RISE and PDA Awards

 This article project reevaluates George Eliot’s seminal novel Middlemarch (1871-72) through a focus on the seriality of the novel’s composition and publication processes. Seriality refers to a literary work being released in separate parts over time. Serial publication is familiar to audiences today from weekly television shows or podcasts, but most major nineteenth-century novels were also published in parts over time. While literary scholars have extensively examined the serial publication of popular novelists such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot’s reputation for producing high-brow literary masterpieces has arguably prevented a full understanding of the effects of Middlemarch’s serial composition and publication. This project draws on archival research into Eliot’s notebooks and correspondence for insights into her composition process and business practices. By combining my research into the publication format with analysis of scenes from the novel, this project demonstrates that Middlemarch’s unique publication format was key to the novel’s ability to navigate the major political problems of nineteenth century Britain. The novel’s serial composition brings together stories focused on the population of a new manufacturing town and the members of the hereditary landed gentry, providing a model for how the members of different social groups might come to coexist in a common community. Ultimately, Middlemarch constructs a serial imagination in which readers can, through access to a print culture that disseminates information between communities and cultural spaces, imagine even different, distant peoples as civil interlocutors in a shared community. 

The research proposed here continues and expands my investigations into growth of Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs) to lengths sufficient for materials applications. CNTs are tubes of pure carbon with diameters of approximately 1 nanometer (one billionth of a meter). CNTs are thin tubes made of single or multiple layers of carbon atoms, and have many remarkable materials properties including extremely high tensile strength, stiffness, and thermal and electrical conductivity. Large-scale wires and cables made of CNTs have been predicted to have a strength-to-weight ratio exceeding by a factor of 100 the strength of steel cables. Thus, there is great interest in using CNTs for cables, wires, composites, and for many other materials applications.
However, CNTs can currently be grown to lengths of only a few centimeters, much less than the multiple-meter lengths needed for envisioned applications. Taking full advantage of CNTs’ unique properties will require production of large-scale quantities of CNTs with lengths comparable to or greater than these macroscopic sizes of the envisioned applications.
In the proposed research, my group and I will continue our investigations into the growth of CNTs to lengths greater than currently achievable. We will investigate ways to extend time for which the CNTs grow, and thus to extend the ultimate length achieved by the CNTs, by changing and varying the composition of the catalyst used to catalyze CNT growth and the feedstock gas mixture used to provide carbon for this growth.

Nature reserve design is an important aspect of conservation biology. Nature reserves usually consist of a few remaining, isolated “islands” of intact natural habitat in a sea of altered landscapes. Diamond (1975) proposed that a “single large” reserve would preserve more biodiversity than “several small” reserves, sparking an on-going debate. The value of reserves in protecting species depends on how many species are protected. On islands (or isolated nature reserves), the number of species will reach an “equilibrium” or average number that depends on 1) island size, 2) the distance to a mainland or other sources of species, and 3) whether a corridor exists between islands and/or the mainland. Corridors connect isolated reserves, rendering them larger, with more species. The equilibrium number is a valuable management objective in nature reserve design. To test the influence of island size and corridor presence while holding equal the distance to the mainland, I will employ replicated artificial “dredge spoil” islands in Mosquito Lagoon on the east coast of Florida. These islands are vastly different in size, some are connected with corridors, and all are the same distance to the mainland. I propose to sample the vegetation on each of the islands and nearby mainland to test the influence of island size and presence of corridors on the number of plant species. The main objective of this study is to collect data that will aid in the management of habitat islands in an altered landscape in Florida and beyond.

Feminist activism in Iran has long been studied in relation to Islamism, patriarchal state policies, or limited political opportunities. Due to this focus, little attention has been paid to the heterogeneity of women’s perspectives, lived experiences, and feminist agenda in Iran. This book project brings attention to the role middle-class and cosmopolitan women play in shaping the feminist agenda and definitions of women’s liberation in Iran. While recognizing the courage and vision of middle-class feminists, this book demonstrates the ways by which privileged women’s assumptions about progress and emancipation, rooted in Iran’s class and ethnic politics, usher in emancipation while facilitating other social hierarchies. By drawing on data gathered through ethnographic observations of a women’s empowerment program in Tehran as well as interviews with its middle-class workers and its impoverished ethnic minority Iranian and Afghan refugee clients, this book offers a unique and intersectional analysis of feminist activism and gender inequality in Iran. This study reveals that local elite and marginalized women continuously debate and contest globally circulating "women’s rights packages" in accordance with local norms, their standpoint, and lived experiences. This book project is under contract by Temple University Press and the RISE grant I am seeking will allow me to complete the project by facilitating the timely revision, editing, and indexing the book.

The purpose of this project is to comprehensively examine crime hot spots relative to controls at especially small units of analysis in Seattle. The evidence for crime hot spots continues to develop rapidly, with corroborating research suggesting its efficacy as a crime reduction strategy across law enforcement agencies that have adopted hot spot policing techniques. Prior conclusions have also indicated that the nexus between crime and place is critical to determining where and why crime events occur. Though, several questions remain unanswered regarding our understanding of what makes hot spots – the places that experience a statistically disproportionate volume of crime – “hot.” Qualitatively coding Google Street View imagery of street segments enables the proposed project to ascertain more nuanced conclusions about the relationship between crime and place at more micro-scales than routinely examined. The proposed project will expand upon research (Connealy, 2022; Sytsma, Connealy, & Piza, 2021) that has examined high crime places of interest using innovative, open source, and remote methodologies. With funding from the RISE grant, research into the environment’s influence on crime can be more adequately probed with potential conclusions impacting researcher and practitioner realms. The project aims to determine; the environmental features distinctively comprising hot spots, the temporal stability of environmental features in hot spots, and the correlation between environmental feature changes and crime levels in hot spots. The goal of this project will culminate in peer-review publications and non-peer review conference presentations focusing on unique aspects of the relationship between the environment and crime.

The Crisis Center of Tampa Bay (CCTB) has over 50 years of delivering Help, Hope and Healing. They are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year as a gateway to help individuals struggling with any type of crisis situation including sexual assault or abuse, domestic violence, financial distress, substance abuse, medical emergency, suicidal ideation, and other situations (Hillsborough County, 2022). Clara Reynolds has been the President and CEO since 2015, and is dedicated to the mission and vision of this non-profit organization. For CCTB to continue to grow and be successful, Reynolds embraces a servant leadership style (Van Dierendonck, 2011). Servant leadership is “an approach focusing on leadership from the point of view of the leader and his or her behaviors” (Northouse, 2013, p. 219). But most of the research on servant leadership is how it should be, not how it is, because there is still little empirical evidence (Van Dierendonck, 2011). Servant leaders put followers first, are ethical, and they empower their subordinates, allowing them to reach their full potential (Northouse, 2013).
This case study will use the CCTB to examine servant leadership through the actions and statements of the CEO, Clara Reynolds. We will interview not only Reynolds but also several of her long-term employees at different levels of the organization, to understand her actions and how they are perceived by employees within the company. The case will allow students to understand and analyze leadership in a real-world context.

I aim to complete two related, peer-reviewed articles and generate additional reference material for future work. This project will extend my long-term research on the major Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881-1936). This project involves archival research on Lu Xun’s correspondence and diaries, translating selections from them for myself and other scholars, locating and reading the accounts of Lu Xun in international media, reading the recent scholarly literature on Lu Xun, and writing two articles for submission to peer-reviewed journals. One article will examine how Lu Xun effectively engaged in self-promotion through informal texts, and the other will investigate how the persona he constructed was received internationally.
Although Lu Xun’s literary work is well known and hotly contested in the scholarship on modern China, the mechanisms by which he emerged as the paradigmatic figure of Chinese literature are less understood. By looking at the less read and more personal parts of his oeuvre—letters, diaries, photographs—this project seeks to demonstrate how Lu Xun consciously established and exploited his celebrity during his lifetime to move in national and international circles as both an artist and political commentator. By examining the mechanisms by which the author manufactured his celebrity, this project hopes to contribute to the larger scholarly conversation on Lu Xun that challenges more facile invocations of his legacy for contemporary political ends.

This project would produce a scholarly research article that focuses on a local culture of Californian cartography commonly known as “star maps.” Sold in the open air by street vendors in Los Angeles, these maps purport to offer directions to the homes of Hollywood celebrities to visiting tourists. Star maps have a century of undocumented history that I aim to archivally recover via targeted archival research in Los Angeles. Originally offered by film studios in the 1920s, and with tacit acceptance from the actors listed on the map, by the end of the Second World War they became an icon of cartographic misinformation, known for their erroneous addresses and guidance. After the tumult of New Hollywood in the 1960s, star maps turned into a gray market product, frequently contested in court and affiliated with bohemian subcultures. They remain a fixture of the tourist experience in Los Angeles.
My planned article, “Star Maps: Cartography and Fandom on the Margins,” would be the first to take these maps seriously, both as a unique regional form of mapping and as a documentary history of fan culture. Poised between the histories of cartography and cinema, this project will argue that star maps tell the story of (on the one hand) a uniquely Angeleno, subcultural, lay cartography; and (on the other) of a streetwise, pre-internet, fan community. These unique maps have been too hastily dismissed, and offer an opportunity to modify, from the margins, the received history of both popular cartography and cinema.

The goal of this project is to develop a game to educate about the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) Treaty with direct implications that positively impact the quality of life for children. In 1989, this treaty delineated a list of basic human rights children should be afforded. All UN countries have ratified it except for the United States. Digital game-based learning (DGBL) is a viable delivery method for instruction, dissemination of knowledge, and a motivational means to learn (Ensmann, 2017, 2021; Justice & Ritzhaupt, 2015).
My approved sabbatical in the spring of 2024 will provide me the time to develop a two-dimensional (flat) prototype (Ensmann, 2017) into an immersive three-dimensional (3D) video game, where players engage in crowd-sourced stories to learn the need for ratification. Beginning in the fall of 2023, the funds from this RISE grant will support me with student assistants, whom I will hire, oversee, and train to apply their class knowledge and expertise, including artistic graphic design, instructional design, and game design talents, to add to the quality of this real-world game application. In the spring of 2024, we will build out the scenes, test the game and report the findings through the summer of 2024. I will aim to publish this study in conferences and peer-reviewed journals, such as the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, Simulation and Gaming, and the International Journal of Game-Based Learning, which advances my field in educational research using metaverse technologies for impactful learning experiences.

Proteins are the key molecules that determine how cells and organisms behave. Their activities are controlled by a number of protein modifiers, one of the most important of which is a polypeptide called ubiquitin. The attachment of ubiquitin to proteins is carried out by a large class of enzymes known as ubiquitin ligases (E3s). These enzymes, which are frequently deregulated in human diseases, often modify their protein substrates with multiple ubiquitin molecules to form a structure known as a polyubiquitin chain. Recent work has shown that the structures of polyubiquitin chains are complex and vary considerably in terms of their size and shape. The study of these polyubiquitin chain “architectures” is important because such structures determine the fate of the protein they are attached to and have been directly linked to neurodegenerative diseases. The goals of this proposal are to: 1) develop a new biochemical tool to detect the formation of complex polyubiquitin chain architectures, and 2) determine the functional relevance of one such polyubiquitin chain architecture formed by a specific family of E3s. We hypothesize that polyubiquitin chain structures differentially alter the stability of the proteins they are attached to, thus providing a mechanism to fine-tune the rate of disposal of damaged or otherwise unwanted proteins. UT students will be directly involved in these projects, providing them with an opportunity to be exposed to biochemical research in a cutting-edge and rapidly developing field.

Characterizing the diversity, residency, and abundance of the Florida Everglades fish fauna will better inform the role of non-native fishes in terms of ecosystem diversity, potential for expansion to other regions, and the potential of future management actions on this unique ecosystem. The information collected will allow natural resource managers to more accurately conserve habitats crucial for various developmental stages of native fish fauna in Florida. Thus, we must understand the relationship between native and invasive fish. The overall goal of the proposed project is to characterize the role and movement patterns of both invasive and native fish in South Florida. More specifically the objectives are 1) characterize the diversity and distribution of non-native and native freshwater fishes in the Florida Everglades and 2) examine the residency and movement patterns of representative non-native and native fishes. This project will use bi-monthly field sampling of representative fixed sample sites in the western portion of the Florida Everglades. Seven representative sample sites will be selected based on preliminary sampling criteria (e.g., representative of the available habitat, considerate of accessibility during varying water levels that are common in this region).This information will be used to characterize the diversity, residency, and abundance of the Florida Everglades fish fauna. This information will better inform the role of non-native fishes in terms of ecosystem diversity, potential for expansion to other regions, and the potential of future management actions on this unique ecosystem.

Mergers and acquisition (M&A) agreements include several contractual provisions that are broadly an attempt to balance deal certainty and an option to back out if it appears that doing so is in the best interest of their shareholders. Some provisions provide compensation to one party if the counterparty backs out. For example, a target termination fee provision requires the target pay the acquirer a fee, generally 3%-4% of the deal value if the target backs out of the deal. Given the average deal value of $3bn (based on 3,085 deals between 2003 and 2018), the effect of paying termination fees is significant. Consequently, substantial research focusses on the impact of the compensatory provisions.
Another group of less researched, but equally important, provisions are non-compensatory in nature. The focus of this project is one such provision - stock voting agreements. These indicate that a group of shareholders, prior to public announcement of the deal, have agreed to vote in favor of the merger agreement effectively reducing the votes required to approve the merger agreement and increasing the likelihood of deal completion. By offering greater deal certainty to the initial bidder, the target could improve its negotiating position and elicit a higher premium (efficient contracting). On the other hand, an initial bidder could anticipate a lower likelihood of a competing bid and offer a lower premium (inefficient contracting). The net effect of target stock voting agreements on competing bids, deal completion and returns to target shareholders is thus an empirical question.

This proposal seeks to utilize a novel reaction platform using TEMPO, an oxygen radical source, to initiate addition to conjugated 1,3-dienes under mild conditions, beginning with the introduction of carboxylic acids as the terminal nucleophilic trapping partner. This oxygenation will open the possibility for a range of nucleophilic addition partners and produce a wide range of reaction outcomes. Oxygen represents one of the most critical components in a variety of chemical fields, such as medicines, agrochemicals, synthetic materials, and natural products. The importance of oxygen cannot be understated, as 96% of the top 200 small molecule drugs of 2021 contain oxygen. Given the importance of small molecule drugs in modern medicine and pharmacology, it is vital that straightforward and reliable methods be created to meet the ever-increasing demand for complex molecular scaffolds. This proposal will build on preliminary results established for the dioxygenation of 1,3-dienes by a) further exploring the range of substrates that are viable in this reaction, b) probing the mechanistic rationale of this transformation, and c) discovering protocols suitable for the removal of either or both of the protecting groups on the resulting oxygen atoms of the product. Finally, this proposal offers an array of possible future reactivity by varying the nucleophilic trapping partner to expand the accessible products of the transformation.

Readers’ comprehension of fictional stories is influenced by many factors. Theories of text processing propose that readers construct mental models of narrative situations and understand what they are reading, in part, by imagining story events, mentally acting out characters’ actions, empathizing with characters, and visualizing story worlds through characters’ eyes. Research suggests that the perspective through which authors frame stories will influence the perspective through which readers "see" stories (Creer et al., 2017). Empirical investigations of narrative perspective have been limited to manipulations of grammatical person – comparisons of readers’ understanding of stories written from the first- and third-person. This research suggests that readers are more likely to visualize stories from the perspective of the protagonist when stories are framed in the first-person (I entered the library) than in the third-person (He entered the library). In contrast, literary scholars’ understanding of narrative perspective and how it affects readers’ interpretation of stories is quite sophisticated. However, many of the factors that are believed to influence readers’ perspective-taking lack empirical support. Once such factor is narrative focalization – the degree to which stories describe the characters’ private thoughts and perceptions of story events. In the current project, I will examine the role of focalization on readers’ perspective-taking and how focalization may interact with grammatical person to influence readers’ perspective taking. We hypothesize that greater access to characters’ thoughts and perceptions will allow readers to more easily relate to characters, adopt characters’ perspectives, and influence their overall understanding of stories.

Notes on Vermin is a book about rats, cockroaches, pigeons, mosquitoes, and worms, and how they are used in modern literature. I argue that these creatures are objects not only of repulsion, but also of fascination, identification, and desire. Poets and novelists see in these abject animals a flash of insurgent energy, a defiant rejoinder to the ruling powers that would expel them.
In political discourse, vermin imagery has often been used to denigrate poor, foreign, or racialized people (most recently in rhetoric that portrays refugees as “swarming” and “infesting” host countries). Why, then, have many writers, including some who belong to these oppressed groups—Franz Kafka in The Metamorphosis, Rawi Hage in Cockroach, Art Spiegelman in Maus, Octavia Butler in “Bloodchild,” Mina Loy in “Property of Pigeons,” and Richard Wright in Native Son, to name just a few—chosen to perversely embrace this vermin imagery? Notes on Vermin finds four main uses to which these authors put vermin: as representations of the repressed thought, the uncommitted fugitive, the surplus life, and the freeloading parasite. The four chapters of the book explore these four figures and humans’ love/hate relationships with them.
Notes on Vermin is under contract with the University of Michigan Press. When published, it will make a contribution to the fields of literary animal studies and environmental humanities as the first book-length study of vermin in modern and contemporary literature. It will also prompt readers to rethink their own kneejerk reactions to vermin and vermin rhetoric.

This research study aims to examine different dimensions of teacher self-disclosure in order to learn which dimensions have the strongest relationships with positive student outcomes such as affect, engagement, and cognitive learning. Teacher self-disclosure is a voluntary (planned or unplanned) transmission of information not readily available to students. Rhetorical and relational goals theory (RRGT) suggests that instructor communication has both rhetorical goals (i.e., focused on classroom tasks and learning outcomes) and relational goals (i.e., focused on fostering perceived caring, connectedness, and liking). Researchers suggest that teacher self-disclosure is one communicative strategy that instructors can use to meet these goals and promote effective teaching. In this project, the researcher will begin by surveying college students’ perceptions of the teacher self-disclosure dimensions. Next, the researcher will analyze these data using statistical software to uncover the meaningful relationships between self-disclosure dimensions and positive student outcome variables. Lastly, the researcher will insert these findings in a manuscript that will be submitted to the National Communication Association conference and a high-quality peer-reviewed journal. In doing so, we will gain a greater understanding of where to focus our attention in future teacher self-disclosure research so that we can further our efforts to improve college student learning.

This project consists of the creation of an index, by a professional
indexer, for my book To Seek a Place in the Social Revolution: The Chinese YWCA and its Women, 1899-1957. The book has already been accepted via peer review and contracted for publication by the University of British Columbia Press. It is expected to be published in hardcover in December 2023. The University of British Columbia Press requires an index for the hardcover edition. A scholarly book index is a mental map of the book, not just a concordance of terms. A professional indexer is strongly recommended.
This book is a history of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in China from its inception as a foreign transplant to its embrace of Mao Zedong fifty years later. I argue that as Chinese women rose to leadership positions in the national headquarters in Shanghai, they transformed the Association from a vehicle for moral and material uplift, to an instrument for Christian-inspired social action, an organizational citizen of China dedicated to national salvation, and finally an ally in the communist state-building project. The fact that the Chinese YWCA survived China’s turbulent twentieth century and still operates in the People’s Republic today makes its early history significant. The book uses historical documents researched in archives in the People’s Republic, Taiwan, Europe, and the United States in both English and Chinese languages to restore the importance of the Chinese YWCA and its women to the history.

Human-made organic molecules are major components in essential industries and building them requires chemical reactions that are efficient by utilizing inexpensive, non-toxic reagents that produce minimal waste. Reactions that produce carbon radicals, a carbon with an unpaired electron, are valuable due to their ability to facilitate transformations that allow chemists to piece together small molecules to produce large, more complex structures. Recently, molecules known as photocatalysts garnered attention due to their ability to generate the necessary radicals under mild conditions using only a fraction of the photocatalyst to minimize waste. Our research investigates the function of molecules called carbazoles as photocatalysts by demonstrating how the carbazole derivatives are valuable as photocatalysts in a carbon–carbon bond forming reaction. Recently, the reaction studied was shown to form a new carbon–carbon bond between two small molecules, an aryl chloride and N-methylpyrrole, in 79% yield using one of our carbazoles as a photocatalyst. When the same method was applied towards other small molecule combinations, however, only trace quantities of the desired product were observed. To further demonstrate the potential and understand the reactivity of carbazoles as photocatalysts, it would be advantageous for the reaction to work with a diverse combination of small molecules. Herein, the proposal aims to investigate the cause and seek a solution for this limitation in the current methodology and involve undergraduate students in the process to aid their development in critical thinking and laboratory skills.

This project aims to complete the extensive archival research that Profs. López and Rey initiated in 2021 and 2022 in Spain to recover the revolutionary press of the Cuban émigré communities of Florida and the greater diaspora in the late 19th century. We have recovered 2639 items of historical importance to date, most of which are newspapers published from 1868-1900, but also include numerous artifacts that reveal important internal and geopolitical aspects of these communities as they organized the war for Cuban independence from Spain. However, only a handful of the newspapers recovered in Spain were published in Ybor City and West Tampa, even though we have identified at least 26 newspapers that were regularly printed there. The reason for this is that by the time Tampa became the primary center for Cuban conspiratorial activities (1890-), Spanish authorities were no longer able to invest sufficient resources in compiling the revolutionary press as in the preceding decades. Nevertheless, we have confirmed that a large cache of Ybor City and West Tampa newspapers can be found at National Archives in Havana. Drs. López and Rey confirmed their existence in January 2020 while in Cuba leading a study abroad course. Now that we have completed our search of Spanish archives and the COVID restrictions on travel to Cuba have been lifted, López and Rey aim to recover the revolutionary press of Ybor City and West Tampa, which is not only of enormous local importance, but without which our recovery project will remain incomplete.

My project examines work being done at six professional Black theatre companies in the United States. This project enables academic theatre, especially at The University of Tampa, to advance a 21st-century ethos of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Project activities are six immersive experiences necessitating travel to six notable, professional, regional Black Theatre companies to 1) see productions, 2) attend events, 3) observe workshops/classes, and 4) interview professional, creative staff. The six theatre companies I will be visiting are Plowshares Theatre Company, Detroit; Birmingham Black Repertory Theatre Collective, Birmingham, AL; True Colors Theatre Company, Atlanta; Rites and Reason Theatre, Providence, RI; National Black Theatre, NYC; The Classical Theatre of Harlem, NYC. These six companies come from a list of eleven Black Theatre companies I compiled (see uploaded document). I used four criteria for selecting these companies.:
• Distinguished status as professional regional theatres.
• Published mission statements that align with my goal of bringing racial justice to the work I produce onstage, in the classroom, in my scholarship.
• Evidence of producing new plays written by Black playwrights or reinterpretations of classical plays for Black audiences.
• Engagement in some form of educational outreach or theatre training.

This activity will take place during my sabbatical leave which was awarded for fall semester, 2023. I will journal my thoughts, impressio ns, reactions. My journal will be the springboard to reimagining my creative scholarship, reshaping my course curricula, and presenting my findings in peer-reviewed publications and at peer-reviewed conferences.

In many cases, race is a highly salient facial feature. Consequently, that feature greatly impacts face memory in that individuals often remember faces from their own race (same-race faces) better than faces from other races (other-race faces), a phenomenon called the other-race effect (ORE). Past research has improved memory accuracy for other-race faces by directing participant's attention towards a meaningful ingroup (Marsh et al., 2016; Marsh, 2021) or by having participants study angry faces (Young et al., 2012) to provoke an emotional response. In two experiments, I test whether political ideological ingroups and emotion elicited from political messages, insults, and compliments impacts how well other-race faces are remembered. During the experimental procedures, participant's eye movements are tracked using an eye-tracker that also measure pupil dilation, a common measure of cognitive effort and emotional response. However, to get a better sense of whether the emotional response is positive or negative, facial expression analysis software is needed. This software measures movement from 33 facial landmarks via webcam and determines which basic emotions are best represented by the movements. It is expected that other-race faces that share a political ideological ingroup will be better remembered than those other-race faces that are not politically in line with the participant. Moreover, if a political message or an insult elicits a negative emotional reaction those faces will be better remembered than the ones that elicit no reaction or a positive emotional reaction.

The grant project is the completion and submission of a book proposal and accompanying sample chapter to two university presses. The proposed book, titled "Unknown and Unlamented: The Exile and Repatriation of a Loyalist Family in the Era of the American Revolution," is a history that explores the distinct experiences of seven members, across three generations, of the British-sympathizing Robie family of Marblehead, Massachusetts during the era of the American Revolution. Built from archival research in the United States and Canada, "Unknown and Unlamented" will be the first book to explore the revolutionary allegiance, exile, repatriation, and post-war influence of a single family from multiple vantages—including from the perspective of women and enslaved people. Fleshing out the diverse stories of the Robie family before, during, and after the American Revolution, the book will provide a more nuanced understanding of how everyday people experienced the Revolution as the nation prepares for the 250th anniversary commemorations planned for 2025/2026. I will use the summer stipend provided by the RISE Grant to complete the two unique book proposals (each around 6,000 words) and to revise a sample chapter that will accompany the proposals based on the feedback I received when I workshopped a draft in November 2022. I will submit both proposals with the accompanying chapter on October 1, 2023.

Health systems are under increasing pressure to reduce patients' hospital readmission rates, sometimes under the threat of financial penalties for high readmission rates. An inpatient stay is generally considered a readmission if the patient went back for another inpatient stay within 30 days of discharge from the hospital. It is often used as a proxy for quality of care given to patients and is also a simple measure to compute. However, a sole focus on readmission rates does not fully capture associated costs of some other hospital policy actions that could lead to readmission reduction. For instance, keeping patients in the hospital a little longer before discharging has cost implications. While this often may result in readmission reduction because the patient presumably has more recovery days in the hospital, the associated costs of keeping the patient are often not accounted for in readmission analysis. In this study, I plan to look for ways to balance these competing agendas. That is, I want to identify discharge policies for health systems that attempt balance both cost and reduce readmissions. To do this, I plan to fit a readmission model and map the readmission rates to costs, and then compare multiple discharge policies and their effect on both readmission and inpatient stay costs.

This research project is designed to theoretically refine and test the construct of open strategy. As an organizing principle, open strategy stands in contrast to traditional notions of competitive (closed) strategy that depend on control. At its most fundamental, open strategy involves the inclusion of internal and external stakeholders beyond the top management team in organizational strategic decision-making. While traditional (closed) views of strategy required a company to generate their own ideas and manage much of the business internally, several factors emerged in the 21st century to challenge these competitive strategy notions including, but not limited to, the mobility of skilled workers, open-sourced platforms, the availability of venture capital, the increased capabilities of external suppliers, and the information available to and engagement of customers.
Today, key knowledge is no longer proprietary and resides in employees, competitors, suppliers, customers, and other ecosystem actors. Astute modern companies now make room for both open and closed paradigms in their strategy-making practices. As previous scholars have noted, there has been a “paucity of systematic theoretical development grounded in empirical studies on open strategy-making” (Gegenhuber & Dobusch, 2017: 339). Its predictions have not been adequately tested, its boundaries have not been enumerated, nor is the science settled on its application in organizational decision-making. This study will attempt to address this gap in our understanding of the open strategy phenomenon.

This project involves indexing, securing images, and preparing the production manuscript of my single-author book titled Intelligent Action: A History of Artistic Research, Aesthetic Experience, and Artists in Academia. My book argues that artists working in and around the American university from 1958-1977 took an alternative approach to the dominant conception of research and knowledge production. I label this approach intelligent action, borrowing a phrase from the American philosopher John Dewey. Dewey’s idea of intelligent action is like knowing-through-doing. However, I also elaborate the ways in which the common ground of experience, an idea that united the sciences and the arts, gave rise to a new role for artists. This new role meant that artists didn’t necessarily need to solve problems but could draw attention to contradictions in the world around them. Artists drew attention to the university itself, the surrounding city, and spaces of wider cultural representation. As new kinds of artworks in the 1960s and 1970s emphasized process, paradox, and irreconcilable experiences, some artists shed the modernist notions of talent and creativity in favor of something decidedly different: a kind of academic practice that engaged with the public through socially engaged art. I conclude that artists who took this alternative path helped transform the visual arts into an intellectually and socially transformative practice, one still fighting for life at the edges of our academic institutions. The book is currently under advance contract with Rutgers University Press.

Machine learning algorithms build a model based on sample data, known as training data, to make predictions or decisions with or without human supervision. It has applications in many disciplines like medical science, business, engineering, and social sciences. For instance, machine learning is proven in predictive analytics, business analytics, financial technology, asset price predictions and optimization, text mining, speech recognition, and so on. In this research, we plan to study the behavior of financial and economic indicators. Financial indicators such as Price-to-Earnings Ratio, Dividend Yield, Free Cash Flow Per Share, Price-to-Book Ratio, and Price Earnings-to-Growth Ratio are highly discussed in the literature of finance. Similarly, economic indicators such as GDP, Federal Interest Rate, US personal saving rate, and consumer confidence index are influential components of the economy. These indicators influence the overall market and stock price of the companies. We plan to use machine learning techniques to create a stock portfolio for optimal returns based on statistically significant indicators identified by the predictive model. At first, we select the best companies from each business sector listed in the S&P 500 index. Then, we create an investment portfolio including the best stocks from each sector. Our proposed model produces customers' choice portfolios for maximum returns, based on a given level of risk they can bear, from the stocks listed in the S&P 500. This project is expected to produce an article to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal and several conference talks.

This book project entails completion of the first known translation from French to English of the 19th century Haitian short story 'Isalina' written in 1836 by Ignace Nau, the first Haitian author to publish works of literary fiction in French. The work tells the story of two men, Jean-Julien and Paul, who attempt to win over the heart of Isalina, a young sugarcane worker from Digneron. Since Isalina prefers Paul, Jean-Julien vows to kill her. After attempting to assassinate her, Jean-Julien succeeds in putting Isalina under a spell thanks to the help of a conjure woman named Marie Robin. Isalina falls gravely ill and begins to lose her faculties. Paul, seeing his beloved’s health continue to decline, calls upon old Galba, the most feared Voodoo practitioner in the area, who is able to ward off the evil spell.

This translation aims to share Nau's pioneering work with a wider non French-speaking audience so that it can be fully appreciated for its contribution to Haitian literature specifically and to the francophone (i.e. French language) literary canon more broadly.

The Hawaiian Islands are known for their rich, highly endemic, and unique biodiversity. Several terrestrial Hawaiian organisms have been shown to have radiated in the region (in situ) from an ancestral species into a multitude of species found nowhere else in the world. Such radiations; however, were thought to not have occurred in coastal organisms from the Hawaiian Islands. Recent studies have shown otherwise, with molecular studies of poorly dispersing and poorly studied coastal invertebrates from the Hawaiian Islands uncovering radiations and previously unknown levels of biodiversity. These findings indicate that our understanding of the biodiversity of poorly studied and poorly dispersing coastal organisms in the Hawaiian Islands is severely limited. This limited knowledge hampers the conservation and management of coastal ecosystems in a region often considered to be amongst the most highly threatened in the world. In this study, molecular approaches will be used to explore the biodiversity of two poorly dispersing crustacean groups commonly found in Hawaiian coastlines: Amphipoda and Isopoda. Past studies in other regions of the world have shown amphipods and isopods to harbor high levels of previously unknown biodiversity, including novel species not previously known to science. This study is thus likely to uncover unique genetic groups that represent novel species in need of description for several coastal crustaceans of the Hawaiian Islands. These findings will help further our understanding of Hawaiian biodiversity and aid in its conservation and management.

This article examines how Ken Loach’s distinctive political vision is communicated in his Palm d’Or winning film I, Daniel Blake by analyzing the title character’s vocation of woodworking and Loach’s own craft of filmmaking. I, Daniel Blake tells the story of a carpenter who has a heart attack that makes him unable to work and shows a series of his arduous interactions with a convoluted, dysfunctional, and under-resourced welfare system. Loach, whose film career spans sixty years, is often treated as an un-cinematic but politically significant filmmaker. This tendency in Loach studies is illustrated in the existing articles on I, Daniel Blake, as most appear in political science rather than film studies journals, and none examine the distinctively filmic elements of the text. I argue that taking Loach seriously as a filmmaker opens up a new reading of I, Daniel Blake that connects Daniel’s persistence in his craft despite significant limitations with Loach’s own use of spare aesthetics to depict hope in a bleak context. Though unqualified for employment due to his illness, Daniel persists in woodworking as he can as an expression of care for other struggling people in his community, modeling a political ethic of responsibility in his creative work as well as his public expression of protest for which the film became famous. Among British filmmakers, Loach has a uniquely democratic and artistic vision of aesthetic taste developed through craft that elevates the contributions of working-class Britons to both the aesthetic and political aspects of national culture.

A main goal of astronomical research is to understand our origins, from the origin of life on Earth to the origin of the Universe itself. A major aspect of these studies is the origin and evolution of our Milky Way Galaxy. While stars only make up about 5% of the total mass of the Galaxy, understanding how and where stars form, and their subsequent kinematics (motions), is a critical component to recovering its evolutionary history. Collaborating with colleagues at institutions in the USA and abroad, I am working to identify stars with similar Galactic kinematics, generally known as stellar streams or moving groups, and analyzing their compositions in order to put constraints on their formation and kinematic histories. We are using the Gaia catalog- a database of positions and three-dimensional motions of about one billion stars in the Milky Way- to identify stars with similar kinematics, which may indicate that the stars share a common origin. We then are using spectroscopic data obtained with large professional astronomical telescopes to determine the compositions of the stars; stars that formed together are expected to have similar compositions. Combining the kinematic and compositional data of stars in stellar streams can place potentially strong constraints on the formation history of the stars and the Galaxy. This proposal is a request for continued support of my contribution to this project, which has included five UT students thus far and will include at least one more in this current cycle.

How did national independence movements against European colonial rule in Africa win support among Europeans? How did supporters and beneficiaries of European imperialism transform into supporters of anti-colonial causes? This historical research project investigates the case of Gavin Maxwell (d. 1969), a famous 20th-century British nature writer and travel writer, who became a critic of French imperialism in Morocco and an active supporter of the Algerian war for independence against France. This project explores Maxwell’s writings about independence movements and French colonialism, and his relationship with anti-colonial sympathizers and allies such as Margaret Pope and Gavin Young, as Maxwell became part of the “transnational activism” (Stenner, Globalizing Morocco, 2019) that supported the movement for Algerian independence, leading to Maxwell’s 1961 espionage mission to Algiers on behalf of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in 1961.
This project requires research in both published and unpublished source material. Published sources include Maxwell’s own writings, numerous books and articles written about him (although the latter almost entirely neglect his North African activities), and historical scholarship on anti-colonial independence movements and their international networking and public relations efforts. Unpublished sources include Maxwell’s papers, including correspondence and notes and an unpublished manuscript on “Arab Nationalism,” which are housed at the National Library of Scotland, in Edinburgh; papers of his publisher, Longman, housed in the library of the University of Reading, near London; items held by the Eilean Ban Trust; unpublished sources on Maxwell’s contacts in North Africa at the French Diplomatic Archives (Nantes; La Courneuve).

Natural products, substances produced by living organisms, are an important part of the modern drug discovery process and natural products isolated from marine organisms have had success in moving from the laboratory and into clinical trials. Currently, my work focuses on isolating and identifying natural products obtained from macroorganisms (such as invertebrate animals) and microorganisms (bacteria and fungi) collected from Florida waters. Funding from the University of Tampa and external sources has yielded promising results and provided students from the Biology and Chemistry departments the opportunity to participate in interdisciplinary scientific research.
Recently, the Department of Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Physics received National Science Foundation grant funding to purchase a new mass spectrometer, an instrument that gives researchers vital information about the chemical make up of substances. Mass spectrometry-based analysis of natural product extracts is currently receiving increased attention from natural products scientists and represents a paradigm shift in the field. Preliminary data generated in our laboratory on bacteria-derived marine natural product extracts demonstrates the significant potential these methods have in improving workflow and identifying new pharmaceutical drug leads.
The primary goal of this project is to refine and implement advanced mass spectrometry-based methods of analysis to prioritize marine-derived natural product extracts for further investigation with an ultimate goal of identifying pharmaceutical drug leads.

As a discipline, art history has undergone many permutations, and most recently, though perhaps reluctantly, it has engaged in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Current literature has established a correlation between traditional disciplinary learning objectives and long-established strategies for “active learning” in the classroom (Gasper-Hulvat 2017). However, further work is needed to explore in detail the relative efficacy of disciplinary-specific pedagogical interventions targeted toward major vs. non-major student populations (ref. Sienkewicz 2016). As colleges and universities strive to identify the most effective strategies for developing future global citizens, art history remains a misunderstood discipline frequently dismissed as “extraneous” or “unnecessary” to an undergraduate’s ambition for a “proper” career path. Yet despite this persistent reputation, its inherent interdisciplinary offers a wealth of benefits for students. Whereas some disciplines have made progress toward naming the “Signature Pedagogies” (Shulman 2005) that define their fields (see Wineburg 2001 for History), art history has yet to “decode” (Pace and Middendorf 2004) the “threshold concepts” (Meyer and Land 2003) that cause “bottlenecks” to undergraduate learning (Díaz, Middendorf, Pace and Shopkow 2008). This project collects and analyzes student assignment data toward identifying effective instructional strategies for teaching universal, higher-order cognitive skills that support learning far beyond the art history classroom. It thus contributes to the small but growing chorus of art history practitioners dedicated to improving the learning of students who take our courses to fulfill general education requirements regardless of whether or not they intend to pursue a career in the arts.

This project will create an interactive virtual reality experience using the Unreal Engine 3D game development platform. The aim of the project, titled Virtual Nekuomanteia, is fourfold:
• to develop a methodology for producing critical scholarship in an immersive VR space commonly used for videogames;
• to present within this immersive space the historical and theoretical context for my methodology, including a critical scholarly exploration of the ties between nekuomanteia, or necromancy--ancient practices used to evoke and interpret the wisdom of the dead--and the hermeneutic tradition in humanities studies;
• to demonstrate and test the methodology I develop through the practice of creating the project; and
• to share the VR experience and the methodology used to create it through peer-reviewed exhibition, juried showings, conference presentations, and articles in refereed journals.

The project’s creative approach is rooted in the work of early feminist art games and virtual experiences that repurpose popular emerging media forms to produce experiences that are critically reflective and intimate. Conceptually, this project is informed by my scholarly interest in how the hermeneutic practices that emerged in the ancient world and have shaped textual studies–including my own field of media studies–share a lineage with hermeticism and more occult practices of communicating with the dead. Thus, the question driving my pursuit of a methodology is how do I develop a set of practices drawing on hermetic approaches to knowledge that would facilitate meaningful scholarly reflection and communication within immersive spaces developed through emerging technologies?

Entering the healthcare field as a novice nurse practitioner that will be tasked with managing the care of patients in the role of a provider is both a stressful and intimidating process. Currently, graduate nurse practitioner educational programs prepare the nurse practitioner student to be a competent healthcare patient provider. Healthcare has become a fast-paced business and nurse practitioner programs have typically not provided business skills knowledge. An elective graduate nurse practitioner business skills course has been added to the UT nursing curriculum. This project involves analyzing the graduate nurse practitioner students’ perceived confidence in knowledge levels in healthcare business topics prior to graduation and again 6-12 months post-graduation when the nurse practitioner is obtaining their first employment position. Data will also be gathered from graduating nurse practitioner students that have not taken the course as a comparison control group. Data obtained from the project surveys is expected to demonstrate that the students completing the course will report higher confidence in their knowledge levels in business topic areas than the students that do not complete the course. Dissemination of this information will provide valuable data for further development of graduate nurse practitioner program curriculum designed to meet the new national nursing program accreditation standards and promote a more business savvy UT nurse practitioner graduate.

Historical analysis and empirical scholarship have highlighted Florida as a battleground state that often receives national attention for its competitive political environment. However, Florida has been producing markedly more Republican-friendly results in recent years, and the number of registered Republican voters now exceeds the number of registered Democratic voters. Thus, for the first time in the state’s history, the Democratic Party is the minority party. In the fourth edition of Government and Politics in Florida, we will be completing a chapter titled “Elections and Partisan Change in Florida.” This chapter will be a new piece of scholarship that will be written for both academics and non-academic practitioners, and the book as a whole will represent much needed, updated scholarship on the state of politics in Florida. Our chapter will cover both the history and present day observations about partisanship and election administration in the state.

Why do some countries, in some years, experience a larger number of terror attacks than others? A considerable cross-national statistical literature addresses that question, and this book will expose, and remedy, several important flaws in that body of research. In brief, the existing literature privileges structural rather than behavioral causes. We argue that focusing on economic and governmental institutions can only explain so much. We adopt a contentious politics approach and begin our theoretical account at the level of tactical decisions made by dissident groups, then theorize about how the decisions of multiple such groups will manifest in different levels of attacks at the country level of analysis. Simply put, the actions of the government and other dissident groups affect a group’s tactical decision about whether or not to engage in terror. Doing so provides a substantially richer theoretical account of terror, explaining several disparate and heretofore unconnected strands of the literature, including those that focus on structure and institutions. We will test several hypotheses implied by our theory using a statistical model well-suited for the challenges found in a cross-national dataset on terror. Specifically, we will use Bayesian statistics rather than the much more common classical frequentist statistics used in most analyses. Doing so will allow us to overcome challenges of noisy data, complex concepts not easily measured with one indicator (e.g., quality of life), and missing data. We expect government and dissident behavior will exhibit more explanatory power than the structural concepts and measures that dominate existing research.

The rare earth elements (REEs) are a group metals found within modern applications ranging from medical imaging to various high-tech products (e.g., smartphones and electric vehicles). These metals are notoriously difficult to separate from each other and obtain in pure form from naturally occurring sources, and improved separation methods are required to enable efficient metal recovery and satisfy the growing demand for these valuable materials. In addition to enhancing REE acquisition from their minerals during mining, improved metal recovery systems will also enable REE recycling from discarded consumer electronics (i.e., “e-waste” recycling). Our group has been developing molecules that are capable of binding to REEs to enable more efficient metal extraction which should lead to improved separation methods. With recent support from the National Science Foundation, we are gaining insight into the factors that impact the separations process to establish clear relationships between the metal-binding molecule’s structure and corresponding extraction ability. These results are guiding the design of new REE extraction agents and encouraging an additional project focus, proposed herein, on the extraction procedure itself and the various protocol parameters of the liquid-liquid extraction process that may further enhance metal recovery. All research plans as outlined here also include significant undergraduate student involvement that will expose our students to a cutting-edge, marketable area of chemical research not typically explored at the undergraduate level.

My first single-authored book manuscript, "Hungry Eyes: Picturing Foodways and Indigeneity in Postrevolutionary Mexico City," asks how and to what ends the visual arts intersected with foodways in the volatile period of Mexican postrevolutionary reconstruction (1920-1960), and how art and food together shaped urban social life in terms of race, class, and gender. This project sets forth an interdisciplinary methodology rooted in art history, visual culture, and food studies, which brings previously underrepresented artists and sites to the foreground of visual and material Mexican culture. I center the book on three main case studies that each highlight one artist/artwork and one foodstuff—Tina Modotti and the fermented indigenous beverage pulque; Carlos González and the national dish mole poblano; and Rufino Tamayo and watermelon, Mexico’s adoptive national fruit. By engaging a wide array of visual evidence, including paintings, architecture, vintage postcards, menus, and cookbooks, I demonstrate how these artists positioned their work within a broad visual landscape that relied upon the symbolic, material, and performative power of Mexican foodways in the urban and national imagination.
This book is under contract to be published as the inaugural monograph of the University of Texas Press’s new interdisciplinary book series, "Visualidades: Studies in Latin American Visual History." My proposal requests support to fund the final stages of publication, including manuscript revisions, the acquisition of high-resolution images, image copyright, printing subventions, and indexing.

Project Based Learning for College Algebra

Submitter: Stephanie Branham

Throughout the College Algebra course, students learn about different functions including linear, quadratic, polynomial, rational, exponential and logarithmic. While word problems are introduced to give students some understanding of the real world applications of these functions, students are always curious about how the equation they are analyzing is formulated. My goal is to develop a comprehensive, project-based learning assignment, so that students can make connections between real world data and the functions they learn in College Algebra. Students will also have a chance to develop research questions and draw conclusions based on their data analysis. The aim of this project is to enhance the student’s quantitative reasoning skills through a learning-by-doing experience.

Charlotte Salomon and Ottilie Gobel Moore in the Nazi Era: A Documentary Mini-Series

Submitter: Dana Plays

Charlotte Salomon and Gobel Ottilie Moore in the Nazi Era: A Documentary Mini-Series created by Dana Plays focuses on the well-known German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, and the filmmaker’s great aunt Ottilie Gobel Moore who sheltered Salomon along her grandparents and other stateless and disenfranchised refugees including Jewish composers, artists, film producers, Roma, resistance, anti-Nazi journalists, of many nationalities on her property in the south of France during WWII. As her benefactor, Ottilie Moore enabled Charlotte Salomon to develop as an artist leading to her magnum opus, Life? or Theatre? After the war, Ottilie Moore gave this work to Charlotte’s father Albert Salomon, and famous opera singer stepmother, Paula Lindberg Salomon, who miraculously escaped from Westerbork concentration camp. The miniseries follows Plays’ two feature documentaries on this subject. The streaming episodic format provides more runtime (450 minutes) than the feature documentary films, allowing for deeper narrative development through each episode, and provides a streaming accessible format with closed captions in multiple languages to advance this work worldwide. Plays holds an important personal, family archive on Moore, including home movies, photographs, affidavits, letters, and records and feels obligated to disseminate this work more extensively through the miniseries to contribute important research to the ongoing international scholarly research and dialogue on these subjects. Plays has advanced her research by working closely with Yad Vashem, the Charlotte Salomon Foundation and the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam the latter two provide full access of their collections for Plays’ works on this subject.

How To Teach Humanities-as-Art-History: Developing a Faculty Training Manual for a General Education Core Course

Submitter: Rosemarie Trentinella

With the pending implementation of the new Spartan Studies curriculum at the University of Tampa comes a need for resources to support continuous pedagogical and faculty development. The work proposed to be completed under this Professional Development Award is multifaceted and aims to facilitate the sustainable improvement and development of an entirely new, multi-section Humanities Core course. Through a combination of reflective and revisionist activities, I plan to develop a robust set of resources to support my and future faculty efforts to provide high-quality educational experiences to general education students at the University of Tampa. Though my work during the Spring 2024 semester will focus on the content and strategies I deploy in my own UTART200: Worlds of Art course, a secondary goal will be to apply lessons learned from this experience toward preparing external funding applications to support the development of college- and university-wide faculty training and professional development opportunities. In this way, all faculty developing or teaching courses in the Spartan Studies curriculum at the University of Tampa can potentially benefit from the outcomes of this project.

Diversity Progress in Science Journals: Florida vs. California

Submitter: Jennifer Wortham

The Florida Academy of Sciences journal, started in 1936, and the California Academy of Sciences journal, started in 1854, are the the main regional academic science journals in both states representing all scientific disciplines and have published manuscripts continuously since their origins. These journals have posted objectives, with California focusing on diversity from journal origin and having several statements and panels about diversity on their website. Florida does not mention diversity anywhere. These journals are ideal sources to evaluate how science journals have changed over time and if those changes match society’s expectation of diversity progress through the decades. All data has been collected already from both journals in every decade, such as percent of female authors compared with male authors, single versus multiple authors, marine-topic manuscripts, length of articles, percent of out-of-state authors and contributions, as well as other diversity measures and changes over time. California was predicted to have more diversity and equality in publication rates between genders compared with Florida, with both journals predicted to have increases in female representation over time. Statistical analysis evaluated these trends and recommendations to increase diversity in both academies are discussed along with opportunities for improvements. Data will be analyzed & graphs created by the PDA start. Writing the manuscript up for peer-review publication would be one PDA outcome (journal such as the Journal of Women and Minorities in Science, Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, or the Florida Scientist) along with a conference presentation.

2021-2022 Research Innovation and Scholarly Excellence (RISE) Awards

2022-2023 Research Innovation and Scholarly Excellence (RISE) Awards