Awards & Honors

Recent faculty awards & grants for research

  • Hall Bjørnstad received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant for Fall 2019 to complete his book project “The Crowning Example: Louis XIV and the Crisis of Royal Exemplarity.”
  • Alison Calhoun received a College Arts & Humanities Institute Fellowship for 2019-20 for her project “Technologies of the Passions on the French Baroque Stage.”
  • Vincent Bouchard was awarded a College Arts & Humanities Institute Fellowship for 2018-19 for his book project “The Film Commentator in West Africa.”
  • Nicolas Valazza was awarded an Indiana Digital Arts and Humanities fellowship for 2018-19 to digitize and analyze banned books, images, and legal documents from the Kinsey Institute.
  • Marco Arnaudo received a New Frontiers of Creativity and Scholarship award in Spring 2017 for his project on “Narrative Trends in Analog Game Design.” According to his project description, Arnaudo’s study will examine the emergence of a trend of “story-rich, highly thematic games…that use rules and components to tell their stories,” an area which has not been previously systematically explored in academic research.
  • Hall Bjørnstad received a College Arts & Humanities Institute fellowship in Spring 2017 for his project “The Crowning Example: Louis XIV and the Crisis of Royal Exemplarity,” which studies the dialectic of human creatureliness vs. royal glory in the age of the Sun King.
  • Nicolas Valazza received a College Arts & Humanities Institute/Kinsey Institute Fellowship for 2017-18 for his project, “La Poésie délivrée: Le livre en question du Parnasse au Symbolisme,” about clandestine modernist poetry characterized by transgressive love, pornography, and political dissidence.
  • Professor Emeritus Albert Valdman is the principal investigator for “The Preparation of a Differential, Historical, and Etymological Dictionary of Louisiana French” which received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant 2016-18. He is working with Kevin Rottet and alumnus Thomas Klingler (Tulane University) on the project, with assistance from doctoral student Carly Bahler.
  • Professor Emeritus H. Wayne Storey is the co-principal investigator for the project “Preparation for publication of a digital edition of Francesco Petrarca’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta” which received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant 2014-17. The other co-principal investigator is John Walsh, professor in the School of Informatics and Computing. Doctoral student and then alumna Isabella Magni (Ph.D. ’17) is a co-author on the project.

Recent student awards for research

  • Lino Mioni received a College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2018-19 for his doctoral work on Maestro Martino’s Libro de Arte Coquinaria, the first cookbook in the Italian vernacular attributable to an author (ca. 1460s). 
  • Sara Dallavalle received a UGS Grant-in-Aid of Doctoral Research Award to purchase issues of Italian comics for her dissertation project “Orient Express (1982–1985): the adventurous journey of the first ‘Italian-only’ auteur comics magazine.”
  • Laura Demsey received a Pi Delta Phi President’s Scholarship for Graduate Students for her dissertation data collection trip to study the French spoken in New England and how it has been affected by the dominant English language.
  • Lucia Gemmani received a College Arts & Humanities Institute travel grant in Fall 2017 to give a paper at the Modern Language Association annual convention about her dissertation research, “Preludes of Modernity within Baroque Extravagances.”
  • Jill Owen received a College Arts & Humanities Institute travel grant in Spring 2018 to present her research on “Space and the Self: Representations of the Bedroom in Nineteenth-Century French Literature” at the Congrès du Conseil International d'Études Francophones in La Rochelle, France.