Four professors in the Faculty of Arts at York University have received the Faculty of Arts Fellowship for the 2006-2007 academic year. The recipients of the 2006 Fellowship Awards, announced April 18, are Professor Marcus Boon (Department of English), Professor Craig Heron (Department of History), Professor Huaxiong Huang (Department of Mathematics & Statistics) and Professor Ananya Mukherjee-Reed (Department of Political Science).
The fellowships are available to full-time faculty members to recognize and encourage outstanding research by providing the opportunity to complete a significant research project. Up to four fellowships are awarded annually, with one fellowship reserved and awarded to probationary faculty (untenured faculty in the tenure stream) displaying promise of excellence. The fellowships provide each professor with time off from teaching and administrative duties to pursue research.
Marcus Boon
Boon was awarded a fellowship for his project titled “Sadhana: Asian Religions and Twentieth Century European and American Literature”. The fellowship committee was impressed by the project which promises to enrich our understanding of the impact of globalization on bohemian culture through an exploration of non-canonical Western writings influenced by Asian religions.
Marcus Boon
“I’m delighted to be a recipient of the Faculty of Arts Fellowship this year. The research support I have received from York has been excellent from the beginning, but it’s a rare privilege to be able to pursue academic research in the optimal conditions that I now have!” said Boon. “In conjunction with the SSHRC grant I was recently awarded, the fellowship will allow me access to material resources, archives and the like that are necessary for my work on Asian religions and their relationship with 20th century writing — but more than anything else, it will buy that most precious ingredient in all intellectual investigation worth the name: time.”
Craig Heron
Craig Heron
With his fellowship, Heron will investigate the intricate relationship between leisure and labour. Heron was awarded a fellowship for his project titled “Punching the Clock: Time, Work, and Leisure in Canada since 1850”. He is also the recipient of the 2004-2005 Dean’s Award for Outstanding Research.
“The award comes at a really fortuitous moment. I began working on issues relating to time, work and leisure many years ago, but had to delay completion of this book manuscript, as other projects intervened,” said Heron. “Specifically I turned to studying one of the most contentious issues related to leisure – drinking – and then to the new public holiday of the late 19th century, Labour Day. Now I will have the time to pull together the larger story more effectively and expeditiously.”
Huaxiong Huang
Huaxiong Huang
Huang is a global expert in field of industrial mathematics. He was awarded a fellowship to pursue his project titled “Case Studies in Industrial Mathematics”. The culmination of Huang’s research will be a monograph which will address the curricular gap between rapid developments within industrial mathematics and the traditional case study approach currently used in the applied mathematical sciences.
“At the moment there are a few books on mathematical modelling but none of them provide a wide selection of case studies and comprehensive review of advanced techniques at the graduate level in one place. This book will become a useful reference for researchers and practitioners who work in the area of industrial and applied mathematics,” said Huang. “It can also be used as a textbook for graduate courses in the same area. I am grateful to the committee for giving me this opportunity and I feel fortunate for the support from the Faculty of Arts towards my research.”
Ananya Mukherjee-Reed
Ananya Mukherjee-Reed
Mukherjee-Reed’s proposed research project, titled “The Business of Development: Problematizing the Questions of Justice and Agency”, will investigate the epistemological effects of development and human security practices and discourses of neoliberal corporations, regimes, as well as international organizations such as the United Nations.
“Initial research from this work will be presented at a workshop on Public-Private Partnerships and Sustainable Development, to be organized collaboratively by the Center for Business and Development Studies at the Copenhagen Business School and the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), Geneva in Denmark in the summer of 2006,” said Mukherjee Reed. “UNRISD is the leading autonomous United Nations agency that undertakes research on contemporary problems affecting development. Our hope is that significant possibilities of international collaboration will emerge from this research.”