Arts and Humanities faculty members Emily Johnson, Anne Bubriski, Sarah Singer and William Fogarty have received grants through the UCF Seed Funding Program for high-risk, high-reward exploratory research. The UCF Seed Funding Program increases recognition of UCF faculty and allows them to collect preliminary data for future external grant funding. This allotment of funds to CAH faculty highlights the college’s position as a leader in cutting-edge research and innovation.
Johnson, assistant professor of English, and Bubriski, lecturer of Women’s and Gender Studies and Coordinator of the Science Leadership and Mentoring program (SLAM), were awarded funding for their project, “emPower through Play: Participatory Design of Games for Diversity in Leadership.” This research aims to empower women and girls through educational leadership games that are completely designed by undergraduate women on current leadership topics. With the Seed Grant, Johnson and Bubriski will recruit UCF students in the Science Leadership and Mentoring program to take part in participatory design practices to create an educational leadership game. The results will inform future projects and contribute to the long-term objective of developing a platform for resources and interventions regarding challenges and barriers to leadership for girls and young women. This project is a reflection of Johnson’s lifelong philosophy that “learning that’s fun is fun.”
“This Seed Grant will advance our work to the next level, where it will be more competitive for large, external grants,” says Johnson.
Singer, assistant professor of English, received Seed funding for her research, “Making Sense of Long Covid: Illness Narratives Within and Beyond the Doctor’s Office.” Her work will investigate how individuals with pre-existing chronic health conditions navigate their diagnoses with “long Covid” and advocate for themselves in healthcare settings. By collecting and analyzing illness narratives, as well as conducting interviews, Singer will better understand how patients convinced their healthcare providers that “long Covid” is real. She hopes to learn how patients’ previous experiences with communicating unclear symptoms can help those with persistent COVID-19 symptoms seek care. Singer’s ultimate objective is to receive a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to expand on this initial research and design an interactive website for survivors to share illness narratives and other materials.
Fogarty, assistant professor of English, earned a grant for “Researching the Gwendolyn Brooks Archive at the University of California at Berkeley for a Book Chapter and a Journal Article.” This funding will allow him to travel to and research the archive of Gwendolyn Brooks at the University of California at Berkeley. There, he will have exclusive access to a marked-up screenplay of an unproduced 1975 screen adaptation of one of Brooks’ most influential poems. He will also analyze the working drafts of her most political poems. The objective of this research is for Fogarty to be published in a major scholarly journal, prepare his book for major academic presses and earn more funding for research that explores poetry in relation to other mediums.
To learn more about research taking place at CAH, visit https://www.cah.ucf.edu/research/.
Read more about the SEED initiative at https://www.ucf.edu/news/ucf-funds-second-round-of-1-million-seed-initiative-to-support-faculty-research.