Five projects from faculty at the University of Oklahoma were awarded a combined total of more than $200,000 in funding through the OU Office of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships' new seed funding program, Initiative for the Humanities and Arts in Society (IHAS). This recently established program promotes research and creative activity of faculty in the humanities and arts who are carrying out convergent and collaborative projects addressing global grand challenges. These faculty and projects won support from this inaugural offering:
Emily C. Burns, principal investigator and an associate professor of art history in the School of Visual Arts and director of the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West, will develop the project, “Animate Itineraries: Native American Art in Settler Contexts,” which expands the analysis of Native American art in settler paintings, anthropology exhibitions and Wild West performance through in-person conversation with Lakota, Blackfoot, Pawnee and Kiowa communities and grows the 2025 Russell Center symposium.
Raju Maharjan, principal investigator and an assistant professor in the School of Visual Arts, and Sang Ryu, co-principal investigator and an assistant professor in the School of Visual Arts, will develop the project “Developing a Generative AI Pedagogical Framework for Visual Communication Design Education,” a sustainable pedagogical framework that incorporates Generative Artificial Intelligence, or GenAI, into design education, with the goal of preparing a new generation of designers with expertise in harnessing the creative potential of this technology to foster innovation and problem solving.
Stephanie Pilat, co-principal investigator and director of the Division of Architecture in the Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture, and Angela Person, co-principal investigator and director of Research Initiatives and Strategic Planning in the Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture, will develop the project “Outré West: The American School of Architecture from Oklahoma to California,” a five-month architecture-themed exhibition to be hosted by the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center. Thereafter, the exhibition, which considers the little-known but widespread influence of Oklahoma architectural education known as the “American School of Architecture,” will travel to the Center for Architecture + Design in San Francisco.
Carol Rose Little, principal investigator and an assistant professor in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, will develop the project “A Theory of Impersonals,” which probes the grammatical parallel of two languages, Ch’ol, a Mayan language of Mexico, and Ga, a Kwa language of Ghana, and investigates how and why speakers of these two languages construct impersonal expressions.
Zoe Sherinian, principal investigator and the chair of the Division of Musicology, Ethnomusicology, and Music in General Studies, and N. Scott Robinson, co-principal investigator, professor and chair of Music at San Diego Mesa College, will develop the project “Sustaining Hereditary Knowledge of South Indian Frame Drummers through Digital Music-Mapping,” an internationally collaborative geographic information system (GIS) music-mapping project on the parai frame drum of the Dalits of Tamil Nadu, South India that presents the contemporary and historic diversity of the parai using audio-visual data and textual interpretation.
Learn more about the Initiative for the Humanities and Arts in Society seed grant program and other OVPRP-sponsored initiatives.
