Faculty Research and Development Awards Seed Funding Leading to External Funding (FRDA Seed Funds), funded by CHSS, are short-term awards that are designed to help CHSS tenured and tenure-track faculty initiate new programs of research and scholarship or enhance existing ones. FRDA Seed Funds provide initial funding that will position faculty to be competitive when applying for external grant or fellowship funding. Applicants must describe their plans for seeking external funding in their application. The College provided 110 FRDA Seed Funds since 2015, for a total of $857,052 in support of faculty research. FY26 Seed Funding Awards provided $56,444 in funding for project periods of May 1, 2026-August 31, 2027.
This year’s FY26 FRDA Seed Funding Awardees:
Erin Eife, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, Medicalizing Punishment: Public-private partnerships with criminal courts in the provision of healthcare to defendants. This project seeks to understand these healthcare provisions in two ways. First, I seek to reveal the motivations for and logics of healthcare provision at the pretrial stage. Second, I seek to uncover how public/private partnerships in this realm are established and operate. To do so, I will collect and analyze two complementary sources of data: an archive of relevant government documents and courtroom ethnographic observations. Based on previous literature, I suspect that provisions are motivated by privatization in the criminal legal system, which turns people with criminal legal contact into market opportunities. In the age of fiscal austerity, judges may be incentivized to assign pretrial healthcare provisions to shift financial responsibility from counties and states to individuals. Alternatively, or perhaps concurrently, court actors may perceive themselves altruistically and enact paternalistic ideas about how to rehabilitate the conduct of defendants in their courtrooms by assigning healthcare provisions. In addition to impacting the stakes of individual cases, these provisions may fundamentally shift the role of the criminal legal system, making criminalized actions into things to be defined and treated, or in other words, medicalizing crime. Findings from this project will be used as pilot data to apply for external grants, as well as be presented and published in academic settings.
Alexandria Frisch, Department of Religious Studies, The Jewish Body Keeps the Score: Trauma and Communal Healing from Antiquity to the Present. It is widely acknowledged that catastrophic events generate trauma not only for direct survivors but also for families, communities, and even transnational populations. In the current moment, many observers have noted how October 7 has activated long-standing Holocaust memory, underscoring the transgenerational nature of Jewish trauma. Contemporary experiences of antisemitism are often felt viscerally, shaped by centuries of embodied fear and collective memory. Building on my earlier research on trauma, ritual, and communal identity in ancient Judaism, this project asks: where do we see the effects of collective trauma on Jewish communities today, both explicitly and implicitly, and how have communal narratives and religious practices developed in response? By examining Holocaust education, communal commemoration and liturgy, and second-generation memoirs and autobiographical writings, this project traces how trauma is remembered, transmitted, and ritualized in contemporary Jewish contexts. At the same time, it places these materials in conversation with earlier Jewish responses to collective catastrophe, probing points of continuity and transformation across the course of Jewish history, from antiquity to the present day. Ultimately, this project poses a deliberately provocative question: is there a distinctly Jewish way of responding to trauma?
Thalia Goldstein, Department of Psychology, Wellbeing through Grown up Pretend Play –Pilot. Adults increasingly participate in activities centered on imagination, pretense, and role play, including Renaissance Faires, cosplay conventions, Model UN, historical reenactments, and immersive arts events. Yet psychological science has produced virtually no theory explaining why these activities are so compelling or how they may support wellbeing. This project offers the first systematic, theory driven investigation of grown-up pretend play proposing such activities foster four core psychological processes: everyday creativity, community formation, identity exploration, and emotion regulation. Together, these processes may play a powerful role in meaning-making, wellbeing, and social connection across adulthood. Using an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods design, the project includes three iterative phases. First, embedded fieldwork at the Maryland Renaissance Faire and DC Awesome Con will document real-time instances of adult pretend play and contextual features that elicit embodied role play. Second, semi structured interviews with grown-up pretend play participants will explore motivations, developmental histories, and the psychosocial functions of sustained engagement in these practices. Third, a large-scale quantitative survey will measure engagement and assess associations with standardized measures of emotion regulation, self-concept, creativity, and wellbeing. Grounded theory and QUAL-quant integration will guide model development. This work will generate the foundational framework needed to launch a new research domain focused on adult pretend play and its psychological impact. Immediate outcomes include scholarly presentations, peer reviewed papers, and competitive grant applications to support randomized controlled trials and longitudinal studies. Ultimately, this project aims to inform development of interventions that cultivate community, strengthen identity, and support wellbeing.
Stephen Robertson, Department of History, Law in the Suburbs: Criminal and Civil Cases and Social Life in Fairfax County, 1950-1980. This project will provide a new perspective on life in the postwar suburbs that played an increasingly influential role in US politics and culture. Scholars have emphasized strong community ties and consensus among the exclusively white residents of the first developments and then conflict and fears about crime beginning in the 1970s as the expanding suburbs became more diverse. Those analyses rely on the records of community groups, local governing bodies, property records, and local newspapers. A different source is the focus for this project, the records of state trial courts. Both civil and criminal cases were heard in those courts, so they offer rich evidence of both disputes between individuals and threats to society. Who has access to the courts and is involved in the legal system also offer insights on inequality and relations between immigrants and existing white residents. This project focuses on the Fairfax Circuit Court from 1950-1980. It served Fairfax County in one of the paradigmatic suburban regions of the postwar period thanks to the presence of federal workers. Beginning in 1950, when the county was still largely rural, provides a baseline for the impact of suburbanization. Extending to 1980 encompasses both the era of exclusively white residents and the first decade when immigrants appeared in the county's population. The grant will support creating pilot data from 1980 to establish the scale of the courts’ caseload and scope its change over time by comparing it with preliminary data from 1950.
Rashmi Sadana, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Cultivating the Future: The Moral Work of Aspiration in Urban and Transnational India. This proposal seeks funds to begin ethnographic research on a new, multi-sited project on aspiration and the moral anxieties that surround mobility, success, and self-fashioning in urban India and northern Virginia. It aims to understand and document what global inequality feels like for India's all-too-often undifferentiated middle and lower middle classes whose own capacity to aspire (Appadurai 2004) has greatly increased since the India opened its economy to the world in the 1990s onward. The project introduces the concept of aspirational landscapes: spatially and affectively organized sites where desires for advancement are concentrated, cultivated, and contested: (1) aspirants being coached for the civil services exam in Delhi; (2) counselors mediating intercaste relationships in rapidly expanding urban therapeutic cultures; and (3) Indian students pursuing higher education in the United States where global mobility is reframed through moral scrutiny around obligation, authenticity, and belonging. Across these sites or landscapes, aspiration emerges not as individual ambition alone but as a socially regulated process structured by institutions, expertise, and spatial arrangements. Rather than focusing solely on unequal access to futures or attachments to often unattainable ones, this project will explore how aspiration demands continuous ethical labor in the present to render necessary, legitimate, and worthwhile futures. Ethnographically tracing the ways people inhabit, justify, and resist aspirational landscapes, the project will examine how moral anxiety and self-cultivation become defining conditions of what it means to aspire.
Lijun Zhang, Department of English, Social Processes, Cultural Politics, and Craft Practice in Southwest China. This FRDA Seed Funding Leading to External Funding proposal, will provide two months of full-time work during the summers of 2026 and 2027 in support of my book project, Social Processes, Cultural Politics, and Craft Practice in Southwest China. Through ethnographic, archival, and museum-based work, I examine how shifting social dynamics and cultural policies shape craft practices within ethnic minority communities in Southwest China, and how folk artists and their communities navigate the opportunities, constraints, and transformations generated by these broader societal changes. This seed funding will enable the collection of primary field data and research essential for developing an external grant proposal and advancing the book manuscript toward completion.