RFA: Rotary Peace Fellows

Free money!

CFP: Congress in the classroom

CFP: CONGRESS IN THE CLASSROOM 2010

* Deadline: April 15, 2010 *

Introducing the new US Supreme Court Database Website!

Washington University professor Andrew Martin and his collaborators have recently released their US Supreme Court Database website. It updates, enhances, and streamlines Spaeth’s original data set. This project looks to be a significant development in the field and  a very useful and reliable resource for law and courts scholars interested in studying SCOTUS. The website can be found here, and Andrew’s formal announcement is available below the fold.

Introducing guest blogger, Melinda Gann Hall

Dear Voir Dire readers, please join me in welcoming professor Melinda Gann Hall to our blog. While she needs     no introduction, I’ll provide a little bio information for anyone who is doesn’t follow law and courts or state           politics work and is therefore unfamiliar with her scholarship. Melinda earned her Ph.D. at the University of    New  Orleans    in 1983 and is now Professor and Distinguished Faculty at Michigan State University, department  of  political  science.

Her publications, awards, and professional leadership positions are too numerous to list here, but you can find her vitae here. She (along with Chris Bonneau) has recently penned a book, In Defense of Judicial Elections and she is also a co-creator (with Paul Brace) of the well-known State Supreme Court Data Project, funded by NSF. We look forward to her posts and I am sure that you will enjoy her insights.

RFP: Southern Africa: Transforming Community-Based Natural Resource Management

From HED:

HED expects to make one (1) award of up to $600,000 for a three-year higher education partnership. This partnership will enhance community-based natural resource management education in southern African higher education institutions in at least three southern Africa countries, potentially including but not limited to: Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

RFP: Evaluation and Analysis of USAID’s Political Party Strengthening Programs

From HED:

HED expects to make one (1) award of up to $685,000, contingent on USAID funding, for a two -year period of performance for an evaluation to identify the impact of USAID assistance on political party development and democratization, and advance technical knowledge and understanding in the field of political party strengthening.

RFP: CAFTA-DR Environmental Law Capacity Building Initiative

From HED:

HED expects to make one (1) award of up to $650,000 for a higher education partnership to strengthen environmental law capacity building in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Nicaragua as part of the U.S.-Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) and the Environmental Cooperation Agreement (ECA). The award will be incrementally funded over a three-year period contingent on funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

RFP: Science of Virtues

See here.

The Arete Initiative at the University of Chicago announces a new $3 million research program on a New Science of Virtues. This is a multidisciplinary research initiative that seeks contributions from individuals and from teams of investigators working within the humanities and the sciences. It supports highly original, scholarly projects that demonstrate promise of a distinctive contribution to virtue research and have the potential to begin a new field of interdisciplinary study. Projects must in some way address the primary question: In what ways might the humanities and the sciences cooperate to develop more adequate models of virtue for modern societies?

 In 2010, about twenty (20), two-year research grants will be awarded ranging from $50,000 to $300,000. Scholars and scientists from around the world are invited to submit Letters of Intent (LOI) as entry into a research grant competition.

Minerva Research Initiative

The first round of grants have been made:

 

• Nazli Choucri, professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “Explorations in Cyber International Relations.”
• Patricia M. Lewis, deputy director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies: “Iraq’s Wars From the Iraqi Perspective: State Security, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Civil-Military Relations, Ethnic Conflict, and Political Communication in Baathist Iraq.”
• James M. Lindsay, professor of international affairs at the University of Texas at Austin: “Climate Change, State Stability, and Political Risk in Africa.”
• David Matsumoto, professor of psychology at San Francisco State University: “Emotion and Intergroup Relations.”
• Jacob N. Shapiro, assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University: “Terrorism, Governance, and Development.”
• Susan L. Shirk, professor of international relations and director of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California at San Diego: “The Evolving Relationship Between Technology and National Security in China: Innovation, Defense Transformation, and China’s Place in the Global Technology Order.”
• Mark R. Woodward, professor of religious studies at Arizona State University: “Finding Allies for the War of Words: Mapping the Diffusion and Influence of Counter-Radical Muslim Discourse.”

Changes at NSF

In the recent Dear Colleague letter, new initiatives:

• Complexity Science. We recognize that the concept of complex systems means different things in different areas, and we encourage work on complex systems incorporating analyses of the interaction of simpler systems to explain observed complexity; the dynamics of complex systems, for example “tipping points,” where many things change dramatically at one time, and “emergent phenomena,” such as phase transitions in which complex phenomena emerge despite being underdetermined by ambient conditioning factors.
• Large-scale Interdisciplinary Research. We also invite the submission to our programs of large-scale interdisciplinary projects that advance the understanding of the dynamics of human systems. We expect to make a small number of awards of up to $1.2 million. HSD funded interdisciplinary research teams using methods from different fields to understand the dynamics of human action and development, as well as knowledge about organizational, cultural, and societal adaptation and change. We encourage proposals that address such matters with an integrated approach drawing on more than one discipline. The PI must be from a discipline appropriate for the host program but collaborators may be from any area of science, not just the SBE sciences. Investigators should contact the most appropriate SBE Program Officer to determine if their ideas respond to this activity’s goals. If it is deemed responsive, the program officer will ask for a two-page description of the proposed project in advance of submission of a full proposal to facilitate the processes of joint review and/or funding. The review process will follow standard NSF practices agreed upon by the programs participating in a proposal’s review, with awards determined in a directorate-wide process.
• Infrastructure. We now encourage proposals for infrastructure development to our programs after discussion with the most relevant SBE Program Officer. This includes but is not limited to cyberinfrastructure, instrumentation, shared data bases, repositories, consortia, etc. SBE will consider both free-standing proposals for infrastructure and requests for research resources not typically available within the context of SBE research proposals.

This seems a straight-forward port of HSD to all of SBE, though HSD seemed to have an implicit “2+ institutions” demand that doesn’t seem present here.

RFP: Higher Education Support for Legal Reforms in Mexico

From Higher Education for Development (HED):

Mexico’s Congress recently passed constitutional reforms making it mandatory for all states, the federal district and the federal government to transform their criminal justice system from a mixed inquisitorial into an oral adversarial criminal justice system. It is expected that these important reforms will lead to transparency and accountability in the legal process. These reforms will entail the development of new legal education programs at the university level to help the next generation of lawyers prepare for the practice of law under the new system involving adversarial proceedings.

RFP: Environmental Law

CAFTA-DR Environmental Law Capacity Building Initiative

HED expects to make one (1) award of up to $650,000 for a higher education partnership to strengthen environmental law capacity building in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Nicaragua as part of the U.S.-Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) and the Environmental Cooperation Agreement (ECA). As a result of partnership activities, universities in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Nicaragua will have greater institutional capacity and stronger human capacity to improve the development and implementation of regional environmental laws and practices. Partners will review current curricula related to environmental law and practices at the member institutions to identify curriculum changes and needed faculty development. Partners will collaborate to strengthen university institutional capacity to teach environmental law and to design and deliver environmental law clinical programs, as well as increase joint legal research projects related to topics about regional environmental law.

RFP: Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF)

The Social Science Research Council, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is pleased to announce a call to faculty for interdisciplinary research field proposals for the 2009 Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF) program. Established in 2006, the DPDF combines financial
support and workshop experience for early-stage graduate students engaged in predissertation research and developing their dissertation proposals. The DPDF program is designed to intervene at a critical moment in the career development of graduate students in the humanities and social sciences by aiding their transition from students to researchers. It provides complementary interdisciplinary perspectives to students across the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities.* Faculty applicants must be tenured at different doctoral degree-granting programs at US universities and apply in teams of two. DPDF Research Directors lead groups of 12 graduate student fellows in two four-day workshops. Research directors receive a stipend of $10,000 each. More information about the program may be found at: http://programs.ssrc.org/dpdf.

Hodgepodge

1. Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January-June 2007, from the FBI.
2. Will the Humanities Save Us?, from Stanley Fish.
3. Good Day for a Riot, from the NIJ.
4. RFP:Research on Crime Prevention and Control: Focus on Gangs., from the NIJ.

Peer Review at the NSF

The NSF recently finished a major study of its peer review and proposal management mechanisms.

The study found:

• NSF funding rates declined due to a surge in proposals, as NSF was making a concerted effort to increase the average award size (absorbing overall NSF budget growth). The annual number of awards stayed constant. Funding rates dropped between fiscal year (FY) 2000 and FY 2004, and leveled off in FY 2005 and FY 2006.

• Proposals have increased as the applicant pool has increased — due in part to growth in the research community’s capacity, decreases in funding from other sources and increases in targeted solicitations in new areas–and the number of proposals per applicant has increased.

• NSF’s peer review system is under stress with great demands on reviewers, posing challenges in order for NSF to maintain scientific integrity and stellar quality.

• The overall decrease in funding rate has affected the entire NSF proposer community proportionately–there has been no disparate effect on any particular group.

• Reduced funding rates and increased proposal submission rates have increased the work for all involved.

• The quality of proposals submitted and awarded has not declined due to increased competition or lowered funding rates.

The final IPAMM report can be found here.

What’s the scoop?

1. Awards are getting larger, which means fewer opportunities for new PIs.

2. People are sending in more proposals.

3. So there are more proposals to review.

Sounds Frankesque.

RFP: American Philosophical Society, Franklin Research Grants

The Franklin program of the American Philosophical Society helps meet research costs such as travel to libraries and archives, the purchase of research materials, fieldwork, or laboratory expenses. The funds cannot be used for subvention costs.

More info here.

This is the only RFP I know of that requires two letters of support. Does anyone know if this typical in the humanities?