The College of Humanities and Social Sciences is proud to announce that several CHSS faculty have been awarded 4-VA collaborative research grants in 4-VA's latest competition round. The 4-VA Collaborative Research Grants are designed to promote collaborations between participating Virginia universities to leverage the strengths of each institution to improve education and research outcomes.
Dr. Amanda Madden, Assistant Professor of History and Director of Geospatial History at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), along with a team of collaborators from Mason and Virginia Tech, will lead a 4-VA funded project, “Historical Mapathons: Team-Based GIS Training and Transformation of Seventeenth-Century Maps”. In addition to Dr. Madden, the project team includes co-PIs Dr. Jessica Otis, Assistant Professor of History and Director of Public Projects at RRCHNM, and Virginia Tech faculty members Dr. Rachel Midura, Assistant Professor of History and Dr. Jessica Taylor, Assistant Professor of History and Director of Public History. The research project will pilot a model for the crowd-sourced creation of an authoritative and accessible repository of historical layers for Geographic Information System (GIS). The investigators will bring Virginia researchers and students together for historical GIS training at two mapathon events hosted at George Mason University and Virginia Tech.
A second 4-VA award made to Virginia Tech includes Mason faculty members Dr. Jessica Otis and Dr. Heidi Lawrence, Associate Professor of English who will serve as co-PIs on the project, “Human Dimensions of Infectious Diseases”. The project led by Dr. Tom Ewing, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research and Professor of History at Virginia Tech, will explore human dimensions of infectious diseases across geographical and historical contexts. A collaboration coordinated by Jessica Otis expands upon the Death by Numbers project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), to analyze London bills of mortality during the plague epidemic. Network visualizations and computational analysis will advance understanding of plague transmission in early modern England. A project led jointly by Heidi Lawrence and Dr. Julie Gerdes, Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Tech, will examine the arguments and health beliefs of patients who question the safety of blood transfusions because of Covid-19 vaccinations. The research team will explore sociocultural and contextual factors of these beliefs by analyzing interview and online data, resulting in a unique contribution to the study of vaccine refusal.
August 12, 2024