Impact
Our research impact is achieved through the Glasscock Center’s programs, grants, and two initiatives, Global Health Humanities and Humanities: Land Sea Space. Here, we showcase some of the ways this research employs the critical methods of the humanities and humanistic social sciences to engage with emerging topics and issues and develop advanced knowledge. We include metrics to show how our grant funding supports the research of faculty and students at the university, as well as case studies which demonstrate forms of impact on the university and wider community. The Glasscock Center is proud to serve as the humanities hub on campus, through which we provide diverse opportunities for research exchange and impact across many disciplines. Check out our Annual Reports to find out more about how we make a difference.
GRANTS & AWARDS
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800Awards to faculty for humanities-related research
$1,640,400
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668Awards to graduate students for humanities-related research
$628,418
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155+Awards to undergraduate students for humanities-related research
$230,115
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500+Grants for co-sponsorship of public lectures, performances, symposia, conferences, etc. to contribute to the intellectual life and multicultural enrichment of the community
$678,000
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45Unique Working Groups, which are our essential incubators for transformative research, interdisciplinary collaboration, publications, & more
$526,000
BOOK PRIZES
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22Annual Susanne M. Glasscock Book Prizes for Interdisciplinary Scholarship
$33,000
Celebration of Books
The Glasscock Center is delighted to share recent book publications by faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Center’s affiliated departments. Congratulations to these scholars on their achievement!
Learn more about these books here.
Impact Case Studies
Glasscock Three-Year Seminar on “#MeToo and the Transnational Politics of Social Media Feminism”
Dr. Vanita Reddy (English) and Dr. Chaitanya Lakkimsetti (Sociology) were awarded a Glasscock Center Three Year-Seminar grant (2019-2022) for their project, “#MeToo and the Transnational Politics of Social Media Feminism.” The project’s activities allowed for transational feminist scholars for gender justice to gather and respond to the uptake of #MeToo across various national sites in 2016. Through these venues, researchers were able to discuss the impact of #MeToo on public policy, elections, workplaces, media, youth cultures, university campuses and other activist movements. The theoretical research was primarily rooted in feminist of color/third-world feminist thought and founded on three primary goals. First, it carved out a space to discuss #MeToo on the Texas A&M University College Station campus. Second, it was built to engender a collection of essays/special journal issues based on the interdisciplinary and global projects that flourished through the seminar activities. The third aim was to provide an open-access website to give a platform for academics to testify and bear witness to everyday acts of sexism in higher-education.
Over the span of three years, especially during the Covid-19 global pandemic, Texas A&M faculty and students were able to meet and discuss (initially in-person and eventually via-zoom) the impact of #MeToo with numerous other scholars and thinkers. In 2019 Dr. Lakkimsetti and Dr. Reddy co-authored an article titled “Feminine Vulnerability and Toxic Masculinity: A Comparative Feminist Analysis of Me Too in India and the US” in the journal Rejoinder (Spring 2019). They also generated a co-authored publication titled “#MeToo and Transnational Gender Justice: An Introduction” in the Feminist Formations journal (2021). Dr. Lakkimsetti also published “Stripping Away at Respectability: #Metoo India and the Politics of Dignity” in that journal. They also presented their work at The School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers and the Center for the Study of Korea at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto in 2022.
The transnational, interdisciplinary, and collaborative components of this three-year project generated cutting-edge research and developed transnational networks. Because a majority of the seminar activities were digital, the programming was more accessible and allowed students from Texas A&M to interact with transnational scholars around topics of sexual justice.
Faculty Fellowship on “George Berkeley and Early Modern Philosophy”
Dr. Stephen Daniel, Presidential Professor of Teaching Excellence and Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University, was awarded a Glasscock Internal Faculty Residential Fellowship 2019-2020 to complete a research project on the idealist philosopher George Berkeley’s concepts of how the mind relates to ideas. Dr. Daniel has written five books, edited three others (two of which are on Berkeley), and published more than sixty articles on 17th- and 18th-century philosophy and on current continental theory. This project places Berkeley contextually in the line of his intellectual development instead of framing him strictly in relation to thinkers such as Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, or other Early Modern Philosophers, as we see in most of the current scholarship. Through this approach, Dr. Daniel delineates Berkeley’s sourcing from his early scholastic training that brings about his unique rendition of the concepts of mind and its relationship to objects and ideas. He notes the influences of the Stoics, Christian Neoplatonists, Descartes, Hobbes, Arnauld, Spinoza, Malebranche, Locke, Bayle, Leibniz, Peter Browne, Anthony Collins, Jonathan Edwards, and pantheist thinkers of the 17th and 18th Centuries on Berkeley’s development.
Language Matters Working Group
The Language Matters Working Group is among twenty Humanities Working Groups that receive funding from the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research. The Group includes numerous faculty members and graduate students across disciplines such as Hispanic Studies, English, History, Psychology, and Computer Science. Established in 2011, the Group functions as a space for interdisciplinary research in theoretical, descriptive, and experimental scientific study of language. Internationally important linguists have been invited to campus, such as Bettina Kluge, Ana Celia Zentella, and Salvatore Attardo. The research that is presented and discussed focuses on the significance and impact of language through an interdisciplinary lens and allows for cross-disciplinary discussions and collaborations both within the Texas A&M University and beyond.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the group collaborated with the Evans Library to celebrate Language Day for the International Year of Indigenous Languages and International Mother Tongue Day. The Group conducted their meetings online during the height of the pandemic (locally). This increased accessibility to those who otherwise may not have been able to attend in-person. They held four presentations in the Fall and four in the Spring hosting faculty and student presenters across Hispanic Studies, History, English, Computer Science, and Psychology, which were generously attended by faculty and students. Even with the limitations that COVID-19 played in logistical issues, this became a venue to practice presentation skills in online environments. Additionally, for graduate students and faculty it provided practice for conferences and job talks, maintained up-to-date information about the field of linguistics, and built an acquaintance with scholars at other universities.
Glasscock Undergraduate Summer Scholars Program
Now in its tenth year, the Glasscock Undergraduate Summer Scholars (UGSS) program is run jointly between the Glasscock Center, LAUNCH Undergraduate Research, and the University Writing Center. The objective is to expand research in the humanities through (1) introduction to important research questions; (2) training in methods of research and analysis; (3) and guidance on developing critical thinking, independent learning, and communication skills. The program is guided by Faculty Directors with whom students develop a research question for the first two weeks in the summer. With this initial research question, they then spend eight weeks investigating the topic, while also attending writing workshops designed by the Writing Center. They produce a completed proposal and a public presentation for their thesis research during the subsequent academic year. Through the workshops they learn topics including “How to Use the Library”; “How to Formulate a Research Question and Answer It” (methods, research); “Writing a Proposal Topic”; and “Peer Review of Drafts.”
As one example of a recent UGSS Seminar, in 2020-21 Dr. Dinah Hannaford (International Studies) worked with undergraduates to explore the concepts of development, underdevelopment and the historical, political, and racial development of the “third” world. In this Seminar titled “The Cultural Politics of International Development,” students were able to develop expertise in theories of globalization, as well as sharpen their critical thinking and writing skills. In the 2019-20 academic year, Dr. Linda Radzik (Philosophy) led a project titled “The Ethics of Social Punishment.” This project looked at punishment beyond the State, and into the ethics of informal social punishment among equals where sanctions fall for moral transgressions. In addition to benefiting the summer scholars’ research, this project also supported the completion of Dr. Radzik’s book, The Ethics of Social Punishment: The Enforcement of Morality in Everyday Life (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Student scholars participate in the Public Humanities by becoming research ambassadors during their program. They are invited to publish their work via public-facing blog posts and tweets showing the impact and relevance of their humanities research. Additionally, the Glasscock Center shares the videos and recordings of their presentations on its website, thus making undergraduate research accessible to the public. Former Summer Scholars have done exceptional work by taking their research beyond the University. Stephen O’Shea ‘13 produced a documentary film about veterans, Hell or High Seas (2021) that emerged from a seminar focused on veteran narratives led by Faculty Director Dr. Marian Eide.