Fellows

2017–2018 Scholars and Artists in Residence

Applications were particularly competitive this year. The four winners were selected for the intellectual significance of their research and the social relevance and public impact of their work on university and area communities.

Walter Grunden | History

Walter Grunden is Associate Professor of History. During his fellowship, he studied how Japanese organizational culture affects contemporary science and technological production.. Since the year 2000, seventeen Japanese scientists have been awarded the Nobel Prize. Explaining this sudden increase in Nobel Prize winners has become a subject of great interest and speculation in Japan, with many pointing to particular cultural traits as a primary factor. But how does culture affect the conduct of science? Do differences in organizational culture really play such a critical role, as some have claimed? This study applies analytical theories from the fields of anthropology and the sociology of science to challenge essentialist cultural explanations of Japan’s recent success with the Nobel Prize by offering a broader historical perspective on the culture of science in modern Japan.

Lecture scheduled for Wednesday, October 4th, 2017, 2:30 pm–4:00pm, Wood County Senior Center

Amy Robinson | World Languages and Cultures

Amy Robinson is Associate Professor of World Languages and Cultures in the School of Romance and Classical Studies. During her ICS fellowship, she researched the legendary Chucho el Roto, Mexico’s Robin Hood. In 1935 U.S. film censors rejected a Mexican film about legendary bandit Chucho el Roto for portraying the criminal as an honorable hero and authorities as corrupt and cruel. This bandit has been celebrated in Mexico for over a century for using clever disguises and ingenuity to cross into elite spaces, steal from the wealthy and redistribute earnings to the poor. Robinson's research focuses on the film and other mainstream representations that exemplify how such tales have promoted critical awareness in Mexico about corrupt societies that presume to uphold law and order by unjustly criminalizing their antagonists. 

Lecture scheduled for Wednesday, October 18th, 2017, 2:30 pm–4:00pm, Wood County Senior Center

Nancy Patterson | School of Teaching and Learning

Nancy Patterson is Professor of Education in the College of Education and Human Development, School of Teaching and Learning. The title of her ICS project is But I Wanna Say What I Wanna Say: Ohio Student and Teacher Perspectives on the First Amendment and will include interviews and focus groups of both students and teachers of their perceptions of the democratic state of social studies. This enduring topic is of concern, as such freedoms require vigilant advocacy and protection. Coretta Scott King (1969) is quoted as having stated, “Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation.” The project is grounded in academic freedom case law and the majority of opinion of the Supreme Court in the Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1965) that held that certain forms of student expression are protected by the First Amendment. Justice Fortas wrote in the majority opinion that “it can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” 

Lecture  scheduled for Wednesday, April 4, 2018, 6:30-8:00pm, BG High School Performing Arts Center

Sheri Wells-Jensen | English

Sheri Wells-Jensen is an associate professor specializing in linguistics in the Department of English at Bowling Green State University.  She is a member of the Advisory board of Messaging Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (MITI) International, and given papers on the relationship between intelligence, perception  and language at the SETI institute, theInternational  Space Development Conference and the NASA sponsored colloquium and the University of Washington. She spends a great deal of time thinking abut science, disability, the relationship between thought and language,  and aliens. Wells-Jensen's project, entitled Imagining Life on Other Planets—Re-Imagining Life on Earth, will explore how an intelligent blind alien race would survive. What implications would blindness have for their civilization and our ability to find and communicate with them? Part advocacy, part popular science, Wells-Jensen's work questions our socially constructed assumptions about ability and disability and the limits we place on one another.

Lecture scheduled for Thursday, March 22, 2:30-4:00pm, BGSU Planetarium