New grants to Mount Holyoke and its faculty.

During May, Mount Holyoke College and its professors attracted grants and fellowships from the following organizations.

• The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation has awarded Olabode Omojola (Five College Associate Professor of Music) a fellowship for a three-month research residency during the summer of 2015 at the University of Applied Sciences in Gürlitz, Germany.

Omojola’s project entitled “Yoruba Music in Transatlantic Perspectives” broadens his research on the music of the Yoruba people of western Nigeria by exploring how it has been adapted and reshaped in the cultures of black diaspora populations in Brazil.

Start date: 5/1/15 for three months

• The Newberry Library has awarded Suparna Roychoudhury (assistant professor of English) a six-month residential fellowship in support of her project “Phantasmatic Shakespeare: Imagination in the Age of Early Modern Science.”

CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities) has awarded Suparna Roychoudhury the EURIAS Visiting Fellowship for up to ten weeks for the same project 

Both fellowships will enable Roychoudhury to complete a monograph that seeks to establish that Shakespeare’s artistic portrayal of “imagination” is more deeply connected to early-modern scientific thinking than has been acknowledged.

Start date: 7/1/15 for one year

• The American Institute of Indian Studies has awarded Indira Peterson (David B. Truman Professor of Asian Studies) a senior short-term research fellowship for her project “Reading and Translating Eighteenth-Century Marathi Language Dramas from the Thanjavur Royal Court.”

The fellowship will enable Peterson to conduct research in Pune and Thanjavur, India, where she will consult scholars and manuscripts to complete research for a book she is writing. The book, titled Drama, the Court, and the Public in Early Modern South India, is a culmination of her pioneering study of the rise of dance-drama in eighteenth-century South Indian courts.

Start date: 2/1/16 for four months

• The Research Corporation for Science Advancement has named Katherine Aidala (associate professor of physics) a Cottrell Scholar, class of 2009. (The year indicates the date of her early-career Cottrell College Science Award.) Aidala is among 50 outstanding faculty members at primarily undergraduate institutions joining the Cottrell Scholar Program in 2015. Only 3 percent of faculty who have received the Cottrell College Science Award in the last 25 years are honored in this way.