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 headshot of China Sajadian.

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 in Art History, Africana Studies, and American Studies

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.

Photo diptych with headshots of Chris Bjork and Bill Hoynes.

Christopher Bjork, Chair and Professor of Education on the Dexter M. Ferry, Jr. Chair and Coordinator of Teacher Education, and William Hoynes, Professor of Sociology on the Jane Baker Nord ’42 Chair in Media Studies, are the authors of the recently published More than Just a Game: How the Youth Sports Industry Is Changing the Way We Parent and What to Do About It, published by Central Recovery Press.

Photo portrait of Kahdeidra Martin.

Kahdeidra Monét Martin, Assistant Professor of Education, was selected by the Literacy Research Association as a 2024–2025 STAR (Scholars of Color Transitioning into Academic Research Institutions) Fellow. Kahdeidra’s research, which explores strategies for culturally sustaining literacy instruction, uses qualitative and community-participatory methods to examine raciolinguistics and the co-naturalization of language, race, and spirituality in the lives of African descendant people globally.

Exciting News from the Vassar Grants Office

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