5x5 HRC Collaborative Grants

Deadline: Rolling

 

The Humanities Research Center is offering a number of 5×5 Collaborative Grants to encourage faculty in the humanities, humanistic social sciences, natural sciences, and the arts to organize around a topic of common interest. This can include a set of readings, an activity, or just an idea which could lead to future research/projects.

How it works

Five faculty meet five times over a period of a few months. Each group will include a minimum of three tenure track faculty and can also include lecturers, full-time instructors, librarians, post-docs, and other university scholars. (This grant is not intended for graduate students.) Ideally, 3 group members will be from CHS. The team organizer should be a member of the tenure-track faculty. While five faculty members is the ideal number, the HRC will consider proposals from teams comprised of four to six members.

Why Apply

These grants will help research faculty carve out some time in an otherwise busy semester to: 1) expand your intellectual and institutional networks; 2) explore research questions of interest to you in the context of the linked interests of other faculty; and 3) develop a new kind of scholarly project.

Goals

1. Encourage collaborative thinking about work in the humanities
2. Create a space for low-stakes exploration of shared interests
3. Facilitate the development of collaborative scholarship in the humanities.

Process

Apply by emailing the following items in a single pdf document to Chris Cynn (cjcynn@vcu.edu):

1. a 1-page proposal (which includes the dates and topics for 5 proposed meetings/discussions)
2. short bios of the participants
3. a short paragraph describing the groups contributions to the intellectual life of the HRC in the last two years (panels, grant teams, research groups, webinars, Research Fridays, Meet VCU's Authors presentations, mentoring, community engagement work, etc.)

Please specify “The 5x5 HRC Collaborative Grants” in the subject line. The proposal will be evaluated by the HRC director and members of the HRC Advisory Board. Each team member of an awarded grant will receive $500 in professional development/research funds upon approval of the group’s application. 

Outcome

The group will submit a one-page description of the conversations and the ideas that emerged from the five meetings (1 page) to the HRC director by June 30 of the year of the application, and will agree to be part of HRC Research presentations/workshops in the following academic year. Funds permitting, teams can reapply every 2 years in similar or different group configurations.

Current Groups

Speculation

We propose to convene a diverse group of scholars and artists from multiple units within the
University to engage in productive interdisciplinary conversations about speculative literature, media,
and art.

• Grace D. Gipson, Assistant Professor, African American Studies
• Julian Kevon Glover Assistant Professor, Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies and Dance & Choreography, VCUarts
• Michael Ra-shon Hall, Assistant Professor, English
• Jonathan Molina-Garcia, Assistant Professor, Photography and Digital Futures, VCUArts
• Jennifer Rhee, Associate Professor, English.

Previous Groups