Kevin Boyle, David Crowe and Megan Squire have been selected as Senior Faculty Research Fellows for the 2012-13 and 2013-14 academic years.
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Elon University professors Kevin Boyle, David Crowe and Megan Squire have been selected as Senior Faculty Research Fellows for the 2012-13 and 2013-14 academic years.
The Presidential Task Force on Scholarship recommended in 2008 that the university create a highly competitive program to support excellence in ongoing scholarly work for faculty with a minimum of seven years in rank at Elon. The award comprises a two-course reassignment for two consecutive years, plus $2,000 per year in research funding, in support of a significant project or projects that advance an already well-established and promising research agenda.
Boyle, a professor and chair of the Department of English, will use the award to complete one collection of poems and begin work on a second. Sin Embargo is a nearly complete manuscript that will reflect Boyle’s last six years of work. Self-described as a slightly unusual writer – son of an immigrant, from a sub-middle class background, a man who writes about domestic issues, and a free verse writer who is attracted to forms – Boyle has continued to be a prolific poet, publishing 11 poems in 2010-11 while also serving as chair of one of Elon’s largest departments. Reflective of his success and productivity as a poet, 27 of the poems to be included in Sin Embargo, Boyle’s third book-length collection, have already appeared in various literary magazines. The Fellowship will support even greater focused time for writing, leading from the completion of one collection to a substantive start to his next.
Crowe, a professor of history, and of legal history at Elon’s School of Law, will use the Fellowship as support for writing his second major biography, this of Raphael Lemkin, a prominent Polish lawyer who coined the phrase and definition of genocide in World War II and, later, played a key role in getting the United Nations to adopt the Genocide Convention in 1948. The 2004 biography Crowe authored of Oskar Schindler received tremendous national press and praise, and his work on Lemkin will extend his notoriety as a specialist in international criminal and international humanitarian law. Like Schindler’s, Lemkin’s life was bittersweet; he was nominated numerous times for the Nobel Peace Prize and yet died alone in poverty. Through extensive archival research of Lemkin’s private papers in the New York Public Library, the Center for Jewish History in New York, Columbia University School of Law Library, the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, and archives in Poland, Crowe aims to craft a comprehensive biography, one that also fills the almost complete void in what is known about Lemkin’s life prior to his flight from Poland in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution.
Squire, an associate professor of computing sciences, will be working to extend the scholarship she and a team of five core scholars around the country began on FLOSS (free, libre and open source software) in 2004. Her team’s original goal was to collect and distribute the data required to effectively study the open source software phenomenon, work that has since led to more than 55 journal papers, 200,000 code and data downloads in support of other scholars’ research, a scholarly paper repository with more than 1,100 papers, and has received more than $2 million in NSF research funding, with an additional $2 million pending in 2011. The Fellowship will support Squire’s efforts to write software and build infrastructures to extend and enhance the capabilities of their FLOSSmole data commons. She will develop “spiders” (software programs) that collect, clean, and store data, and she will also build a cutting-edge “executable paper” infrastructure that lets FLOSS researchers go beyond downloading research data to performing online data analysis to creating scholarly papers that can be replicated and extended (“executed”) by other researchers. Her work will also find outlets in published articles and proceedings.
Boyle, Crowe and Squire will join four current Senior Faculty Research Fellows. The first two Fellowships were awarded for the period of 2009-11 to Anne Bolin, professor of anthropology, and Mary Jo Festle, professor of history, for, respectively, completion of a four-volume encyclopedia of sexuality and Second Wind: The History and Experience of Lung Transplantation.
Clyde Ellis, a professor of history, and Yoram Lubling, a professor of philosophy, are currently completing their second year as Senior Faculty Research Fellows for major book projects related to, respectively, the history of North Carolina American Indian communities and philosophies of Dewey and Emerson.
Last year, Joel Karty, associate professor of chemistry, and Laura Roselle, professor of political science, were awarded fellowships for work spanning 2011-13, with Karty focused on studying the magnitude of resonance and inductive effects on molecules’ stability, and Roselle completing work on an edited volume and a single-authored manuscript related to international relations, political communications, new media, and strategic narratives.
A call for applications for Senior Faculty Research Fellowships is announced early each fall. All faculty with a minimum of seven years in rank at Elon, established records of scholarship, and robust project proposals with the potential to significantly advance their research agendas are encouraged to apply.