Faculty Fellows Program

Call for Faculty Fellows Applications

2025-2026

The Office of the Provost is pleased to invite applications from tenured faculty seeking support to advance teaching, scholarly, and/or creative work for participation in the Faculty Fellows Program during the 2025-2026 academic year. Faculty Fellows, who must be housed in either the School of Arts & Sciences, Jepson School of Leadership Studies, or Robins School of Business, are granted two (2) course releases for the fellowship year while maintaining a regular service and advising load. These course releases are intended to provide time to devote to the Fellow’s proposed project, as detailed in their application. The releases may be taken in a single semester or spread across fall and spring. The Provost’s Office will award ten Faculty Fellowships on a competitive basis for the 2025-2026 academic year.

 

Eligibility and Application

All tenured faculty in the School of Arts & Sciences, Jepson School of Leadership Studies, and Robins School of Business, are eligible to apply, with preference granted to mid-career faculty seeking support to advance to full professor.

The Faculty Fellows Application entails three (3) parts:

1. A proposal of 1-2 typed, double-spaced pages that details the project on which the applicant will work. The project can advance the applicant’s teaching, scholarly, and/or creative work. In addition to describing the project, the proposal should share the project’s significance to the applicant’s teaching, scholarly, and/or creative profile, as well as intended outcomes (i.e. publication, presentation, grant proposal, performance). Proposals should be written for an audience of faculty scholars who are not experts in the discipline of the proposed project.
2. A CV
3. A letter of support from the applicant’s department chair or, if the department chair is the applicant, dean, which explains how the courses for which the applicant will be released will be covered. School deans should be cc:ed on all letters of support.

Applications must be submitted to Rose Nicholson (rnichol3@richmond.edu) no later than November 15, 2024. Letters of support can be submitted separately.

 

Review Process

Upon receipt of the applications, a committee of faculty drawn from across the three eligible schools will review the proposals and make recommendations to the Provost.

 

Reporting

At the end of their fellowship, each Fellow must submit a brief report of 250-500 words detailing the outcomes of the fellowship year. Fellows will also be strongly encouraged to share their work/works-in-progress as part of the Faculty & Staff Symposium in September or through another public venue.

 

Questions

Please direct any questions about the Faculty Fellows Program to Nicole Maurantonio (nmaurant@richmond.edu), Associate Provost of Academic Affairs.

  

Faculty Fellows Application

1. Applicant Name and Rank:
2. Department/School:
3. Title of Proposed Project
4. Brief Summary of the Proposed Project (250 words or less)
5. Fellowship Proposal of 1-2 typed, double-spaced pages. The proposal should:
   1. Describe the project on which the applicant will work for a non-disciplinary expert.
   2. Share the project’s significance to the applicant’s teaching, scholarly, and/or creative profile.
   3. Describe intended outcomes of the fellowship (i.e. publication, presentation, grant proposal, performance).

2024-2025 Faculty Fellows

Jessie Fillerup, Associate Professor of Music

Dr. Fillerup will draft the third and fourth chapters of her book, titled Enchanted: Music, Stage Magic, and Illusory Technologies. The book examines how music and sound design shape the illusory experiences of the magic show, whether performed on stage in the nineteenth century or on TV in the modern era. Chapter three will focus on nineteenth-century musical magicians, who performed their own music, invented instruments, composed musical works, and treated on-stage music like a mysterious effect akin to a magic trick. The fourth chapter will analyze the complex ways music contributed to “exotic” acts, including those performed by Western magicians dressed in Eastern garb, and by Chinese and Japanese magicians marketing themselves to European audiences. Dr. Fillerup’s research will support an SSIR course, “Music, Magic, and Illusion,” in which students examine historical sources, study modern performances, and stage a fully produced magic show.

 

David Lefkowitz, Professor of Philosophy and PPEL

Dr. Lefkowitz plans to further expand his scholarship on the moral justifiability of civil disobedience and conscientious objection. Inspired by recent court cases in Europe and the U.S., he will explore the question of whether civil disobedients should be civilly liable for the pecuniary costs their conduct imposes on others. He will also develop a conception of conscientious objection as a plea for mercy to which the state ought to be cautiously receptive. Dr. Lefkowitz and his students will consider these and other questions concerning the grounds and limits of the law’s moral authority in a seminar titled The Morality of Obedience and Disobedience to Law.

 

Maia Linask, Associate Professor of Economics

Dr. Linask will study WTO (World Trade Organization) trade disputes, which are quasi-legal cases where one country accuses another of violating a trade agreement or trade policy commitment. Dr. Linask will work with students to use machine learning and natural language processing to analyze WTO trade dispute documents to create a dataset of trade dispute outcomes based on textual analysis. She will use this dataset to characterize and analyze the factors that influence trade dispute outcomes, including the basis for the complaint, the type of argument, the purported costs of the violation, key terms in the decision, and any precedents that influence the decision.

 

Shahan Mufti, Associate Professor of Journalism

Professor Mufti will be working alongside his students on developing and producing a limited series true-crime podcast that explores the life and death of a prominent and influential Muslim American imam who was assassinated inside his mosque one day in 1990. The series also tells the story of the decades-long federal and local investigation into the murder that followed. The story will follow the development of Muslim American groups and institutions through the second half of the twentieth century and, as such, aims to shed new light on the history of American Islam in the years immediately preceding the attacks of 9/11.

 

Anthony Russell, Associate Professor of English and Italian Studies

Dr. Russell plans to work towards the completion of his monograph, entitled Performing Life: Grace, Vitality, and the Miracles of Art in Vasari’s Lives. The monograph provides innovative readings of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, published in a first edition of 1550 and a second expanded edition in 1568, and traditionally considered the founding text for the discipline of art history. While art historians have tended to utilize the Lives as a source for their specific research goals, I read this work as a complex but unified narrative whose rich pattern of themes and motifs has not been sufficiently explored. Specifically, he argues that vitality is a central and versatile idea in this sequence of biographies, encompassing far more than Vasari’s praise of lifelikeness in individual works of art. He employs strategies of close reading to investigate the theological, scriptural, literary, rhetorical, and performative dimensions of vitality as deployed by Vasari, arguing that the overlap between notions of vitality as divine gift and as brilliant performance leaves us with a more complex vision of the work of art than has heretofore been recognized. Dr. Russell’s research is tied to his ongoing interest in interdisciplinary studies, which he intends to integrate in various courses in both English and Italian Studies.

 

Nicole Sackley, Associate Professor of History and American Studies

Dr. Sackley will draft the third chapter of her book-in-progress, Co-op Capitalism: Cooperatives International Development, and American Visions of Capitalism in the Twentieth Century. The book examines the history of a diverse range of American “co-opers” who debated the nature of US capitalism and furthered their own development dreams through international cooperative ventures. The book’s third chapter, tentatively titled “The Battle for Oil,” explores the efforts of US and European co-opers to use the new United Nations to challenge the “goliath” of Big Oil and the very principle of national sovereignty over commodities. While drafting this chapter, Dr. Sackley will also design a new general education course on the history of oil and energy in the 19th and 20th century. The course will, in part, draw on her book’s research and primary source materials.

 

Tanja Softić, Tucker-Boatwright Professor of Art, Department of Art and Art History

Professor Softić will create “Uproot”, a series of nine large monoprints using the laser-cutting equipment Metal, Wood and Digital Fabrication Workshop in the Art Department to create modular, reprintable matrices that can be combined to create large-scale prints. The proposed series of prints continue the work on “Landscapes for 21st Century”, informed by the cultural conversations on migration, displacement, environmental destruction and solastalgia. The web structures in various states of undoing, uprooted plant images, astronomical charts and microscopic images embody concepts and ideas surrounding migration and environmental destruction, two burning issues of our time.

Key questions driving this work include: does landscape in art mean today if we consider the constantly evolving technologies of seeing and recording our environment? How do we detach/rescue the idea of landscape from the legacies of colonial expansion, land degradation/appropriation and blood-and-soil nationalist ideologies? How do we use it to critique those very ideologies and practices?

 

Shital Thekdi, Associate Professor of Analytics and Operations

Dr. Thekdi will work on developing and analyzing two risk-related datasets. The first dataset will help understand the extent and impact of food insecurity across populations and how that information translates to risk-based decisions for business and society. The second dataset will help understand how the credibility of the risk analyst relates to factors including value generation for employers (e.g., for-profit, public sector, etc.), academic credentials of the risk analyst, experience of the risk analyst in a particular role, and others. Both datasets will be used for research and for experiential learning activities in her First Year Seminar and Business Analytics courses.

 

Amy Treonis, Associate Professor of Biology

Dr. Treonis will study the ecology of nematode worms, an understudied group of microscopic animals. Her goal is to analyze data from field studies conducted in the Namib Desert of Namibia to determine the factors that influence nematode distribution, diversity, and abundance. As part of this work, she and her students will be curating an online Namib Desert nematode image database as a resource for other scientists. Finally, she and her research students will initiate a study in the Salt Creek watershed in the Mojave Desert, an area damaged by recent, epic flooding that is home to an endangered pupfish species. Nematodes are food for juvenile fish, and this study will help park managers assess the system’s biological recovery. Student participants in this research will gain experience with field and laboratory research, data analysis, and scientific writing.

 

Yücel Yanikdağ, Professor of History and International Studies

Dr. Yanikdağ will be working on one of his book chapters. As part of a larger monograph project on the Ottoman First World War as a history of emotions, gender, and masculinity, this chapter will focus on how the military "constructed," reaffirmed, and disseminated normative masculinities and militarized emotions among conscript soldiers. While the military sought to "modernize" the "ignorant" conscripts, it also used traditional and patriarchal cultural beliefs and practices about gender, masculinity, and emotions to discipline, masculinize, and militarize men in preparation for war service. Dr. Yanikdağ will be translating some of his primary sources (from Ottoman and Turkish) to use in his current course on the First World War in the Middle East. His work will also contribute to the development of a new course on gender and masculinity in the Middle East.