CISS Awards Three Book Incubator Grants
CISS and Associate Dean of the Faculty for Arts & Sciences Arianne Chernock are please to announce the three recipients of 2025 book incubator grants. These small grants are designed to support book proposal/manuscript “incubator” workshops. These workshops provide faculty an opportunity to receive feedback on their book proposal or manuscript draft through a day-long or half-day meeting in which key readers gather to provide guidance and suggestions. Congratulations to the three awardees!
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Andrew Robichaud (CAS/History). On Ice: America’s Nineteenth-Century Ice Age and the Making of Modern Life is a history of ice and the ice industry in the United States, focusing on the nineteenth century. The book follows the life cycle of a commodity, tracing the creation, development, death, and afterlife of a particular (and peculiar) commodity, which profoundly transformed production, consumption, environment, and space in the nineteenth century and beyond. | |
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Chun-Yi Sum (CGS/Social Sciences). Dreamers and Volunteers: University Students and Their Experiments to Modernize Chinese Socialism. Based on over sixteen months of ethnographic research among university students in China’s Guangzhou city in the 2010s, this book shows that extracurricular activists and volunteers participated in collective organizing not only for resume building but also for making meaningful social contributions. | |
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Pamela Zabala Ortiz (CAS/Sociology). Black but “not Black”: Dominican Racial Contestations and the Pursuit of Authentic Blackness. This book explores how those individuals at the intersection of Blackness and Latinidad in the U.S. make sense of their often-contradictory racialization . This work draws from seventy-five in-depth interviews with first-, 1.5-, and second-generation Dominicans living in the United States, as well as social media data, to analyze how they navigate the prevalent narratives around Black and Latinx identity in the U.S. that racialize them as Black but also not Black. |