indigenous students’ heritage language learning. These events will create greater awareness of heritage languages within the Latinx and Indigenous Latinx communities and will build the institutional knowledge necessary to implement a heritage language program at El Colegio High School and Academia Cesar Chavez. The grant will support 1) three workshops focusing on the importance of heritage language programs and how to develop these for K-12 education; 2) a faculty-mentored high school YPAR student project; and 3) conclude with a community forum on heritage languages of Latin America.
   
• Palita Chunsaengchan, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, College of Liberal Arts
  
  Southeast Asian Cinema and Its Diaspora: Theory/Praxis/Politics 
  This event brings together film practitioners, academics, and other stakeholders from across Southeast Asia for a series of public talks, workshops, and a two-day public screening of Southeast Asian films at the University of Minnesota. This program is interdisciplinary in that it seeks to enhance collaborations across fields, methodologies, and areas of expertise. It also aims to invite participants to consider contemporary Southeast Asian cinema as a productive site that processes historical and political events, especially after many atrocities that took place in the region. The series celebrates Southeast Asian cinema and, most importantly, the people behind it for their creativity and resilience, and acknowledges their contributions to the global collective of film theory, praxis, and politics of filmmaking.
   
• Christina Ewig, Center on Women, Gender, and Public Policy, Humphrey School of Public Affairs 
  
  Women and Two-Spirit Native Americans Leading for the Next Generation
  The Center on Women, Gender, and Public Policy hosted two public-facing events in 2022: Leading for the 7th Generation, and Advocating for Systems Change for Missing & Murdered Indigenous Relatives. Both events highlighted the critical work and leadership of Minnesota Indigenous women and communities. Leading for the 7th Generation provided an opportunity for community members to learn about seventh generation principles. The seventh generation mindset is about stewarding resources—such as land, water, and indigenous languages—in the interest of building a sustainable future for descendants, while simultaneously tending to the well-being of contemporary Native nations. Advocating for Systems Change for Missing & Murdered Indigenous Relatives, offered a public conversation about the work being done on the local, state, and federal level to address the epidemic of violence against Indigenous women and communities. Minnesota established the first statewide task force on Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women in 2019, followed by the Presidential Task Force in 2021. 
   
• Boris Oicherman, Curator for Creative Collaboration, Weisman Art Museum
  
  The Float Lab on Lake Itasca
  The Big River Continuum is a Mississippi-long artist residency exchange that amplifies the interconnectedness of cultures, research, water and land through collaboration between the multimedia artist Karen Goulet (White Earth Ojibwe) from the Mississippi Headwaters region, and social practice artist Monique Verdin (Houma) from the Delta. In the summer of 2022, the Weisman Art Museum presented an in-progress exhibition, organized by guest curator Rebecca Dallinger, that showcased the collaborative creative explorations of the artists thus far in the process through works in diverse media, as well as the documentation of their creative collaboration with the partners at the Itasca Biological Station and artists of Northern Minnesota and Yakni Chitto.
   
• Luverne Seifert, Theatre Arts and Dance, College of Liberal Arts
  
  Increasing Awareness of Rare Diseases among Minnesotans through Theater: A Collaboration of Art and Science
  The University of Minnesota Center for Orphan Drug Research and Sod House Theater Company are collaborating to develop a new production focused on bringing attention to those diagnosed with a rare disease. The collaboration will adapt the Greek tragedy, Philoctetes, to help audiences gain a greater awareness and deeper understanding of the medical, economic, psychological, and social challenges facing people with a rare disease. The production will tour to Duluth, Morris, Rochester, Fargo ND, Hastings and Prescott WI, and will be performed locally at the Capris Theater in North Minneapolis and in Rarig Center at the University of Minnesota. The play will be written by Kevin Kling, best known for his popular commentaries on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, and will be produced by Sod House Theater, a local theater that specializes in creating professional theater experiences in close collaboration with Minnesota communities.

The Annual Faculty Research Grants support innovative research in the arts, design, and humanities by individual faculty. This funding is typically used to support research needs (e.g. research assistants), teaching materials, books, materials for creative work, or travel to support research or scholarship. It often supplements other funding sources. Annual Faculty Research Grant programs will be administered directly through participating arts, humanities, and design colleges and campuses. 

University of Minnesota-Duluth, College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences

• Alison Aune (Art and Design) - Swedish Folk Art: Tradition and Change, an exhibition at the Swedish American Museum in Chicago
• Sarah Blaylock (Art and Design) - A Global Cold War: Speculative Futures & Activist Ecologies (research travel)
• Paul Cannan (English, Linguistics, and Writing Studies) -  The Making of Shakespeare the Poet: The Publication and Reception of Shakespeare’s Poetry, 1640–1790 
• Paula Gudmundson (Music) - Developing Leadership Class Room to the Concert Stage: Providing Students Lightbulb Moments 
• Mark Harvey (Theatre) -  Research travel to Germany to visit archives at the Hellerau Institute in Dresden and the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth
• Rachel Inselman (Music) - Caruso and Lanza: A Centennial Tribute Lecture Recital 
• Steve Matthews (History, Political Science, and International Studies) - Aran Islands Heritage Preservation Plan and oral history archive 
• Adam Pine (Geography and Philosophy) - Twenty “sketchquotes” (single-panel comics) about food insecurity in St. Louis County, MN (in collaboration with Duluth artist Nelle Rhicard and Dr. David Beard)
• Justin Rubin (Music) - Create, edit, and master a series of digital recordings with the assistance of a professional audio engineer and virtual studios 
• David Syring (Studies in Justice, Culture, and Social Change) - Study intersections of research practices in environmental sciences, arts, humanities, and social sciences, and investigate how Indigenous knowledges are and are not included in research at these centers
• Maryam Khalegi Yazdi (Art and Design) - An interactive textile illustration project that will narrate the stories of immigrants in the United States 

University of Minnesota Morris, Humanities Division

• Rebecca Dean (Anthropology) - Army Animals and Mill City Meals: The Twin Cities through Time, Space, and Species
• Dan Demetriou (Philosophy) - Tribalist/nationalist ethics and psychology: applications to price gouging and memorialization
• Ann DuHamel (Music) - Solo Piano Work – Commissioning Libby Larsen
• Michael Lackey (English) - German Exile Biofiction
• Jimmy Schryver (Art History) - The Lough Key Archaeological Project: Finding MacDermot's Lost Castle
• Nadezhda Sotirova (Communications, Media, and Rhetoric) - The cultural communication of COVID-19 rules in Bulgaria
• Simon Tiller (Music) - Minnesota - Land of Legend and Song

University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, College of Design

• Vincent deBritto (Landscape Architecture) - The Italian COVID Lockdown and the Reinvention of Quarantine
• Greg Donofrio (Heritage Studies and Public History/Architecture) - Human Toll: A Public History of Twin Cities' Freeways
• Lucy Dunne (Apparel Design) - Toward First Principles of Apparel Aesthetics
• Brad Hokanson (Graphic Design) - Support for Teaching College In the Schools: Building Creativity
• Brad Holschuh (Apparel Design) - Novel Clothing Accessibility Solutions Using Garment-based Actuation
• Hyunjoo Im (Retail Merchandising) - A Systematic Review of Design Science and Psychology Research for Teaching Modules
• Lauren Kim (Retail Merchandising) - A Path to [Virtual] Consumption: Mapping Customer Experience on The Metaverse
• Carlye Lauff (Product Design) - Prototype Fidelity: Defining Terms and Identifying Impact on Design Communication for Product Design Students
• Kristine Miller (Landscape Architecture) - Open Source Digital Edition of Almost Home, The Public Landscapes of Gertrude Jekyll
• Malini Srivastava (Architecture) - Material Stories: The Before, During and Afterlife of Materials
• Cecilia Xi Wang (Graphic Design) - Design, a book project: User Experience Design for the Future Healthcare

University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, College of Liberal Arts

• Hakim Abderrezak (French and Italian) - Clandestine Sea-Crossings in Art: A Book Project
• Sophia Beal (Spanish and Portuguese Studies) - Brazil’s Urban Housing Crisis in Contemporary Fiction and Film
• Marissa Benedict (Music) - Pressing Progress Not Valves: Using the Natural Trumpet as a Pedagogical Tool
• Timothy Brennan (Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature) - Borrowed Light: Imperial Form (vol. 2)
• Lisa Channer (Theatre Arts and Dance) - Girls at the Painted Bird 
• Ananya Chatterjea (Theater Arts and Dance) - Michhil, Amra: Investigating Performance in Times of Pandemic and Political Uprising
• Roy Cook (Philosophy) - The Logic of Minecraft
• Gabriela Currie (Music) - Encountering the Musical Other in the Kingdom of Kongo
• Scott Currie (Music) - Improvising Activist Agency: Free Initiatives for Improvisation in Berlin
• Immanuel Davis (Music) - Hot Off the Press: Concert Video of 21st Century Works for Flute and Piano
• Lorenzo Fabbri (French and Italian) - Black Italian Film and Media
• Carl Flink (Theatre Arts and Dance) - Developing Battleground: The Fog of War
• V.V. Ganeshananthan (English) - The Missing Are Considered Dead 
• Keya Ganguly (Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature) - Baroque Lucknow
• Njeri Githire (African American and African Studies) - Lights! Camera! Digital Revolution: East African Cinema in the 21st Century
• Margaret Hennefeld (Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature) - The Fantasy of Silent Cinema
• Rachmi Diyah Larasati (Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies) - Cartography of Conservativism and Modern Empire
• Hanne Loeland Levinson (Classical and Near Eastern Religions and Cultures) - Cautionary Tales for Today: Dystopian Literature as Vehicle for Imaging and Re-Imagining Racial and Social Justice
• Alex Lubet (Music) - New Composition for the Galan Trio
• Lynn Lukkas (Art) - Fulbright Funding Leverage
• Chelsea Masteller Warren (Theatre Arts and Dance) - Laser Station for Scenic Design
• Jason McGrath (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies) - Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age
• Monica Moses Haller (Art) - Plans [working title]
• S. Douglas Olson (Classical and Near Eastern Religions and Cultures) - Visit to the American University in Cairo
• Karen Painter (Music) - Composing for Hitler: Ordinary Men, Their Music and Path to National Socialism [working book title]
• Christina Schmid (Art) - Desert Redux: Sand, Salt, Surface
• Luverne Seifert (Theatre Arts and Dance) - Studying European Performance Models at the Gaulier School in France
• Sima Shakhsari (Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies) - Iranian Queer and Trans Media Analysis
• Paul Shaw (Music) - Global Arts Leader Aspirant
• Kimberley Todd (English) - Isle Royale Wolves Essay (research travel)
• Victoria Vargas (Music) - Opera Cooperative, a collaboration with Minnesota Opera
• Travis Workman (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies) - Discovering North Korean Film Theory
• Tetsuya Yamada (Art) - Invisible