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Reves Faculty and Drapers’ Fellows
ANNOUNCING THE 2022 Reves Faculty Fellows
Each year, a committee of faculty and Reves staff awards Reves Faculty Fellowships to support faculty-student research and collaboration on internationally-focused, engaged scholarship. The initiative is open to full-time William & Mary faculty in all academic units. Proposals are invited from faculty with significant experience in the international arena as well as those seeking to expand the focus of their work to include international, global, and/or trans-national approaches.
LESLIE W. GRANT & JAMES H. STRONGE
SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
Understanding the behaviors, skills, and dispositions of effective teachers is crucial to helping improve schools and student success. Research in the United States provides evidence that teachers have a tremendous impact on student achievement. Such studies do not exist for teachers who work in independent international schools – including research that reflects the importance of understanding both the context of working in intercultural settings and the skills that allow teachers to flourish in these settings. With consideration for the unique opportunities and challenges presented by independent schools located in a range of host countries, this project focuses on the discovery of beliefs and practices (including planning and instructional skills) of effective teachers that can cross the international/cultural contexts that exist in international schools.
SHARAN GREWAL
GOVERNMENT
“Public Opinion Poll in Tunisia”
Tunisia’s young democracy, the only one to emerge from the Arab Spring, has recently been rocked by a power grab by the president, which threatens to undo the country’s democratic gains. Surprisingly, the president’s coup has been met with considerable public approval. The proposed survey would therefore examine the sources of this public support, and thus contribute more generally to research on the popular foundations of democratic backsliding. Populist politicians from Hungary to Turkey, the United States to the Philippines, have attempted to draw upon their public support to undermine democracy from within. Yet, scholars have only begun to explore the sources of public support for such actions.
DANIEL MALINIAK
GOVERNMENT
Georgia sent soldiers to support the two U.S.-led conflicts largely in an effort to curry favor with Americans: politicians, policymakers, bureaucrats, the public, and American servicemen and women. The U.S.-Georgian relationship has evolved over the past 20 years. U.S. policymakers have expressed gratitude for Georgian military involvement. Many Georgians have expressed the importance and intentionality of sending troops to support the American military missions as part of a strategy to align politically with the U.S. and the West. There has not been research, however, into the thoughts and feelings of the soldiers— or their families—who served alongside the Americans, or those of their American counterparts. The research team will address two questions: (1) How do Georgian veterans reflect on their time serving and how do they view current affairs?, and (2) How do American veterans view the soldiers and countries who supported those soldiers’ time abroad?
JENNIFER STEVENS
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCES
The proposed project, “Intercultural Understanding Through Art”, involves work by a faculty-led student team that seeks to evaluate a six factor model in the experience of art in terms of how we understand others and how we understand ourselves. This cross-cultural examination will include interviews, surveys, and observations at the Louvre (Paris, France) and the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.). The socio-theoretical basis for this work rests on the question of whether art is culturally specific or if it offers a universal language. The outcomes from this work, while based in art, are anticipated to provide a model toward intercultural understanding, broadly defined.
IYABO OBASANJO
KINESIOLOGY AND HEALTH SCIENCES AND THE AFRICA RESEARCH CENTER
In both South Africa and the United States, the effect of long-term social barriers on health outcomes is profound, with the Black population having significant negative impact on their health outcomes from both chronic noncommunicable diseases and infectious diseases. South Africa has a history of using Community Health Workers (CHWs) in low-income Black communities for improvement in health outcomes. While use of CHWs started in low- and middle-income countries around the world, their use in minority populations in the U.S. has increased over the last 20 years as a means of reaching lowincome populations with health access and health education that is culturally appropriate and low cost. The researchers have interviewed Community Health Workers working in low-income housing in the Richmond/Henrico Health district on their perceptions and motivations for the work they do. The project will enable them to include an international comparison, by interviewing CHWs in the Eastern Cape Region of South Africa. This is a new collaboration with colleagues at Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.
ANNOUNCING THE 2022 Drapers’ Faculty Fellows
A limited number of fellowships are provided through the generosity of the Drapers’ Company. Founded over 600 years ago, the Drapers’ Company is incorporated by Royal Charter and is one of the Twelve Great Livery Companies in the City of London. Supporting education has been one of the primary aims of The Drapers’ Company for centuries and continues to be the main focus of the Company’s grant making today. The Company to assists schools, colleges and universities in many ways, from serving on the governing body to providing grants for scholarships, prizes and research. The Drapers’ Faculty Fellowship, administered by the Reves Center, provides support for archival research by the fellows, with the potential involvement of W&M graduate and/or undergraduate students at institutions in the United Kingdom.
JONATHAN GLASSER
ANTHROPOLOGY
This project seeks to makewidelyavailablea trove of Arabic-language poems from seventeenth-century Algeria found in a set of manuscripts at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. The unpublished poems, which were part of the popular music repertoire of early modern North Africa, are found ina multi-volume collection prayerbook associated with the Jewish community of Oran, Algeria. This community was expelled from Oran to Tuscany by the city’s Spanish rulers in 1669, who until then had made a local exception totheir 1492 ban on Jews in an effort to maintain theempire’snewstrongholds on the North Africancoast.The roughly one hundred Arabic poems found in these manuscripts are testament to the importance of Arabic literary and musical forms to Jewish liturgical practice in this borderland, as well as to the astonishing range (sacred and profane, classical and colloquial) of Arabic popular poetry in the early modern Maghrib. In a literary field that has left few remains of everyday artistic life for this place and time, the Bodleian manuscripts vastly expand our knowledge of what Arabicspeakers were speaking, writing, singing, and hearing.
MARCUS HOLMES
GOVERNMENT
This book puts forward a novel and highly important claim, namely, that the interpersonal interactions of state leaders can transform adversarial relationships into cooperative ones in world politics. While leaders, diplomats, and decision-makers in international politics have long argued that personal chemistry and social bonding matter for outcomes, such arguments have largely been shunned as either inconsequential or naïve by scholars and analysts alike. Drawing on interdisciplinary insights from sociology, psychology, and cognitive science, this book is the first to delineate both the conditions under which social bonding is expected to develop and the causal effects of such bonds in diplomacy. Utilizing qualitative case studies of critical historical cases and elite interviews, this project seeks to demystify interpersonal chemistry at the international level and provide concrete and practical recommendations and advice for policymakers on how to engender it in order to promote new possibilities for conflict resolution.
Jonathan Glasser Photo by Stephen Salpukas
For more information and a list of previous faculty fellows, visit www.wm.edu/offices/revescenter/globalengagement/revesfacultyfellows
