notre dame research awards grants

By KATE NAESSENS news Writer

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story appeared online Friday, Feb. 3.

There were 24 awards for the f all 2022 n otre d ame r esearch Internal grant cycle announced in three categories: The f aculty r esearch s upport Program ( frs P) r egular Grant, The f aculty r esearch s upport Program ( frs P) Initiation Grant and the f lip the s cript grant. Those receiving awards not only spanned every college at n otre d ame, but also nd Learning, the o ffice of the Provost, n otre d ame International and n otre d ame r esearch. s ome grants awarded are being used to bring new projects straight to n otre d ame’s campus. Assistant professor of violin Patrick Yim’s project, “ c hen Yi and Zhou Long at n otre d ame” will do just that. Long and Yi will leave University of m issouri-Kansas c ity to come to n otre d ame’s campus for the spring 2024 semester, and while here, “they will work with our students, put on a program of their music, and Zhou Long will write a brand new piece, never heard before,” according to Yim. n ot only this, but “Grammy award winning recording engineers” will come to campus along with an “all star cast” of musicians to record three previously written pieces of music of Yi and Long’s, as well as Long’s new piece that will be composed specifically for this project, Yim said. o ne of Yim’s motivations for this project is to “diversify the repertoire” of classical music as “the defining feature of their music is combining Western culture and c hinese tradition,” and in doing so, prevent “the concert hall from just being a museum.” o ther projects that the grants are funding will take place a little further from s outh b end.

In the r oman c atholic c ardinals’ Pre- c onclave speech, the assembled cardinars talked about the church needing to go to the margins and the “peripheries”, leaving their comfort zones in order to reach those that are excluded in one way or another. This inspired Professor c lemens s edmak, director of the n anovic Institute for e uropean s tudies and social ethics professor in the Keough s chool, to create the pilot program of his project “The c ontribution of ‘Peripheries r esearch’ to e uropean s tudies.”

In conjunction with the c atholic University in r uzomberok ( s lovakia), a research team will soon embark on a year-long stay in a remote s lovakian village in order to assess the “sense of hope, sense of belonging, and sense of identity” of its inhabitants, s edmak said. This is intended to be the first of many case studies that will research not only those that are not in a powerful location and geographically peripheral, but those who are on the peripheries of society as well. A symposium in o ctober will highlight the findings of the research in r uzomberok, as well as determine where the project might go next.

Inspiration for these projects come from a variety of places. f or professor of American s tudies, s ophie White, the idea for her project “ h is m aster’s Grace: e xtrajudicial v iolence, Punishment, and m ercy, A d igital h umanities c omparative s tudy of b ritain and f rance’s s lave s ocieties’” arose while she was writing her book “ voices of the e nslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in f rench Louisiana.” This book examined how the courts treated enslaved people, but as she delved deeper into the judicial source material, she “realized there was a lot of information about extrajudicial violence” and found that “the word that comes up over and over again is asking for a masters ‘grace,’” she said.

“ o ne of the things I found is that alongside the endemic violence there were also mechanisms for negotiating pardon … you would go before your slave owner and there would usually be some sort of protocol and performance of contrition or penitence,” White explained. s he delving into this aspect of everyday life for those enslaved and researching “another way of thinking about the burdens of being enslaved.”

White hopes to provide information not just to scholars and academics about this period, but the general public. b y publishing a digital humanities website, users can navigate the original sources as well as helpful hyperlinks while reading White’s work in order to make exploring this content more accessible and to discourage any “cynicism that some quarters have about this material.”

The full list of grants can be found on n otre d ame r esearch’s website.