2019 Social Sciences Research Center Faculty Seed Grants and Graduate Student Fellowships Announced

The Division of the Social Sciences has announced the recipients of the 2019 Social Sciences Research Center (SSRC) Faculty Seed Grants and Graduate Student Fellowships:

Three faculty projects were selected for funding through the seed grant initiative, which is in its second year.

Faculty Seed Grant Recipients:

• Leonardo Bursztyn (Economics), “Disguising Xenophobia through Economic Narratives”
• Brian Prendergast (Psychology), Vanessa Leone (Medicine) and Eugene Chang (Medicine), “Brains and Bacteria: Inter-species Interactions and the Neural Representation of Time”
• Emily Talen (Social Sciences) and Marc Berman (Psychology), “Street Psychology: Exploring the Link Between Pedestrian Experience and Cognitive Well-Being”

Eight graduate students were selected to be inaugural fellows through our new Graduate Student Fellowships program. Fellows, who are in the final throes of dissertation write-up, receive a dedicated workspace in the Social Sciences Research Center and a small research stipend.

Graduate Student Fellows:

• Nicholas Campbell-Seremetis (Political Science), “Fanatics, Fools, and Madmen: The International Causes and Consequences of Perceived Irrationality and Incompetence”
• Danielle Charette (Committee on Social Thought), “David Hume, Niccolò Machiavelli, and the Acquisitive Passions”
• Nicholas Judd (Sociology), “Political Participation and Campaign Finance in American Democracy”
• Omid Kardan (Psychology), “Restoration Through Urban Greenspace Experience”
• Lauren Ledin (Anthropology), “Revisiting lineage: a life course approach to relatedness at the Late Shang capital of Yinxu (ca. 1200-1050BCE)”
• Ilana McQuinn (History), “The Symbolic Image of Central Europe: Jewish Representation in Czechoslovak Culture, 1945-1975”
• Sarath Pillai (History), “Decolonizing the Empire by Treaties: Princely States and the Quest for a Federal India”
• Lucas Pinheiro (Political Science), “Factories of Modernity: Labor, Aesthetics, and the Racial Politics of Historical Capitalism”

To read more about these researchers, students, and their projects, visit the SSRC website.

Opened in Fall 2017, the SSRC is designed to foster team-based and multi-method collaborative approaches to understanding complex social problems, addressing the rapidly evolving and growing needs for research infrastructure across the social sciences.