Examples of New School Mini-Grants

• Doris Chang, Associate Professor of Psychology at The New School for Social Research, received funds for travel and participation in the 2012 American Psychological Association Leadership Institute for Women in Psychology, a program designed to prepare, support, and empower women psychologists as leaders to promote positive changes in institutional and organizational life. The program involves a two-and-a-half-day workshop in Orlando and a follow-up meeting in Washington DC.
• Assistant Professor of Fashion Studies Heike Jenss will work closely with a leading senior scholar of fashion studies at University of California-Davis. During her week-long research visit, Jenss will work on turning her research case studies into a book project. She will present her work to faculty and graduate students for feedback during her visit.  
• Shagun Mehrota, Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management at The New School for Public Engagement, will develop a collaborative mutual mentoring partnership with two senior scholars—one at Harvard and another at the Economic Research unit of the Antitrust Division in Washington DC—whose research expertise complements his scholarship on transportation economics and sustainable urban development. Mehrota will meet with each scholar to discuss his research and seek advice on publishing in the rapidly evolving interdisciplinary and niche fields of transportation economics, planning theory for developing countries, and climate change and global cities.
• Christina Moon, Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Art and Design History and Theory, will meet with two scholars whose works have deeply influenced the narrative forms of her writing. She identified these two scholars because their work and writing have successfully engaged both an academic audience and a public at large, as Moon seeks to do, and they have successfully navigated the academy as faculty of color. The two lunch meetings will result in a collaborative contribution to Open City, a journal published by the Asian American Writer’s Workshop (AAWW). 

Examples of New School Team Grants

• The project designed by Environmental Studies faculty at The New School brings several tenured scholars in the field to The New School for a full day of meetings with individual faculty to discuss scholarly pursuits and opportunities for advancing scholarship, as well as group discussions about potential research partnerships. The Environmental Studies program at The New School is administered and taught by junior faculty members whose academic backgrounds and scholarly work—from food systems to urban ecology—neither fit within the disciplinary boundaries of established New School departments nor fall within the areas of expertise of the university’s senior faculty. This project provides environmental studies faculty a chance to work with senior scholars in their field who can guide them in thinking through research and teaching plans. The full-day session will include a group meeting with Provost office staff and associate deans of faculty affairs so that the senior scholars, experienced with the promotion and tenure review process in their academic institutions, can offer perspectives on how the review and promotion process can effectively evaluate and recognize scholarship in this interdisciplinary field. 
• A team of faculty from Parsons (School of Design Strategies and Art, Media and Technology) and from NSPE’s Media Studies program will develop a faculty-led working group to foster a creative culture of DIY (do-it-yourself) learning, research, and community-based civic engagement. Faculty will work to develop new opportunities and innovative tools, methods, and modes of creative inquiry for peer-based learning and coproduction, and to critically reflect upon the social and creative processes involved. Two day-long retreats will include speakers from outside of the university who will help New School faculty expand their professional network and consult on specific areas of expertise. The DIY working group will offer one public program to provide a venue for faculty collaboration and presentation of outcomes as well as create a shared project blog featuring individual and jointly developed research/teaching efforts emerging from the mutual mentoring work. 
•  The Parsons Fashion Research, Scholarship, and Creative Practice (RSCP) Colloquium project includes all faculty of the Parsons Fashion community, across the Schools of Fashion, ADHT, SDS, and AMT. A one-day colloquium will feature a renowned expert on practice-based research design and will serve as an opportunity to share methods and modes of creative research practice across Fashion communities at Parsons. A handbook of “RSCP shorthand” will be created for faculty at all levels to provide a loose framework for the colloquium. The aim is to enrich dialogues about the range of creative research and practice currently pursued across Parsons and the broader discipline/industry, its role in faculty and student development, and potential impacts within and beyond the classroom and curriculum.

Examples of Grants awarded by the University of Massachusetts Amherst

The New School's Mentoring Grants program was modeled after the Mutual Mentoring program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  Lists of grants awarded by the Center for Teaching and Faculty Development at the University of Massachusetts Amherst serve as additional examples of the types of activities that may be funded by Mentoring Grants. Read about projects funded by small grants, called “micro grants,”  here, and about projects funded by team grants here.