22 SBU Faculty Awarded President’s Distinguished Travel Grants
Twenty-two faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences received grants from the President’s Distinguished Travel Grants program to support them in sharing their research and scholarship at conferences and events around the world.
“I am pleased that these faculty will be able to share their research, scholarship, and art with their colleagues and peers,” said Carl W. Lejuez, Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost. “The conversations and connections at these conferences spark new lines of inquiry and strengthen the impact of discoveries, ideas, and understanding.”
For more than a decade the travel grants program has been part of ongoing efforts to support faculty in arts, humanities, and social science fields at Stony Brook University.
“It’s always important that Stony Brook researchers connect and network frequently with a wide variety of publics, and the President’s Distinguished Travel Grants offer valuable support toward this goal,” said Janet Ward, Associate Provost for Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Initiatives.
The following faculty received grants to support their research and scholarship.
Izumi Ashizawa
Associate Professor, Department of Art, College of Arts and Sciences (CAS)
Ashizawa traveled to the University of Northern Iowa and Coe College to perform the current evolution of her three-part piece of performance art, “Kurogo Me version 1.x + Kurogo me, Together! + Commodify Me!” This interactive performance piece spurs a conversation about invisibility in multiple perspectives.
Mohamad Ballan
Assistant Professor, Department of History, CAS
Ballan traveled to conferences in Madrid, Spain, and Bonn, Germany, to present two ongoing projects and strengthen his ties to international collaborators. As a scholar of the medieval Mediterranean, Ballan’s two projects explore Muslim-Christian relations during the Second Crusade in the 12th century, and an examination of ideological implications of genealogy and kingship from the Nasrid-Castilian borderlands in 14th-century Spain.
Isak Berbic
Associate Professor, Department of Art, CAS
Berbic traveled to the University of Waterloo in Canada to participate in a conference that brought together scholars in cultural history, theory, film studies, and visual arts. He presented research on “Jugoslovenska Dokumenta,” an art exhibition organized shortly before the breakup of Yugoslavia, examining it as a site of memory and a reflection of broader cultural and social transformations.
Simone Brioni
Professor, Department of English, CAS
Brioni traveled to Italy to present the photographic book he curated, “Crazy Fish Sing,” a work of visual storytelling reflecting on a 1974 new-fascist massacre in Italy. Paired with a film chronicling the lives of the bombing’s victims, the book became a catalyst for broader conversations about the tragedy’s legacy and place in collective memory. During his visit, Brioni also entered discussions to expand the project into a full-scale exhibition.
Robert Chase
Associate Professor, Department of History, CAS
Chase traveled to Chicago to participate in a panel about the state of incarceration at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians. Chase discussed his award-winning 2020 book, “We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in America,” and gave a preview of his current book project, “Sheriffs and Carceral States of America: Right-Wing Law Enforcement, Anti-Insurgent Policing, the Posse Comitatus Movement, and American Democracy.”
Robert Crease
Professor, Department of Philosophy, CAS
Crease was invited to speak in Denmark at a meeting of the Nordic Society for Phenomenology about the philosophy of science. He was invited by the organizers of his session to co-author the lead article in the forthcoming book, “Oxford Handbook of Phenomenology of Science.”
Jiwon Hwang
Assistant Professor, Department of Asian and Asian American Studies, CAS
Hwang traveled to Cornell University for a conference about Korean and Japanese linguistics. There, she presented her research about how initial nasal stops in spoken Korean are becoming less nasal in certain populations by age, gender, and geographic location.
Katherine Johnston
Assistant Professor, Departments of English and Writing and Rhetoric, CAS
Johnston traveled to The Netherlands for a conference about AI and public safety, where she presented on the ways AI models entrench traditional gender roles and notions of motherhood. Johnston is expanding her scholarship of digital surveillance to address the underlying ideologies animating the expansion of artificial intelligence.
Robert Kaplan
Advanced Senior Lecturer, Department of Writing and Rhetoric, CAS
Kaplan traveled to a national writing studies conference to present, with two Stony Brook colleagues, about an online pilot to revise the library instruction component of WRT 102, a required course in the Stony Brook Curriculum. Kaplan and colleagues from the Department of Writing and Rhetoric and Stony Brook Libraries have been working on this revision for four years and are preparing to assess the pilot efforts in the upcoming academic year.
Alan Kingsberg
Associate Professor, Department of Creative Writing, Film and TV, CAS
Kingsberg traveled to Denver, Colorado, for Series Fest, a conference of aspiring and professional television writers. There, he spoke to a group of collegiate fellows about Stony Brook’s MFA programs and networked with other industry professionals with the goal of raising awareness of SBU’s programs for future recruitment and collaborative opportunities.
Fernando Loffredo
Assistant Professor, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature, CAS
Loffredo is leading a long-term international research project to examine how art and artifacts moved across territories and had an impact on cultures and environments in Latin America and the Pacific Rim under Spanish and Portuguese rule, and the role power hierarchies played in those interactions. His project includes a series of seminars with graduate students and international scholars. With his award, he traveled to the Peruvian Amazon, delivering talks about local visual culture. Stony Brook PhD student Samuel Espíndola joined the seminar.
Anna Melnikova
Instructor, Department of Linguistics, CAS
Melnikova traveled to a languages conference in Chicago where she spoke about teaching Russian, a less commonly taught language, to classes of heritage and non-heritage speakers. Melnikova’s talk blended her experiences using innovative pedagogy to teach Russian and her research as a linguist.
Nobuho Nagasawa
Professor, Department of Art, CAS
Nagasawa traveled to Seoul for a conference with artists, scholars, and scientists about the intersections and interactions between the different fields. She presented her work with fiber optic cables that blends weaving techniques from her ancestral Kyoto, Japan, with sculpture, sound, and biofeedback.
Douglas Pfeiffer
Associate Professor, Department of English, CAS
Pfeiffer traveled to France to network with future collaborators, present a talk about his latest book, “The Force of Character,” and receive the 2025 Jozef Ijsewijn Prize at a meeting of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies. Pfeiffer’s book and a related in-progress anthology explore the role of author biographies in literary criticism in early modern language traditions.
Lauren Richmond
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, CAS
Richmond traveled to Denver, Colorado, for a meeting of the American Psychological Association to give a talk about her research in cognitive offloading and its usefulness to older adults. Cognitive offloading is a process by which people use external prompts as memory aids, for example writing a grocery list rather than trying to memorize it.
Tara Rider
Senior Lecturer, School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences
Rider traveled to New Zealand for the International Congress of History of Science and Technology as part of a group of scholars with the International Commission for the History of Oceanography. Rider presented her research about how teaching environmental history helps her students better understand how social and natural sciences interplay and impact communities, past and present.
Jeffrey Santa Ana
Associate Professor, Department of English, CAS
Santa Ana traveled to Baltimore for the annual American Studies Association conference. There, he joined a panel discussion about environmental horror films and literature, and spoke with colleagues and potential publishers about his next book project, tentatively titled “Flood Memory: Decolonial Land and Water Reckoning in the Transpacific.”
James Austin Smith
Lecturer, Department of Music, CAS
Smith has spent years uncovering lost contemporary music from East Germany, and wove the discovered compositions into a presentation that blends musical performance with lectures and archival film to tell the story of a politically-charged avant garde. Smith traveled to Cologne, Leipzig, and Dresden to present this performance for the first time in Germany, with help from German colleagues and music students.
- K. Tan
Associate Professor, Department of English, CAS
Tan presented his work at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association in New Orleans and the biennale conference of the Society of Sinophone Studies in Edmonton, Canada. At each conference, he discussed different facets of his research about queer identity and activism among Sinophone communities in Asia.
Javier Uriarte
Associate Professor, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature, CAS
Uriarte traveled to Brazil for a meeting of the Brazilian Comparative Literature Association to present a paper about the influence and aesthetics of rivers in Indigenous Amazonian cultures. The presentation, and opportunity to meet and network with other scholars, will help inform his upcoming book project about the significance of rivers in early twentieth-century writings about and from Amazonia.
Yi Wang
Assistant Professor, Department of Asian and Asian American Studies, CAS
Wang organized two panels and presented two papers at the annual conference of the Chinese Language Teachers Association in New York City. Her presentations examined how Chinese language educators conceptualize and implement social justice-oriented pedagogy, with particular attention to the ways in which students’ multicultural and multilingual identities are acknowledged, negotiated, and integrated into classroom instruction.
Jennifer Young
Lecturer, Department of Writing and Rhetoric, CAS
Young traveled to the annual conference on college composition hosted by the National Council of Teachers of English in Baltimore. There, she attended sessions about first-year writing, pedagogy, generative artificial intelligence, and information literacy.