2011

Sarah Casteel, Department of English
The FASS Research Award will assist in the completion of Casteel’s SSHRC-funded book project “Calypso Jews”: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination. As Casteel’s research shows, Jewish characters and motifs are a persistent presence in postwar Caribbean writing. Yet discussions of Black-Jewish relations have focussed almost exclusively on the United States and often mirror contemporary tensions between African Americans and Jewish Americans. Adopting a transnational approach, Casteel’s project investigates the alternative modes of drawing Black and Jewish histories into relation that become available when we widen our lens to encompass a broader African diaspora cultural landscape.

James Deaville, SSAC (Music)
James Deaville’s project focuses on the use of music in television news to manipulate audiences, not only into deciding on a news provider, but also into accepting its particular “take” on the news.

Deaville’s book will contribute to the growing body of literature about “political” uses of music, which considers music neither neutral nor powerless in the communication of affect.  This is territory already familiar to disciplines like media studies, television studies, and American studies, yet musicology has just begun to examine the role of music in the broadcast media, whether radio, television or the internet.

Masako Hirotani, SLaLS
Masako Hirotani’s research project advances our understanding of how humans process language and in particular, sentence structure. Specifically, Hirotani will investigate how sentences prior to the target sentence, or discourse contexts, are used in the real time processing of thematic information (i.e., information about who did what to whom). She will also examine the role that auditory information like intonation and pauses, called prosodic information, plays in facilitating thematic processing.  Hirotani’s research also tracks how both eye-movement patterns and brain signatures of speakers of verb-initial and verb-final languages (e.g., English and Japanese, respectively) may differ when processing thematic role information.

Ralph Serin, Department of Psychology

Ralph Serin’s research examines the conceptualization and assessment of dynamic risk in offenders on probation and parole supervision in the community. His work focuses on the creation of a new measure that better reflects a conceptual understanding of dynamic risk and one that includes protective factors consistent with our offender change research.

This measure is called the Dynamic Risk Assessment of Offender Reentry (DRAOR) and has been adopted recently as a national standard by the New Zealand Department of Corrections.

Interest in the measure has been expressed also in Albania where the DRAOR will be used to refine probation services consistent with evidence-based practice in order to assist their application into the European Union as well from other states in the US.

The FASS Research Award will be used to develop a research plan to maximize the academic, theoretical and applied contribution regarding risk assessment and to further the international research linkages emerging around this technique.

2010

Ash Asudeh, Cognitive Science & SLaLS
The Logic of Pronominal Resumption.

Travis DeCook, Department of English
Israel’s Imagined Futures in Early Modern England: Literature, Knowledge and Political Theology.

Janna Fox, School of Linguistics and Language Studies
Janna Fox’s research focuses on improving learning and retention among first year engineering students through the use of diagnostic assessment that is linked to pedagogical interventions.

Heidi Maibom, Department of Philosophy
Heidi Maibom’s work focuses on the nature, origin and function of core moral emotions. These include empathy, sympathy, guilt, shame, disgust and anger.

2009
James Opp, department of history
Photography and Public Memory in Prairie Canada, 1920-1970

Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, school for studies in art and culture
Cinema in the Post-Studio Era: Japanese Contemporary Films in the 1990s and 2000s

Barbara Leckie, department of English Language and Literature
Open Houses: Architecture, the Social Housing Debates, and the Rise of the Novel, 1842-92

2008
Jennifer Evans, department of history
Reconstruction Sites: Spaces of Sexual Encounter in Cold War Berlin

Carol Payne, school for studies in art and culture
The Official Picture: The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canadian Nationhood

Armand Ruffo, department of English language and literature
Norval Morriseau: Man Changing into Thunderbird

2007
Aaron Doyle, department of sociology and anthropology
“Risk, Fear, Blaming, Punitiveness and the Public”

Catherine Khordoc, department of French
“Babel: un architexte mythique dans la litterature francophone contemporaine”

Doug King, department of geography and environmental studies
“Multi-scale Modelling and Mapping of Vegetation Composition and Structure for Habitat Analysis”

2006
Ming Tiampo, school for studies in art and culture

Sean Carey, department of geography and environmental studies

Susanne Klausen, department of history.