Senior faculty research leaves awarded

Photos/Mike Lovett (Golden, Jankowski, McClendon) and David Powelstock

From left: Charles Golden, Paul Jankowski, Charles McClendon and David Powelstock

Brandeis University has awarded four senior faculty research leaves for spring semester 2016. The competitive grant program was established four years ago to provide a semester free of teaching responsibilities, enabling the faculty member to focus on a scholarly or creative project.

“We had outstanding proposals for impressive research projects this year, making the selection process very challenging.  It is clear that these teaching leaves have the potential to significantly advance the research and scholarship of our faculty,” said Susan Birren, dean of Arts and Sciences.

“Recognizing that time will always be in short supply in academia, especially as it relates to research, Brandeis saw this program as an important opportunity to further support our faculty and to underscore our commitment to research,” Irving R. Epstein, the Henry F. Fischbach Professor of Chemistry and interim vice provost for research.

This year’s recipients, and the title of their research project, are:

Charles Golden, Anthropology, Courting the Landscape – a comparative study of landscapes of authority in Classic period kingdoms (AD 250 to 900) of the western Maya lowlands of Chiapas and Guatemala.

Paul Jankowski, History, “The Winter of 1933” – a book about the power of bad ideas. Why, during a single winter, that of 1933, so much went so wrong.

Charles McClendon, Fine Arts, The art and architecture of St. Peter's and the Vatican from antiquity to the present.

David Powelstock, German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature, The Inward Turn: Lyric Selfhood in the Russian Poetry of the 1830s, a critical re-examination of a crucial formative stage in the history of Russian literature and culture and an attempt to look at lyric poetry in a new, interdisciplinary way.