Celebrating Scholarship

Terrence Cullen, Visiting Assistant Professor, and Rupinder Kaur, Assistant Professor—both from French and Francophone Studies—received an Albertine Cinémathèque Festival Grant for Vassar’s 2025–2026 French film festival. Organized around the theme of “art and artifice,” the festival will introduce students and the community to French cinema and create opportunities for intellectual exchange.

Elizabeth Bradley , President and Professor of Political Science and Science, Technology and Society, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . This tremendous honor recognizes Betsy’s pioneering public health efforts, extensive publications, higher education research, and innovative international partnerships.

Joshua de Leeuw, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, received a grant from the Center for Open Science (COS) to enhance behavioral researchers’ accessibility to COS’s Open Science Framework (OSF). Josh and his team are creating an add-on for his existing DataPipe service to validate and send data directly to an OSF component, saving researchers money and time.

April M. Beisaw, Professor of Anthropology, is co-author of The Archaeology of American Protests, published in 2025 by University Press of Florida, that explores American protest history across four centuries to illustrate how ideals such as equality, prosperity, and self-determination have been challenged and negotiated through protest, connecting today’s protest movements to those that came long before.

Myles Drance, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, received a grant from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund for his project entitled “Upconversion of Feedstock Chemicals by Iron in a Strong Ligand Field.” His research is focused on developing new iron-based catalysts for upgrading liquid alkanes.

Yvonne Elet was awarded the Elizabeth Blair Macdougall Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians for her book Urban Landscape in the Third Rome: Raphael’s Villa and Mussolini’s Forum, which explores the twentieth-century recreation of the “Renaissance” gardens of Villa Madama, planned by Raphael, and “details how the restored villa came to be integrated into one of the most significant urban initiatives of the 20-year Fascist rule.”

Justin Touchon, Associate Professor of Biology, is the author of Applied Statistics with R: A Practical Guide for the Life Sciences and Beyond, recently published by Oxford University Press. The book uses the statistical language R and a real-world dataset to teach data manipulation skills and prepare readers for more advanced statistical analyses.

Abigail Coplin, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Science, Technology and Society, was selected by The Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations as a 2025 Project Fellow. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Domesticating Biotechnological Innovation: Science, Market, and the State in Post-Socialist China.

Michael Reyes Salas, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, has received fellowships from the Institute for Citizens & Scholars and Camargo Foundation in support of his book project Fragments of Carceral Memory. This comparative visual and literary study examines French Antillean-Guianese, Puerto Rican, and Northern Irish photo-texts—books straddling serial photography and writing to create narratives—of prison ruins in order to interrogate why we make museums out of prisons.