Several of our colleagues received PWR research awards in spring 2024 to support their creative and professional projects during the 2024-2025 academic year. Read on to learn about their impressive award-supported work.
Note that PWR suspended its annual call for research proposals in spring 2025 due to budgetary constraints.
Erik Ellis
In March 2025 I traveled to the Andalusia region of Spain to immerse myself in sites where Muslim, Jewish, and Christian cultures blended in relative harmony during the medieval period. Given the often devastating religious tensions and conflicts in the world today, I wanted to seek inspiration for writing a picture book about religious and cultural tolerance. While marveling at the geometric splendors of the Alhambra in Granada, walking beneath the double-tiered arches of the Mezquita-Cathedral in Cordoba, and admiring multi-faith inscriptions in the magnificent wooden ceiling of the Sephardi Museum in Toledo, history came to life. I’m currently working on a manuscript that I hope will echo this tapestry of cultures and convey the spirit of tolerance that we need so much today (and tomorrow). And although I’m no illustrator, and although the picture-book industry very clearly separates authors and illustrators—unless you’re a professional in both fields—I aim to create a black-and-white book dummy that outlines my vision for the story. With any luck, literary agents might show interest and want to check out my manuscript and dummy. This research trip has also inspired other story ideas that I’m excited to pursue. I’m grateful to PWR for the research grant and for its support of such creative projects, which in my case will help me teach my PWR 2 course with fresh practitioner insight.
Harriett Jernigan, Jennifer Johnson, and Lindsey Felt
The PWR research funds supported the student editorial staff for the inaugural issue of BACKSTORY, a student-run, peer-reviewed, and open-access undergraduate research journal.
This first issue featured a vibrant collection of research essays and multimedia contributions—many of which originated in PWR classrooms—and represents a labor of love from our amazing student editorial team (Aya Hilal '25, Alonzo "Ty" Sexton '27, Catherine Wu '28) who took the lead the article/media review and the editing/publishing process.
Backstory responds to two core provocations: (1) How do we pull our communities, languages, and histories into our writing and research, and (2) how do we engage in cross-disciplinary, culturally grounded knowledge-making that challenges dominant narratives? Our first issue presented a range of submissions that address these questions, spanning research essays to multimodal alt-text projects. Together, they capture a tapestry of backstories that weave together overlapping threads, from language, identity formation and belonging, to historical sites and topographies. Backstory also acknowledges the emerging role of technology in shaping our stories, and our Alt-text section reflexively nods to the practice of web accessibility that codes visual information into text, highlighting both the challenges of visibility in all its valences as well as multimodal translation for diverse audiences.
We are grateful for the PWR research grant which provided this unique student-lead opportunity to showcase undergraduate work to the broader community. We hope this inaugural edition sparks inspiration and encourages future contributions from undergrads!
Jenne Stonaker
My research assistant, Diego Bustamante, and I used our PWR research funds to continue working on the Arizona Garden Oral History project that we began last year. We reached out to another round of Stanford staff members and volunteers who had worked on the garden restoration, but we were not successful in scheduling any additional interviews. However, our partners in the Stanford Oral History Program finished transcribing and archiving the interviews that we conducted last year, and we have now linked all the oral histories on the Arizona Garden website. In May, the Stanford Oral History Program awarded our project a Special Commendation for the Susan W. Schofield Oral History Award for “exploring not only the history of a beloved campus space but also the day-to-day efforts involved in its upkeep, its meaning to the volunteers who give their time to maintain it, and the special personality of the plants that inhabit it.” I feel so fortunate that I was able to work on this project with Diego, who just finished up his undergraduate studies (including a Notation in Science Communication) at Stanford this spring. Thank you to PWR and the Stanford Oral History Program for their support of this project.
Kathleen Tarr
I convened my 10th Getting Played Symposium on Equity in the Entertainment Industry and Awards in October 2024, livestreamed from the Berkeley Public Library community room. This year’s conversation focused on the role of online spaces in advancing equity in the local theater community. It asked what ticket buyers notice, including their own engagement. It explored how performers’ opportunities have changed over the years. Finally, it delved into whether producers’ choices have evolved to meet community demands for more equitable theater. Speakers included: award-winning actor, writer, director, blogger, teacher, and previous Getting Played Equity Award recipient Michael Gene Sullivan; President of Stanford Students in Entertainment and Production Officer (Vice President) of BLACKstage, Kendal Murray; director, casting consultant, and theatre artist Salim Razawi; and this year’s Getting Played Equity Award recipient, multidisciplinary visual artist and craftsperson, Devon LaBelle. Theatre Bay Area also showcased the event at its 2024 Annual Conference Roots Intertwined with a breakout session, “Who's Playing You? A Sneak Peek of the Getting Played Symposium.” The PWR Research Grant further permitted me to continue championing equity at other events like the Women In Entertainment Summit in Los Angeles. I thank PWR for the opportunity.
Irena Yamboliev
PWR’s generous support allowed me to travel to the Greek island of Thasos to conduct research on the work of an early-twentieth-century sculptor, Polygnotos Vagis, a figure in whom I’ve been interested for several years. Vagis (1892-1965) was born on the Greek island of Thasos and moved, in the 1910s, to New York City, where he lived for several decades before moving back to Greece. Because his career spanned continents, his story has been told in English and in Greek, by biographers and scholars shaped by both American and Greek/European sensibilities, to audiences both American and Greek. I am interested in this historiography, in the ways Vagis’s narrative changes as the authors and audiences change. To study this, I visited two museums on Thasos dedicated to his work and life—one in his small hometown, and the other in a coastal tourism center. It was moving to be in the presence of his sculptures, in tiny towns where museum hours are unposted and you have to get a local to open the gallery for you especially—and to see how much of the quality of those sculptures and that life is not captured by English-language Wikipedia entries or by encyclopedias of early-twentieth-century sculptors.
I compared the depictions of Vagis in the two museums dedicated to him, speaking with the museum staff about his legacy, and gathered material that will help me feature Vagis as an example and case study in a PWR class I’m developing, called Local Heroes. This class will ask students to investigate how a local hero (or antihero) from their home community has been represented by different storytellers, and then craft their own multimedia “profile” of that figure.
In addition to seeding this course, the work I did will also be a germ for a scholarly article I’m planning on how Greek and Bulgarian artists in the decades after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire positioned themselves relative to European Modernism.
Below are pictures from Irena's research trip:
Meg Formato, Kevin Moore, and Sarah Pittock
We used our research grant to support our ongoing collaboration on our textbook-in-progress, Communicating Science in Public, which is currently under contract at CRC Press (Taylor and Francis). The centerpiece of this work was the panel we designed and participated in at the CCCC conference in Baltimore in April, titled “Exploring Genre Approaches to Science Communication Pedagogy.” This panel provided us with a chance to present our approach to a live audience of colleagues for feedback, as well as to prototype materials for our respective chapters. Meg presented on our general values and framing in “From Foundations to E-Portfolios: Building Genre Awareness Across a Science Communication Program,” giving our audience an overview of the project as well as how it emerged from our work in PWR’s Notation in Science Communication program. In “Self and Science: Using Personal Essays to Communicate Science,” Sarah gave an account of how and when science writers might choose to pursue a personal narrative, based on a textbook chapter she drafted last summer. Kevin presented strategies as well as pitfalls that emerge when scientists take a stand in op-eds in “A Genre Approach to Scientific Opinion Writing.” We were grateful for the opportunity to hear perspectives on our work-in-progress for the textbook, and also to spread the word about the project.
