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Carolina Research News
Nine researchers awarded Arts and Humanities Research Grants
The funding provides support to scholarly, creative, or artistic pursuits and research projects led by individuals or teams.
Arts and Humanities Research Grants are part of UNC-Chapel Hill’s strategic plan and the Vice Chancellor for Research’s University-wide pilot funding portfolio, furthering Carolina’s position as a leader in foundational research, creative practice, and the translation of research into social settings. The program is co-funded by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities.
This year’s winners, from the College of Arts and Sciences and School of Information and Library Science, are: Benjamin Arbuckle, anthropology; Emily Baragwanath, classics; Lucia Binotti, romance studies; Scott Kirsch, geography & environment; LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant, African, African American, & diaspora studies; William Payne, School of Information and Library Science; David Pier, African, African American, & diaspora studies; Courtney Rivard, English & comparative literature; and Yurika Tamura, Asian and Middle Eastern studies.
Read below to learn about their research.
Benjamin Arbuckle, Professor, Anthropology
Team: Christine Mikeska, Theo Kassebaum, and Jack Clark of UNC-Chapel Hill
Project: Critically Approaching Early Urbanism in the Ancient Near East: Implementing a Multispecies Zooarchaeology at Türkmen Karahöyük, Türkiye
Summary: This work is a new archaeological project exploring the deep histories of urbanism and animals in the ancient Near East, specifically Türkiye. Arbuckle will implement a new study that takes nonhuman animals seriously as partners in the making of history, producing significant contributions to the archaeology of urbanism, human-animal relationships, and Bronze Age animal economies. The research will also expand ontological — the relations between concepts and categories — diversity and reflexive methodologies within archaeological research.
Emily Baragwanath, Professor, Classics
Team: Nicholas D. Smith, Lewis & Clark College; Russell Jones, University of Oklahoma; Carolina Araujo, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; Emily Austin, Wake Forest University; Irina Deretic, University of Belgrade; Louis-Andre Dorion, Université de Montréal; Alex Lee, The Miller School of Albemarle, Charlottesville; Patricia Mareschal, University of California-San Diego; Thomas Moody, University of California-Santa Barbara; Francesca Pentassuglio, University of Messina; Frances Pownall, University of Alberta; Ravi Sharma, Clark University; and Alessandro Stavru, Università di Verona
Project: New Perspectives on Socrates: The Trial, Politics, and Religion
Summary: This work will support the convening of colleagues from around the world who represent current trends in scholarship on the complex issues surrounding politics and religion in relation to Socrates and his trial. In the past decade, studies on Socrates and Socratic literature have blossomed. The gathering, to be held at the village of Piryoi Thermis in Lesbos, Greece in June 2025, seeks to broaden the scope and impact of existing connections between classicists, ancient historians, and ancient philosophers in a collaboration that promises to significantly impact the field.
Lucia Binotti, Professor, Romance Studies
Team: Jorge Espinosa Campuzano, UNC-Chapel Hill
Project: Dialectal Superdiversity and Urban Transformation: Mapping Linguistic and Cultural Variation in Tetuán, Madrid
Summary: This study explores dialectal superdiversity in the Tetuán district of Madrid, Spain, emphasizing the coexistence of numerous Spanish dialects from Central and South America and the formation of a “pan Spanish Koine.” Unlike traditional linguistic superdiversity studies that focus on multilingual contexts, this research highlights internal dialectal and cultural diversity within the Spanish-speaking community.
Scott Kirsch, Professor, Geography & Environment
Project: Kress Variety Stores and the Architecture of Mass Consumption: A “Building Geographies” Approach
Summary: This work will ask what we can learn from Kress buildings — produced in the early-to-mid-20th century to house the S.H. Kress & Company’s thriving 5-10-25-cent stores — about changing infrastructures of consumption in U.S. cities. This project will link aesthetic constructions of space and landscape to the practical work of high-volume commerce and trace the stores’ “after lives” in the built environment in current downtown landscapes across the country.
LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant, Professor, African, African American, & Diaspora Studies
Project: Sacred AXA, Part 2
Summary: This project involves visually documenting several consecrated locations in, Anguilla — a Carribean island of the Lesser Antilles — which is best known for its tourist economy and is home to nearly 50 churches, cemeteries, and other sacred sites. This work will create a digital archive to explore the varied meanings of these spaces, tend to the significance they hold, and make the knowledge of these spaces more readily available to a larger public.
William Payne, Assistant Professor, School of Information and Library Science
Team: Izabella Rodriguez, New York University Ability Project; Richard Thai, FMDG Music School; and Ian Matty, Mountain Lakes Public Library Makerspace
Project: Developing Tactile Graphics for Music Education
Summary: Blind and visually impaired music learners access educational resources and notation through alternative means, such as audio recordings, text-to-speech, and braille music notation. Yet, some concepts, like the circle of fifths, orchestra layout, and polyrhythms, are difficult to express without visual diagrams. In collaboration with the Filomen M. D’Agostino Greenberg School, this work will develop and evaluate tactile graphics — raised line prints — for teaching music concepts to visually impaired learners. It will also explore how music educators can incorporate tactile graphics into their practice and establish production methods to increase the accessibility of multisensory learning.
David Pier, Associate Professor, African, African American, & Diaspora Studies
Project: Kadongo Kamu: Uganda’s Country Music
Summary: Kadongo kamu, meaning “one little guitar,” is a Ugandan music genre that first emerged in the 1950s that adapted traditional drumming and dancing rhythms to an instrument that, at the time, was a symbolically modern instrument. Through this project, Pier will write a book to illuminate a rustic conservatism/populism that is specific to Uganda and the ethnic Buganda region, arising out of that region’s specific precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial history.
Courtney Rivard, Assistant Professor, English & Comparative Literature
Team: Jordynn Jack and Sejal Mahendru, UNC-Chapel Hill
Project: Forever Chemicals in North Carolina: A Story Archive
Summary: This project creates an oral history archive dedicated to documenting how individual community members in North Carolina understand PFAS exposure, how they connect PFAS to their local environment and community, and what motivates individuals to take action in response to these exposures.
Yurika Tamura, Assistant Professor, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Project: An Inheritance of Mourning: Art and the Inhuman in Post-Fukushima
Summary: In 2023, Japan released radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima Triple Disaster of 2011 into the ocean. Many local artists in Fukushima initiated innovative art and performance projects to contest the Japanese government’s environmental policy. This project will result in a book which investigates transnational environmental art scenes in the post-Fukushima world. It will highlight the intersection of radioactive pollution and imperial globalization and proposes that these art scenes offer an alternative yet global mode of anti-imperial environmental ethics.