CAS faculty travel abroad for research, collaboration: 2022-23 re-cap

Posted on May 26, 2023

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Each year the CAS Office of Research sets aside funding to support international travel by our faculty. The CAS International Travel Fund provides up to $1000 to faculty members who travel abroad to present research and scholarship at academic gatherings or to conduct research. To access these funds, faculty must obtain $1000 in matching funds — from a grant, department contribution, or from UNCG’s International Programs Center. Funding is limited and is awarded on a first-come, first-served basis to those who submit quality, eligible applications.

Over the past academic year, CAS has provided or promised support to 19 faculty members from 12 departments. Here are some highlights of their travels from the 2022-2023 year.

SUMMER 2022

Professor Stuart Dischell (English) traveled to Switzerland to take part in a writer’s residency at the Chateau de Lavigny, where he joined a cohort of writers from Switzerland, Romania, Russia, and the U.K. Dischell reports, “During this residency I reworked a chapter from my book in progress Walking the Walls of Paris for publication. I also drafted new stories toward a collection of prose and reworked stories I had previously drafted. Additionally, I gave a public reading of my work to an international audience from the Vaud region that includes Geneva and Lausanne.”

Dr. Steven Tate (Computer Science) traveled to Lisbon, Portugal to participate in the 18th International Conference on Software Technologies (ICSOFT 2022), a major conference in the field. Dr. Tate presented his paper “Minimum Size Build Environment Sets and Graph Coloring,” which was co-authored by former UNCG master’s student Bo Yuan. Dr. Tate also chaired a session on Software Engineering and Systems Development. 

Dr. Christian Moraru (English) presented at the International Conference on Identity Politics in Crete, Greece and then co-led the Critical Theory Institute (CTI) in Sibiu, Romania. In addition to his conference talk “The World is Flat: Identity Politics beyond the Human,” Dr. Moraru gave several lectures and talks at CTI, including “Capillary Realism,” “Literary History and the Dynamic of Translationalism,” and a book talk on a new volume he co-edited, Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons. With CTI colleagues, he also worked on a new collection of essays. 

Dr. John Z. Kiss (Biology) presented at the COSPAR Scientific Assembly (Committee on Space Research) in Athens, Greece. His talk was titled “Spaceflight studies identify a gene encoding an intermediate filament involved in tropism pathways.”

Rogers got a firsthand look at Christian blood imagery in Northern Italy.

Rogers got a firsthand look at Christian blood imagery in Northern Italy.

Dr. Eugene Rogers (Religion) explains his trip to Northern Italy was “to conduct research on the Christian use of images and symbols in blood as they are preserved in museums and churches” of the region. He notes, “I traveled with several historians of art or religion who helped me think about Christian blood symbolism on site: Betsy Bolman (Case Western) and William Lyster.”

FALL 2022

Dr. Anatoly Miroshnichenko (Physics and Astronomy) attended the annual Bulgarian-Serbian Astronomy Conference in Velingrad, Bulgaria. He presented an invited talk on “a long-term study of a complex stellar system, which was done in collaboration with astronomers from several countries, including Bulgaria.” Dr. Miroshnichenko says he also traveled to Sofia and “met with astronomers from the St. Kliment Okhridsky University and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. As a result, a new collaboration on a study of a different stellar system was started.” This new research will soon be ready to present and to be prepared for publication.

Dr. Gwen Hunnicutt and Dr. Cindy Brooks Dollar (Sociology) both attended Eurocrim 2022 (the annual conference of the European Society of Criminology) in Malaga, Spain. They were both involved in a panel and presentation on Criminology of Species. The session was well-attended by other scholars. Hunnicutt explains, “Since I am co-editing a book on this topic, I was able to meet with some of the contributors to this volume and recruit new authors who seemed to be promising participants in this project.”

A trip to the International Book Fair of Guadalajara fanned Grossi’s love for literature.

Dr. Veronica Grossi (Languages, Literatures, and Cultures) attended the International Book Fair of Guadalajara, Mexico in November 2022. Dr. Grossi calls the event, “the largest and most-important book fair in a Spanish-speaking country.” During the multi-day, multi-venue event, Grossi presented two papers of her own: “De la música de Enrique González Martínez a la habitación como una isla en Silvia Eugenia Castillero y Víctor Ortiz Partida” and “Parodia del libro impreso en los Enigmas de Sor Juana.” She also participated in an editorial board meeting for the literary journal Luvina, and she was especially excited to attend a reading by the Syrian poet Adonis. The poet read his work in Arabic, which was translated into each attendee’s preferred language through headphones.

SPRING 2023

Dr. Sat Gupta (Mathematics and Statistics) traveled to India and Pakistan in December and January to meet with research collaborators, conduct recruitment, and make several presentations, including a keynote talk at M D University Rohtak, India, and invited presentations at Lahore College for Women University, Pakistan; National College for Business and Economics, Lahore, Pakistan; Lucknow University, India; Banaras Hindu University, India; and GND University, Amritsar, India. 

Dr. Anthony Cuda (English) traveled to London, England in his role as executive director of the T.S. Eliot International Summer School. Dr. Cuda tells us, “I convened the first ever winter-session workshop focused on a discussion of the groundbreaking new digital humanities project on Eliot’s Complete Prose, for which I am managing editor with Johns Hopkins University Press and Project Muse. The exclusive workshop was attended by advanced doctoral students and world renowned specialists in the field, as well as a representative from the Eliot Estate.” While in London, Cuda also attended the readings and prize ceremony for the annual T. S. Eliot Prize in Poetry, which he calls “the most coveted poetry award in Europe and the UK.”

Dr. Heather Adams (English) attended the Writing Research Across Borders conference in Trondheim, Norway in February 2023. At the conference, she co-presented with Professor Tracy Nichols (Public Health Education) a talk entitled “Advocacy, Stigma, and Game-Writing: Theorizing from an Interdisciplinary Reproductive Care Case Study.” Drs. Adams and Nichols plan to revise the talk for publication in journals in their respective fields (Rhetoric and Writing Studies; Public Health Education). Adams also notes: “I also made valuable connections with a writing teacher in France working at the intersection of writing pedagogy and nursing training as well as with a US-based writing instructor presenting on trauma-informed teaching strategies. These are just two of the useful connections among many that were made possible by attending this conference.”

For Bayonas, a conference in Merida, Spain was a chance to build bridges with international colleagues.

Dr. Mariche Bayonas (Languages, Literatures, and Cultures) traveled to Merida, Spain to present her research at the Spanish Association for Applied Linguistics in April 2023. She recalls, “It was a wonderful experience to talk about learning Spanish online and how students feel about learning culture. The conference was located in Merida, Spain, which is a very old city founded as a Roman colony in 25 BC. Being able to finally go to a face to face conference was a great experience, especially networking and connecting with colleagues and professors that conduct research in similar areas of Spanish applied lingusitics.”

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