Grants in Action

Celebrating Scholarship

Vassar Grants in Action highlights and celebrates the grant funding, principal investigators, and project leadership that enrich faculty research and scholarship, institutional programs and priorities, and the student experience at Vassar.

Photo portrait of a person in front of a grey wall.

Myles Drance, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Received ACS Petroleum Research Fund Grant

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.

Photo portrait of someone standing in front of a stone wall.

Yvonne Elet, Professor of Art, Receives Major Book Prize

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, Publishes New Book Applied Statistics with R

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.

Portrait of a person with library book shelves in the background.

Abigail Coplin, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Science, Technology and Society, Selected for Prestigious Fellowship

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, Selected for Two Fellowships

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.

Candy Esther Martinez, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latinx Studies, Selected by the School for Advanced Research as a 2025–2026 Resident Scholar

Candy was selected for her book project Transborder Affect: The Intersection Between Emotions, Inequalities, and Healing within Oaxacan Communities. Candy’s research provides a multi-layered interpretation of Oaxacans’ own words, embodiments, and processes for discussing inequalities, emotional distress, and healing processes.

Molly S. McGlennen, Professor of English, Co-Edits New Book Indigenous Poetics

Molly published the book with her 25-year mentor, scholar and poet Inés Hernández-Ávila (Nez Perce/Tejana) from UC Davis. The book is a collection of essays by contemporary Native American poets that highlight the role of poetry in Native American and Indigenous Studies.

China Sajadian, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Receives ACLS Fellowship

China was awarded the fellowship for her book project Debt and Refuge: Syrian Farmworkers and the Politics of Displacement in Lebanon. Her ethnography of Syrian refugees who have long-standing ties to Lebanon as seasonal farmworkers makes a case for radically rethinking forced migration as an agrarian question of labor and feminist question of social reproduction, as debt at every scale of life governs how people move across borders.

Lisa Gail Collins, Professor of Art and Director of American Studies on the Sarah Gibson Blanding Chair, Wins Bard Graduate Center’s Horowitz Prize & Getty Fellowship

Lisa has received multiple accolades for her book Stitching Love and Loss: A Gee’s Bend Quilt (U. of Washington Press, 2023; paperback, 2025), including Bard Graduate Center’s Horowitz Book Prize. She was also selected as a 2025–2026 Getty Scholar, which will allow her to deepen her new book project “tending towards” during a residential fellowship at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.