Duke Kunshan’s faculty members compete for a broad range of grants, fellowships and prizes in support of their cutting-edge research. This is a roundup of the awards received recently by faculty in the undergraduate program’s Arts and Humanities Division.
Jung Choi, assistant professor of art history and visual studies, has received 208 million Korean won (US$183,700) from the Seongnam city government along with media artist Jiyoun Chun for their augmented reality (AR) project AR Urban Museum 2021.
As the co-principal investigator and exhibition director, Choi will lead background research for AR content on Seongnam city, South Korea, and direct two exhibitions, ‘Transtopia I’ and ‘Transtopia II,’ in August and December respectively. Participating artists will present newly commissioned works that transcend genres and boundaries focusing on relationality. In addition, AR Urban Museum 2021 will feature workshops on three city districts of historical and cultural significance.
Choi’s research focuses on interactions between art and technology, and contemporary visual and media culture. Her earlier work includes Digital Humanities City: Restoration of Soonsung, which developed a mobile app with seven AR programs about Seoul based on collaborations between contemporary artists and humanities scholars.
Nathan Hauthaler, lecturer in philosophy, has won the 2021 Jean Hampton Prize from the American Philosophical Association (APA) for his essay ‘For No Particular Reason,’ which he wrote while at Stanford University.
The APA presents the award biennially to early-career philosophers for papers in an area in which the late professor Hampton worked: social and political philosophy, foundations of ethics, normative ethics, the philosophy of law, rational choice theory, feminist theory, Hobbes to Hume, Kant, realism, and pragmatism.
In addition, the APA Pacific Division held a symposium on Hauthaler’s essay at its meeting in April with commentators from the University of Helsinki, East Tennessee State University, and the University of California, Riverside.
In his essay, Hauthaler argues against the dogma that any intentional action is done for a reason for action, and highlights the as-yet unmet burden of proof resting with those who defend the dogma.
Zhaojin Zeng, assistant professor of history, has received a China and Inner Asia Council research grant of US$2,000 from the Association for Asian Studies, the largest academic organization for Asian studies in the U.S.
The funding will support his work on the Chinese Factory Project, a data analytics and digital humanities initiative focusing on the history of factories, industrial development and economic life in 20th-century China. Zeng’s first book project, ‘Engineering Modern China: Industrial Factories and the Transformation of the Chinese Economy in the Long Twentieth Century,’ analyzes China’s factory economy from the late Qing dynasty to the post-Mao era.
Zeng also received funding toward the Chinese Factory Project from the Data+X Project, a three-year program led by Duke Kunshan’s Data Science Research Center to support interdisciplinary research that combines humanities and social sciences topics with big data.
Jesse Olsavsky, assistant professor of history, has received funding in the form of two postdoctoral research fellowships in the United States.
As a recipient of an AAS-NEH Fellowship, he will complete a four-month residency at the American Antiquarian Society, one of the leading libraries and archives for the study of American history. Funding comes from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities. The Massachusetts Historical Society has also awarded him a one-month African American Studies Fellowship.
Olsavsky’s work focuses on the history of African slavery in the Americas, the international movements to abolish African slavery, and the intellectual history of pan-Africanism. Both fellowships will provide time and archival resources to complete revisions of his book manuscript, ‘Fire and Sword Will Affect More Good: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835-1861.’
Duke Kunshan media and arts professors Benjamin Bacon and Weijing (Vivian) Xu, and Augustus Wendell, assistant professor of the practice of art, art history and visual studies at Duke University, have received a Carry Innovation Forward grant to explore new learning technology.
Led by Duke Learning Innovation and Duke Kunshan’s Center of Teaching and Learning, the Carry Innovation Forward program focuses on sustaining and expanding the learning innovations that arose during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The DKU-Duke group’s project, Approaches to Participatory Learning in Virtual Environments, will explore virtual reality (VR) technologies, test content modules, and build foundational tools to support courses centered on aspects of VR, interaction design, user experience, and game mechanics.
Bacon, who also serves as director of signature work, and Xu are the co-founders of Dogma Lab, a trans-disciplinary design project that uses concepts developed in research and experimentation to drive production and aims to form a sustainable ecosystem of intellectuals and artisans.
