May 2008 Newsletter
In This Issue:
Faculty News
Explore Funding Opportunities
Upcoming Proposal Deadline
Final Products Accepted
BFRF 2008 Summer Stipends
Grant Writing Tips
Corporate, Foundations and Government Relations Office (CFGR)
Faculty News
Entreprenuership Theory and Practice is ranked among the top Business journals by Financial Times. A May 2007, two-volume special issue on women’s entrepreneurship, edited by D. Ray Bagby, has received a fantastic response. The introduction, "Advancing a Framework for Coherent Research on Women's Entrepreneurship," co-authored by Candida Brush, Entrepreneurship, with Anne de Bruin and Friederike Welter, has been downloaded 661 times. "The entrepreneurial propensity of women," an article co-authored by Nan Langowitz, Management, and Maria Minniti, was accessed 576 times. The two articles about women entrepreneurs by Babson faculty are in the top 20 for all the downloads from Wiley-Blackwell Synergy in 2007. This suggests, says Brush, "that YES, there is significant interest in women's entrepreneurship, and more important, that there is an opportunity for us to do more pieces like these using GEM data."
A selection of poems by Mary O’Donoghue, Arts and Humanities, from her recently completed “Wrecks” and “Transports” sections of the Aquitania poetry collection project have been accepted for publication at The Recorder: Journal of the American Irish Historical Association. This work was sponsored by a major grant (stipend and course release) from the BFRF. O’Donoghue’s essay, “Fecking Around With These Old Stories: Talkers and Earwitnesses in the Theatre of the Bar”, has been accepted for publication in a volume essays entitled Orality and Modern Irish Culture, due from Cambridge Scholars Publishing in late 2008.Back to top
Explore Funding Opportunities
COS Funding Alert:
Community of Science (COS) Funding Opportunities is the largest, most comprehensive database of available funding. If you are looking for external funding ideas, this link to COS is accessible on or off-campus. If you want to explore external funding ideas, contact Wendy Silverman, Director of Corporations, Foundations, and Government Relations, X5993.
Government Agencies:
Grants.gov is THE single access point for over 900 grant programs offered by the 26 Federal grant-making agencies.
Foundations:
The Foundation Center offers a comprehensive lists of
and links to numerous private funding sources.
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Upcoming Proposal Deadline
August 1, 2008
Fulbright Scholar Program 2009-2010
The traditional Fulbright Scholar Program sends 800 U.S. faculty and professionals abroad each year. Grantees lecture and conduct research in a wide variety of academic and professional fields.
Awards in the Fulbright Distinguished Chairs Program are viewed as among the most prestigious appointments in the Fulbright Scholar Program. Candidates should be senior scholars and have a significant publication and teaching record. Back to top
BFRF Final Products Accepted
Babson Faculty Research Fund
The BFRF has accepted the Final Products from the following faculty members who have completed their BFRF sponsored research projects.
Kevin Bruyneel, History and Society
"Hierarchy and Hybridity: The Internal Postcolonialism of Mid-19th Century American Expansionism"
In this essay I argue that in some of the key documents, policies and governing practices of mid-19th century American expansionism we can see the compatible workings of hierarchy and hybridity in the relationship between race and nation in U.S. politics and history. Hierarchy and hybridity are the twinned components that I introduce to better account for the complexity of the interplay between racial inequality and American nation-building in the decades immediately following the US-Mexico War, which ended in 1848. To develop this argument, I begin by explaining what I mean by hierarchy and hybridity, how I put them together, and in what way they can offer a precise analysis of the colonialist dynamics shaping persistent group inequality in a liberal democratic setting such as the United States. For the purposes of this paper, the main focus of my analysis will be the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and its consequences. With this focus in mind, I see in a few of the Treaty's key clauses, as well as in subsequent legislation such as the California Land Act of 1851, the internal postcolonial process by which Mexican citizens were drawn into the American polity on hierarchical and hybridic terms, requiring both their subjugation in the politics, culture and economy of the United States and the creation of a new ethnic identity for them that would assume a liminal place within the nation's racial order.
Ryan Davies, Finance
"Fund of Hedge Funds Portfolio Selection: A Multiple-Objective Approach"
This paper develops a technique for fund of hedge funds to allocate capital across different hedge fund strategies and traditional asset classes. Our adaptation of the Polynomial Goal Programming (PGP) optimization method incorporates investor preferences for higher return moments, such as skewness and kurtosis, and provides computational advantages over rival methods. We show how optimal allocations depend on the interaction between strategies, as measured by covariance, co-skewness and co-kurtosis. We also demonstrate the importance of constructing "like for like" representative portfolios that reflect the investment opportunities available to different sized funds. Our empirical results reveal the importance of equity market neutral funds as volatility and kurtosis reducers, and of global macro funds as portfolio skewness enhancers.
Shari Laprise, Mathematics and Science
"Investigation of the role of RASSF1A in the cell death response in cancer models"
This project explored how the RASSF1A-mediated cell death response confers a protective effect against human cancers. RASSF1A, a tumor suppressor protein, functions in inducing apoptosis in abnormal cells. The mechanism by which RASSF1A accomplishes this is not entirely understood. In this study, data is presented which suggests an additional protein module by which RASSF1A interacts with TNF-R1; it is this association with TNF-R1 that initiates the apoptotic response. In addition, experimental results suggest that the relationship between RASSF1A and Grb2, an anti-apoptotic protein, may be more complex than that between RASSF1A and other anti-apoptotic proteins. Taken together, these experiments shed light on the role played by RASSF1A in human cancers; in particular, how cell death is chosen over survival in abnormal cells.
Faculty Resource Facility
The following faculty members have completed their FRF sponsored research projects.
Kent Jones, Economics
The WTO in Crisis: Proposals for Reform
This book follows up on the author's previous book, Who's Afraid of the WTO? (Oxford University Press, 2004). The new book addresses the problems that the WTO has had as an institution in promoting trade liberalization. It focuses on three major themes of reform: better representation, coherence with other economic institutions, and flexibility in negotiating frameworks. The goals of reform are presented in terms of their ability to promote a consensus in multilateral trade negotiations. This research was supported by a 2004 FRF award.
Jeffrey Melnick, History and Society
Under Construction: America’s Cultures of 9/11
Under Construction serves as a useful introduction to the complexities of American culture in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. With a broad purview that includes film, music, literary fiction and other popular arts, the volume is designed for anyone interested in quietly probing how American cultural agents and audiences have processed the national trauma of 9/11. Written in an accessible language, and unburdened by academic jargon, 9/11 Culture constructs a number of common-sense approaches for the study of all of the works of popular and literary art. Offering balanced examinations of a catalogue of artifacts culled from across the cultural landscape--film, music, rumors, photos, memorials, comic strips, fiction, telethons, poetry--Melnick probes the multiple ways that 9/11 has exerted a shaping force on a wide range of social formations from the politics of masculinity to the poetics of redemption. This project was supported by a 2002 FRF award.
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BFRF 2008 Summer Stipends
The following faculty members have been awarded stipends to pursue BFRF sponsored research activities this summer.
Lisa Colletta, Arts and Humanities, "J.B. Priestly: From Hollywood to the BBC." This essay will examine J. B. Priestly's politically-oriented writing for the BBC as well as his work on the 1941 Committee and the Common Wealth Party.
Stephen Deets, History and Society, "The Institutions and Unfulfilled Visions of the Saami." This research will examine efforts by Saami to institutionalize their community in order to consider practical and theoretical implications of trans-sovereign governance.
Lisa DiCarlo, History and Society, "Observations of Ebru." DiCarlo will analyze the Turkish public's reactions to and the Turkish media's coverage of Ebru, an exhibit on Turkey's ethnic diversity, in an attempt to discover whether the original Republican ideas about ethnicity have been internalized by the general population of Turkey.
Jon Dietrick, Arts and Humanities, "Blood Money and Bad Pennies: Monstrous Money in Sidney Kingsley's Dead End." Dietrick will investigate Depression America's attitudes toward economic life by considering two metaphors that dominate Kingsley's 1935 play Dead End: one that associates money with the monstrous, and one that associates money with self-making (as in the phrase "self-made man").
Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, Arts and Humanities, "Notes Toward a Theory: Is the Human in Human Rights the same as the Human in the Humanities?" The essay will explore the relationship between human rights and the humanities in both theoretical and methodological terms, with the specific goal of making visible the theoretical implications of a human rights oriented approach to literary study.
Julie Levinson, Arts and Humanities, Levinson will write the introductory chapter to her book, Top of the World: The American Success Myth in Film.
Salvatore Parise, TOIM, "The Role of Technology-Mediated Networks in Knowledge Management." This study, a joint project with Bala Iyer, will focus on the value resulting from social/collaboration tools.
Mary Pinard, Arts and Humanities, will write An Elegy for Estuaries, a series of poems on the ecosystem of estuaries.
Anne Roggeveen, Marketing, "The Impact of Involving Customers in the Creation of a Service Recovery." This research adds to an on-going investigation of how customer participation in the creation of a service recovery impacts satisfaction. By teasing apart the impact of transparency of the recovery effort from involvement in the recovery effort this research helps to better understand the role of customer participation in the creation of a recovery effort.
Brian Seitz, Arts and Humanities, "Phenomenology and the Politics of Death" Using his book, Being and Time, Seitz will critique Heidegger’s skewed understanding of the role of death.
In addition, Lydia Moland, Arts and Humanities, has a major BFRF award that includes a course release and a 2008 summer stipend. In the article, "Aesthetic Reflection: Hegel, Art and the Citizen’s Disposition," Moland will connect Hegel’s aesthetic and political theory through analyzing Hegel's Aesthetics and the literature he discusses.
Mary O'Donoghue, Arts and Humanities, has a major BFRF award that includes a 2008 summer stipend and a course release. She will be writing part of a novel, Skelper.
William Rybolt, Math and Science, has a research-related expenses award for "An Exploration of Direct Neural Input Devices: A Comparison of Reality and Promise."
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Grant Writing Tips
The following are web sites that offer free writing tips.
Grant Proposal.com is devoted to providing free resources for both advanced grant writing consultants and inexperienced nonprofit staff.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has published Basic Elements of Grant Writing
National Science Foundation provides a Guide for Proposal Writing Guide for Proposal Writing
Foundation Center offers a Proposal Writing Short Course
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Corporate, Foundations and Government Relations Office (CFGR)
The Office of Corporate, Foundation and Government Relations (CFGR) within Development and Alumni Relations at Babson College provides guidance and assistance to faculty and staff seeking funding from corporations, foundations, and government agencies to support their research and curricular development initiatives. Among the services provided are pre-award activities such as identifying and researching possible funding sources, assisting with cultivation of funding prospects and with proposal development and writing, particularly in the final draft stage, and ultimately with the submission of proposals.
If you would like to explore the possibility of external funding or examine your research agenda please contact Wendy Silverman, Director, CFGR, at x5993.
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