A World of Support: Stories of International Grants and Fellowships in the Arts & Humanities

Date: Fri., Nov. 14, 2025 from 10am-11am

Location: Zoom (link provided to registrants)

As part of FSU Global's International Education Month, Research Development is hosting a panel talk featuring four faculty members from the Arts and Humanities who have won funding support for international research and creative initiatives.  Drs. Elizabeth Cecil, Frank Gunderson, Laura Lee, and Cathy McClive have all been awarded grants and fellowships that have taken them overseas.  They will provide insights into their experiences with the application process and how these opportunities have broadened their horizons and enriched their work.  

• Dr. Elizabeth Cecil, from the Department of Religion, is currently conducting a project supported by a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant with collaborators from the Netherlands and Japan.  The €2.5 million grant has an award period from 2022-2027.  The project, entitled Purana: Mythical Discourse and Religious Agency in the Puranic Ecumene, approaches the concept of purāṇa as a way of worldmaking expressed in visual, performative, and ritual media, showing how it shapes cultural memory, narrates history, and imagines possible futures in South Asia and beyond.  

• Dr. Frank Gunderson, from the College of Music, has been awarded a range of international grants and fellowships.  Most recently, he completed a Fulbright Distinguished Chair Award in Tanzania (2021-2022).  He won a Volkswagen Foundation grant which funded a conference and extended archival stay in Zanzibar (June 2015).  He won a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support research concerned with turning a dissertation into a monograph (2006).  He won an Ohio University Latin American Studies (LACS) Summer Travel Grant (2002) which funded a summer trip to Havana.  He won a Fulbright-Hays grant to support summer language study in Tanzania (1993).  He also won a Wenner Gren Foundation grant to support fieldwork pertaining to his dissertation research (1994-1996).  

• Dr. Laura Lee, from the College of Motion Picture Arts, has been awarded funding support three times by the Association for Asian Studies's Northeast Asia Council Japan Studies Grants and once by the Japan Foundation's Japanese Studies Fellowship Program.  She was awarded the Northeast Asia Council Japan Studies Grant to support projects requiring archival research on 1930s film and visual culture at the National Diet Library (2022); archival research at the Kyoto International Manga Museum (2015); and archival research at the Gordon W. Prange Collection (2013).  She as awarded the Japanese Studies Fellowship Program to support a project requiring archival research on early 20th-century film history in Japan (2014-2015).

• Dr. Cathy McClive, from the Department of History, has been awarded a range of international grants and fellowships.  Her most recent international fellowship was the FIAS (French Institutes of Advanced Studies) Fellowship at the Collegium de Lyon in 2024.  Dr. McClive won various other international grants and fellowships when she was faculty at Durham University, UK; these programs were through Leverhulme Trust, British Academy and Entente-Cordiale.  She also held a prior fellowship at the Collegium de Lyon through an old funding mechanism called EURIAS in 2011-2012.