Faculty Release Fellowships

The Faculty Release Fellowship supports long-term research/creative projects that may include the development of external grant or fellowship applications. No preference is given to faculty rank. Applicants must have demonstrated the ability to undertake and complete research/creative projects beyond a thesis or dissertation before the time of their application. Projects may not be mere editing, expansion, or readying for publication of a dissertation.

2024-2025

Peter Langland-Hassan, Philosophy
Inner Speech: New Problems of Philosophy

Peter Langland-Hassan is using his Taft Faculty Release Fellowship to explore the implications of recent advances in artificial intelligence for his longstanding research on inner speech, imagination, and memory.  He is writing on issues including the use of inner speech by large language models in “chain of thought” reasoning, the nature of creativity in AI systems, and the long-term implications of AI for human mortality. 

Maria Paz Moreno, Romance and Arabic Languages & Literatures
"La gacela perdida" ("The Lost Gazelle")

I am using my Taft Faculty Release Fellowship for Fall Semester 2024 to write a poetry manuscript, which, when published, will become my eleventh book of poetry. The writing work started in Cincinnati, but I am now working on the final stages during a stay at a writers’ residence in Southern Spain. Fundación Valparaíso, located in Mojácar, Almería (Spain), a non-profit residence for artists, writers and researchers, is a wonderful place, a restored old almazara (oil mill) located on a plot planted with orange, olives, and palm trees, adjacent to a rich archaeological spot, a mountain called Mojácar La Vieja. More details on the Foundation are available here. I am currently here working full time on my writing, while sharing the space with several other artists. My manuscript is entitled La gacela perdida (The Lost Gazelle), and is inspired by the works of a wide array of mystic and visionary poets. Specifically, What I intend to do with The Lost Gazelle is to produce a book rooted in poetic mystic tradition, but written from a metaphysical, non-religious, standpoint.

Eric Jenkins, School of Communication, Film, and Media Studies
Complete a Book Entitled "Understanding Modes: The Intensities of Media Affect"

I am working on a book entitled Understanding Modes: Computer Science, Neuroscience, Affect. The book analyses the rise of the term “mode,” as borrowed mostly from gaming and computer science, across culture and many fields of inquiry. Modes in computer science designate states that shape the inputs and outputs recognized by the software. This terminology, like often happens with emergent media, has become applied to humans, as when people talk about being in “vacation mode” or “sleep mode” and has found usage in a variety of fields, most notably in neuroscience under the label of the “default mode network.” The book seeks to explicate what are modes and why they have found such widespread social and cultural uptake.

Lei Kang, Mathematical Sciences
New Statistical Methods for Uncertainty Quantification in Climate Sciences

Climate science relies heavily on data from both climate models and observational sources, including a variety of remote sensing products. Analyzing these datasets for climate projections and impact studies presents significant challenges, especially in addressing uncertainties. To improve the accuracy of climate models, we must combine remote sensing data with climate model outputs for bias correction while accounting for the uncertainties inherent in both sources. Many analytical methods, including recent machine learning algorithms, still lack effective uncertainty quantification. This project is dedicated to advancing statistical modeling and machine learning algorithms with a focus on uncertainty quantification in climate science. Our goal is to develop methods that jointly analyze multiple remote sensing products and climate model outputs to enhance our understanding of climate projections and support climate change impact and mitigation studies. Additionally, we will create new approaches for solving high-dimensional nonlinear inverse problems, with quantified uncertainties, to analyze remote sensing data from upcoming NASA Earth System Observatory missions, such as the Surface Biology and Geology (SBG) mission. 

Sigrun Haude, History
Living and Dying in the German Lands during the Seventeenth Century

During my Taft Faculty Release Fellowship semester in fall 2024, I focused on the aspect of aging and old age within my overall project of life from birth to death. My main sources came from funeral works (especially of people who died in their 70s and 80s, which was not that common in the 17th century). Both the sermons and the CVs of the deceased often discuss the graces and disgraces of old age. Manuals, devotions, prayer and song books, and postils round out my documentary basis. I found a great deal of ambiguity and contradiction in these texts. Old people ought to be honored and respected – this is the theory as described in the Bible and by the old Greek philosophers; in practice, however, older people were often despised and shunned. Many authors enumerate the endless miseries of old age, from failing eyesight and buckling legs to loss of memory. In the resumes of the funeral works, many expressed a yearning for death. This longing should not only be understood in religious but also in very practical terms: Even if people did not live through a time of war, they had a hard life since they typically worked until their death. Nevertheless, despite the clear awareness of what old age would likely entail, people by and large still desired a long life.

Brendan Green, School of Public and International Affairs
Assessing Theories of Nuclear Escalation
The ongoing war in Ukraine, along with the possibility of a great power war over Taiwan, place the problem of nuclear escalation in sharp relief. While the question of crisis and wartime escalation has received much attention, many of the most important decisions affecting whether a conflict goes nuclear are made in peacetime, when states construct their military postures. Why do states sometimes adopt military postures that are more likely to cause nuclear escalation during a conventional war, and sometimes adopt postures that are less likely to make a war go nuclear? The standard answer is that military organizations, which often have a large degree of autonomy from civilian oversight during peacetime, adopt risky postures that suit their parochial interests rather than the national interest. This project proposes a theory which emphasizes the incentives that civilian leaders have to adopt risky force postures, which can provide them with tools to terminate wars and reap peacetime political benefits from adversaries and allies. The two explanations are tested using classic cases of escalatory force posture from the late Cold War, including the US Army’s "AirLand Battle,” the US Navy’s “Maritime Strategy,” and NATO’s deployment of Theater Nuclear Forces.

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