Faculty literature projects gain funding through OURC

The Ohio University Research Committee awarded a total of $47, 015 for its fall cycle to six faculty members, funding that one professor deemed “essential” to his project.In an age when Harry Potter and The Hunger Games are what make the bucks, Neil Bernstein, a classics professor and funding recipient, emphasized the importance of funding for research, scholarship and creative projects.“If we don’t have [funding] then we’d have to go into the marketplace,” he said. “Most [projects] in the humanities are not marketable.”Bernstein submitted his funding proposal in the fall, which was judged by a committee of appointed faculty and administrators for its “scientific and creative merit,” said Roxanne Male-Brune, the director of grant-writing and projects. According to her, the Office of the Vice President for Research, which funds the OU Research Committee (OURC), strives for a funding rate of at least 33 percent.For the fall cycle, the committee received 14 proposals requesting $106,321 in funding and approved 6 of them.Bernstein was awarded $7,123 to collaborate with the Tesserae Project, which aids Latin literary scholars in identifying instances of text reuse and variation, in which Latin poets borrow phrases from their predecessors.He compared the phenomenon of text reuse to how today’s vernacular uses phrases from the Bible and Shakespeare, like the ubiquitous “to be or not to be.”Ray Klimek, a professor of photography, also received funding—the maximum amount of $8,000—for his film project about Mount Ventoux in southern France, which the historic poet and early humanist Petrarch climbed solely to see the view.Klimek said he wanted to explore the concept of landscape, which he said has not always existed, as well as “the importance of the idea of looking, of having a view.”However, Klimek is not the only one benefiting from the grant.“The more that I learn about something, the more I can impart,” he said. “People assume that there’s some kind of split between teaching and research. I think that’s a myth…I think ideally the one feeds into the other.”Male-Brune agreed that students also have something to gain from professors engaging in research.“Their research and their creative efforts inform their teaching,” she said. “The students always say that the best faculty are the ones where they could talk about a subject and then contextualize it to a real life application, and that really is what research is all about: engaging in that real life application.”Male-Brune also recommended that students partake in research projects as a “test drive,” to determine whether or not they like the discipline they are in.“I always tell people, you don’t want to be the 40-year-old that says, ‘What did I do? I don’t like this!” she said.The OURC provides funding for research to undergraduate and graduate students through the Student Enhancement Award.  Overseen by the Honors Tutorial College, the Provost’s Undergraduate Research Fund also provides research awards to undergraduates.According to Male-Brune, the OURC’s awards programs do not prove a strain on the university’s wallet.“For every dollar that we invest in the internal awards program, we actually receive $21 back in external funds directly related to that project,” she said. “I always tell the Board of Trustees and the Foundation Board, ‘Beat that return on investment!’”Despite recent budget cuts over the past 10 years, the OURC has sustained almost no cuts to the internal awards programs, she said.“People realized what a great return on investment it was and what a great investment in the students and the faculty,” she said.