Faculty Research and Development Awards (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. The project period for this year’s awards is May 1, 2025-Aug. 31, 2026. FRDA Seed Funds provide initial funding that will position faculty to be competitive when applying for external grant or fellowship funding.
This year’s FY25 FRDA Seed Funding Awardees:
Sylvia Schreiner, Department of English, “Aspect and related concepts in Scottish Gaelic.”
This project seeks to answer questions about the meaning and structure of aspect and related grammatical notions in Scottish Gaelic. The project consists of completing data collection for two publications (a monograph and an article) and the gathering of pilot data for a related larger-scale project for which NSF support will be sought in the future. The funded project and the larger-scale project it will seed will contribute not just to the theoretical linguistic literature, but to the growing body of literature on responsible, effective, and community-based language documentation and revitalization practices.
Michelle Dromgold-Sermen, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, “Entrepreneurial Innovation for Refugees, Immigrants, and Marginalized Communities.”
This project offers needed research on the pathways into and roles of mentorship in entrepreneurship for individuals from marginalized communities, including immigrant, low-income, racial minority, and rural communities. The findings from this CHSS FRDA-funded project will enhance cross-college practice with the Costello College of Business, sustain increased engagement with the George Mason University campus and wider community, and generate pilot data to strengthen external funding applications.
Daniela Oramas Mora, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, “Plea-Bargaining Reform: Improving Information-Sharing Between Prosecutors and Defense Attorneys.”
The goal of the proposed project on plea-bargaining reform is to understand current plea-bargaining practices in jurisdictions with lead prosecutors who ran on the progressive prosecution platform in order to improve information-sharing between public defenders and prosecutors during the plea-bargaining process. To achieve these goals, the current project proposes to conduct a national survey and pilot interviews that will provide insight into the challenges and opportunities of plea-bargaining in jurisdictions with progressive lead prosecutors. Those insights will then be used to frame and justify proposals for future research aimed at developing and evaluating new tools for improved information-sharing during plea-bargaining.
Jacqueline Burek, Department of English, “Memory and History in Twelfth-Century Britain.”
The goal of the proposed project is to conduct manuscript research that will form the basis of the second chapter of Professor Burke’s second monograph, Memory and History in Twelfth-Century Britain. In this book, she will demonstrate how the writing of history in high medieval Britain was shaped by medieval memory theory. The book will contribute to recent work on fictionality, truth, and narrative in medieval literature by examining the boundaries between personal memory and collective history in twelfth-century Britain.
Amanda Madden, Department of History, “Modeling Historical Violence.”
This seed funding will be used to develop a data model and prototype a database built and hosted by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) that will allow for the interdisciplinary modeling and investigation of historic violence. The outcomes for this first stage of Modeling Historical Violence will include this database prototype for testing and a website publishing initial results. The project team will use this prototype to apply for two grants to fund further database development and the public interface with web tools for data analysis: 1) Harry F. Guggenheim Distinguished Scholars award (up to $50,000) and 2) NSF Human Networks and Data Science Program (up to $500,000).
Allison Redlich, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, “Spanish-English Language Court Interpreters and the Plea Process.”
This project will survey Spanish-English court interpreters to understand their roles and experiences managing guilty plea cases. Findings have the potential to inform our understanding of and promote further research on Spanish-English interpreter-mediated plea cases. Findings will also be used to inform larger studies and grant proposals submitted to the National Science Foundation.
Cynthia Kierner, Department of History, “The Mason Family Account Book: A Digital Project on Family, Economy, and Culture in a Post-Revolutionary Virginia Community.”
This seed funding will support initial work on two components of the Mason Family Account Book project, a born-digital research and public history initiative of the Center for Mason Legacies. This grant will support other essential components of the project, in preparation for applying for additional external funding. In summer 2025, the project seeks to research and write three (of 10 planned) contextual essays, as well as creating some pilot visualizations.
Sabine Doebel, Department of Psychology, “How do Parents’ Folk Theories of Child Development Shape Executive Function and Self-regulation Skills in Childhood?”
This project will generate pilot data for an NSF standard grant proposal investigating the role of parenting in the development of executive function and self-regulation in childhood. This project tests this idea via two aims: 1) will develop a novel measure of parental folk theories of development and assess its relationship with observed parenting behaviors; and 2) will test whether these folk theories predict children’s executive-function and self-regulation performance on four laboratory tasks. Findings will advance knowledge on how experience shapes executive-function development and provide preliminary data for a larger, longitudinal study investigating these relationships.
Daniel Temple, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, “Histological Investigation of Stress in Early and Late Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers of Cis Baikal.”
The goal of this research is to reconstruct stress in the early life environment before and after climatic cooling. Skeletal remains of each individual have been radiocarbon dated, and stable isotopes have been collected to estimate childhood and adult diet. This work will provide a high-resolution perspective on the ways human health responds to environmental change, and, specifically, how adaptive shifts in diet following climatic cooling may interact with stress in the early life environment. Results from this work will be foundational to a newly developing communally engaged project on human remains from the Point Hope, Alaska, archaeological site complex.
Vivek Narayanan, Department of English/Creative Writing, “The Kuruntokai: A Poet’s Annotated Translation of a Legendary Ancient Tamil Anthology.”
This seed funding will provide support for summer research towards the first complete, annotated translation by a practicing poet of a tremendously influential major classic of world literature from the Ancient Tamil, the Kuruntokai (c. 200 B.C.E.). Professor Narayanan plans to address mysteries of interpretation in the poems and produce a rich, accessible annotated translation that suggests the classical anthology’s startling immediacy and the ways in which ancient poetry might continue speak to contemporary experience.
May 08, 2025