School of Interdisciplinary Studies
Beate Allert 
Beate Allert, an Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature and a 2015-2016 Awardee of the PRF Research Grant for her project The Romantic Roots of cognitive Poetics: A Comparative Study of Poetic Metaphor in Herder, Novalis, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley.
Jean Beaman 
Jean Beaman, an Assistant Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies and joint awardee of a 2015 Global Midwest Internal Seed Grant for the project Why Barack Obama’s Road to the White House Began in Chicago: Race, Gender, and Politics in the Midwest, 1900-2016.
Nadia Brown 
Nadia E. Brown, an Associate Professor in Political Science and African American studies and joint awardee of a 2015 Global Midwest Internal Seed Grant for the project Why Barack Obama’s Road to the White House Began in Chicago: Race, Gender, and Politics in the Midwest, 1900-2016.
Cornelius Bynum 
Cornelius Bynum, an Associate Professor in History and African American Studies received a $200,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for "From Plessy to Brown: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Twentieth Century".
Professor Bynum also is collaborating with Chrystal Johnson, an associate professor of social studies education in Purdue's College of Education. Both will direct the summer institute, which is a four-week program designed to help high school teachers incorporate African American history and culture into their classrooms by blending African American history and literature, geospatial information systems and digital humanities.
"By taking advantage of the vast potential of both GIS and digital humanities to improve information literacy, this institute will help teachers influence students' critical thinking skills and reading comprehension in ways that align with the recommendations of both the National Council of Teachers of English's 21st Century Curriculum and the National Council for Social Studies' 21st Century Skills," Bynum said.
The goal is to expose teachers to subject matter experts to help them develop more extensive knowledge of the African American freedom struggle in the 20th century and improve program participants' understanding of GIS and digital humanities as teaching tools, said Bynum, who specializes in 20th century African American history and is the author of "A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights."
Professor Bynum also is a joint awardee of a 2015 Global Midwest Internal Seed Grant for the project Why Barack Obama’s Road to the White House Began in Chicago: Race, Gender, and Politics in the Midwest, 1900-2016.
Cheryl Cooky 
Cheryl Cooky, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, whose research “’It’s Dude Time!’: A Quarter Century of Excluding Women’s Sports in Televised News and Highlight Shows” Has been published in the Communication & Sport. The work is a longitudinal analysis of the coverage of men and women’s sports in televised news by Professor Cooky and her colleagues, and reveals that coverage of women’s sports continues to hover around 2 to 3 percent. Her research shows that although recent cover is less focused on sexualized humor related to female athletes, there is more of a tendency to feature them as wives, girlfriends, and mothers as opposed to athletes.
In June of 2015, Professor Cooky delivered a paper based on the results at the International Sociology of Sport Association World Congress in Paris. Her research has also been reported in serval media outlets, including National Public Radio, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report, the national media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and the web-based science, research, and technology news service phys.org.
Professor Cooky was also elected to serve as the President of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS) and is the Conference Program Chair for the 2015 Annual Meeting.
Olga Dmitrieva 
Olga Dmitrieva, an Assistant Professor of Russian and Linguistics in the School of Languages and Cultures and awardee of a 2015 PRF International Travel Grant for Round 3 to participate in the internationally recognized 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Glasgow, Scotland in August 2015.
Elaine Francis 
Elaine Francis is an Associate Professor of English and Linguistics and a 2015-2016 Awardee of the PRF Research Grant for her project Structural Priming in Motion Event Descriptions: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese and English.
Shannon McMullen 
Shannon McMullen is a jointly appointed Assistant Professor in the Electronic and Time-Based Art Program in the School of Visual and Performing Arts and in American Studies and a 2015-2016 Awardee of the PRF Research Grant for her project Reexamining the “Heartland”: Korean American Religious and Ethnic Identity Formations in the Midwest.
Bill Mullen 
Bill Mullen, a Professor of English and American Studies and a 2015-2016 Awardee of the PRF Research Grant for his project Contested Chineseness in Transnational Narratives: Post-1979 Chinese/American Immigrant Literature.
Daniel J. Olson 
Daniel J. Olson, an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Linguistics and a 2015-2016 Awardee of the PRF Research Grant for his project Language Experience and Phonetic Processing in the Accommodation of Foreign Accented Speech.
Felicia Roberts 
Felicia Roberts, an Associate Professor of Linguistics and a 2015-2015 Awardee of the PRF Research Grant for her project Effects of Age of Learning on Attitude and Proficiency in EFL among Taiwanese Adults.
Ronald Stephens 
Ronald Stephens, a Professor of African American Studies and awardee of a 2015 PRF International Travel Grant for Round 3 to conduct the following international research on his project Researching Australian and New Zealand Tours of Larry Steele’s Harlem Blackbirds, 1955-56 in Australia, and New Zealand in July 2015.
Monica Trieu 
Monica Trieu, an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies and a 2015-2016 Awardee of the PRF Research Grant for her project Transnational Activism and National identities: Professional Turkmen Migrants in the United States.