Excerpts of article by Tony Moore:
It’s always nice to hear about someone joining an organization and making his or her mark right away. Maybe it’s a baseball player hitting a home run in his first game. Maybe a first-term congresswoman helps pass a groundbreaking bill.
Dickinson’s current roster of grant, fellowship and award recipients is impressive, and it’s also notable for its new impact players—early-career faculty members who have hit the ground running.
“These grants underline the high quality of Dickinson’s junior faculty and more,” says Neil Weissman, provost and dean of the college. “They confirm the college’s competitiveness in the academic job market when it comes to recruiting. And they validate our claim that our faculty are excellent in both the classroom and research. We are a place where the ‘teacher-scholar’ model truly works.”
Alyssa DeBlasio, assistant professor of Russian, recently received three awards to advance her sabbatical efforts: from the American Philosophical Society ($6,000), the American Council of Learned Societies ($35,000) and the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh ($50,000). Like Seiler, DeBlasio is finishing her fourth year at Dickinson and will use the grants to finish a book, hers on the transition of Russian philosophical thought from the immediate post-Soviet period (1990s) through the first decade of the Putin era (2000s). She too will start a new book, which explores the influence of Soviet philosophy on a new generation of Russian art-house filmmakers.
“Both of these projects bridge my three academic loves—Russia, philosophy and film,” she says. “And thanks to the grants I received, I’m now in the very lucky position of having the flexibility to travel to Moscow for archival research next year, if that’s where my new project takes me.”
