Samrat Upadhyay (Creative Writing Program, English) received a $8,000 travel grant provided by College Arts and Humanities Institute to take two graduate students in the Creative writing Program to Nepal during the summer to support their efforts to write cross-culturally. The project is titled, “Cultural Space and Displacement.” He also received a $20,000 New Frontiers grant to invite authors who address the personal and the political in their writing. The project is titled “The Writer in the World: The Personal and the Political.”

Sculptor Jerald Jacquard's recent research and exhibitions include:

 1.   Permanent installation of a Large Sculpture at the Fullerton Subway Station in Chicago
 2.   35 Year Retrospective Model Exhibition at the Bloomington City Hall Gallery
 3.   Seven pieces of art accepted into the permanent collection of the Indiana Historical Museum which includes 3 models, 3 paintings and 1 drawing
 4.   Faculty Art Exhibition -- Summer work to start the school year 

Portia Maultsby, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, served as general consultant, artistic advisor, and editorial assistant for a two week festival Honor! Festival Celebrating American’s African American Roots that celebrated African American music and culture curated by soprano Jessye Norman and sponsored by Carnegie Hall in March. She also developed and wrote the text for a historical, interactive timeline on African American music  permanently featured on Carnegie Hall’s  web site (http://www.carnegiehall.org/honor/history/index.aspx) and presented  “African American Musical Legacy and its Political Function” and “Situating Gospel and Spirituals in the Black Continuum” for panels on African American expressive arts and African American religious music as part of Honor Festival. Maultsby also presented the opening lecture, “Fight the Power with Black Power: Black Music and Political/Social Activism in the 1960s and 1970s,” for the 2009 MLK program and lecture series at Denison University.

Sue Tuohy, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, received a 2009 Trustees Teaching Award from the College of Arts and Sciences.  Tuohy was awarded an East Asian Studies Center (EASC) grant to present “Olympic Performances: Mass-mediated and Participatory Displays of China” at the Society for Ethnomusicology annual meeting in October 2008. She received a grant from Hong Kong Baptist University and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council to participate in the conference “East Meets West: Sino-Western Musical Relations / Intersections / Receptions / Representations,” hosted by the Department of Music, Hong Kong Baptist University in April 2009. She presented a paper titled “Representations of Western Music in Chinese Films.”   Her article “Reflexive Cinema: Reflecting on and Representing the Worlds of Chinese Film and Music” was published in Global Sound Tracks: The Worlds of Film Music, edited by Mark Slobin (Wesleyan University Press, 2008, pp. 177-213).

Professor of Fine Arts Malcolm Mobutu Smith’s ceramic work is featured in a recent exhibition(feb. of 2009)  “NewNow” at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park Kansas. The museum acquired two works for their permanent collections one is a part of the Nerman museum proper and a second work for the Oppenheimer collection also within the museum. Additionally, The Indiana State Museum acquired my work for their permanent collection and my work will be featured in an upcoming exhibition at the Indiana State Museum  June 20 – Nov. 1 2009, Making it in the Midwest: Artists Who Chose to Stay.  The exhibit explores the challenges facing working artists in the Midwest and discover the extraordinary talent found throughout Indiana and the surrounding region. Making it in the Midwest will bring together an important array of historical works, many of which are in private collections and have not been seen publicly for decades. The exhibit uncovers the ways artists have earned recognition when working outside the centers of the art world.

Hasan El-Shamy, Folklore and Ethnomusicology, conducted a workshop/training session on the topics of “Fields of Folklore and current theories of Folklore,” in Bahrain. It involved 61 professionals mainly at the National Museum of Bahrain at Manama.  Two of his published works served as textbooks.  Hasan was honored by a certificate of appreciation from the Minister of Culture and Information and received a golden key to the city, Manama. 

Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, professor of Arabic Literature in NELC and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature, is currently on a 6-month NEH research grant through the American Research Center in Egypt for a project on the 11th c. Syrian poet al-Ma`arri. The Arabic translation of her 1991 book on the 9th century Arab poet Abu Tammam appeared Fall 2008 with the Egyptian National Center for Translation; it was the subject of a panel discussion at the Egyptian Society for Literary Criticism in April, 2009.

Marcia Baron, Philosophy, was awarded an NEH fellowship for the calendar year 2010. During this period, she will be working on a new book project under the title of Self-Defense, Reason, and the Law. 

Richard Bauman, Folklore, was awarded the American Folklore Society Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award at this year's American Folklore Society meetings.

Daniel Reed, associate professor in Ethnomusicology, received a New Frontiers Grant for New Frontiers for Crossing Boundaries: An Application of Innovative Technology to an Ethnomusicological Study of Ivorian Immigrants in the United States.

During the first quarter of this calendar year Fine Arts librarian Tony White stepped down as editor for the Journal of Artist’s Books and was appointed to a new position at the College Art Association’s online review website: http://www.caareviews.org/.  CAA Reviews is a Andrew Mellon foundation funded project to actively publish scholarly book reviews for books within their first year of publication. 

Michael Foster, Folklore and Ethnomusicology, won a $3000 grant for research in Japan this summer from Northeast Asia Council (NEAC) of Association for Asian Studies (AAS).  The research project title is Producing and Consuming Heritage in Japan: Tourism and the Namahage. He also released his book Pandemonium and Parade, 2009.

Randy Long, professor of Metalsmithing and Design, is exhibiting her work in an invitational small group show titled, "State-Of-The-Art": New Jewelry at Taboo Studio in San Diego, California from May 8- June 19th.

Professor of Fine Arts Arthur Liou’s high-definition video series “Improbable Waves” are featured in solo exhibitions at Ruschman Gallery in Indianapolis and Poissant Gallery in Houston.

Dr. Sungok Hong, director of language instruction in the India Studies Program, has been awarded a STARTALK grant of $119,999 to offer  SIPHUR  2009 (Summer  Intensive Program for Hindi and Urdu). STARTALK is one of the projects of the National Security Language Initiative, a multi-agency effort to expand foreign language education in critical-need languages,  and is administered by the National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland .