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.

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.

Pictured: Carl Elsaesser. Person holding an old fashion camera to their eye while standing outside.

Carl Elsaesser, Visiting Assistant Professor of Film, Awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship

Carl was awarded the fellowship for his project Resonant Coastlines, a feature-length experimental film that tethers a young man’s emerging queer identity—captured in his stream-of-consciousness filmmaking practice—to Maine’s unseen histories and forgotten landscapes.

Joshua de Leeuw, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, Receives Supplemental NSF POSE Grant

Josh received supplemental grant funding to support his current grant project “POSE: Phase II: An Open-Source Ecosystem for Behavioral Experiments.” Funding is supporting the creation of an open-source ecosystem for behavioral experiments centered around jsPsych, Josh’s established and highly-used tool for behavioral research.

English Professor Amitava Kumar is Author of The Green Book, a Follow-up to The Yellow Book of 2023

Amitava Kumar, Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English, is the author of The Green Book, newly recently published by HarperCollins India (December 2024), and the final volume in a trilogy that launched in 2022 with The Blue Book, a comprehensive perspective on the Covid-19 pandemic, and continued in 2023 with The Yellow Book, on overcoming adversity.

Photo diptych with headshots of Chris Bjork and Bill Hoynes.

Christopher Bjork, Professor of Education, and William Hoynes, Professor of Sociology, Publish New Book

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.

Kahdeidra Monét Martin, Assistant Professor of Education, Selected for 2024–2026 STAR Fellowship

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.