Essay

Fall 2024 CGII Grant Winners

n Fall 2024, the Center for Global Inquiry + Innovation awarded its latest round of grants to support impactful global research endeavors led by faculty and graduate students. The grants awarded included 24 Graduate Global Research (GGR) grants, seven Center Grants for individual faculty research, and three Global Programs of Distinction (GPOD) grants. From exploring the complexities of post-authoritarian cultural heritage preservation to examining galactic dust, these projects reflect a commitment to advancing knowledge and addressing pressing global challenges through interdisciplinary collaboration and innovative scholarship. Emerging themes this semester include heritage, culture, and identity; environmental justice and adaptation; and systems of power, inequality, and resistance.

The awarded Center Grant projects are:

Returns and Departures and Returns Again: Reimagining Spirit, Body and Landscape in Vietnam and Vietnamese America through Performance 50 Years After the War | Sylvia Chong (English) & Patricia Nguyen (American Studies)

The Impossible Museum: Negotiating Contested Heritage and Fractured Memories at the Museum of Yugoslavia | Katia Dianina (Slavic Languages & Literatures)

Law, Race, and Rights in the Indian Ocean and Francophone Worlds | Jennifer Sessions (History), Indrani Chatterjee (History), Janet Horne (French)

Mutual Mimicry: China and the Francophone World | Jennifer Tsien (French)

New Directions in Black Disability Studies: Conference I Nemata Blyden (American Studies), Jasper Conner (Carter G. Woodson Institute), Elizabeth Ellcessor (Media Studies)

The City in the Shadow of the Shantytown: A Critical History of the Bidonville I Sheila Crane (Architectural History)

Nuclear Colonialism and the Art of Resistance I Eleanore Neumann (Kluge Ruhe, Art)

The awarded GPOD projects are:

African Collaborative on Surgical Data Equity and System Strengthening: ACCESS Program | Bhiken Naik (Anesthesiology)

Millions of lives are lost to preventable deaths following surgery in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The ACCESS program will address the reliance on paper-based health records in LMICs, which limits timely access to vital surgical data for research and quality improvement. Using a scalable mobile health application powered by artificial intelligence, we will digitize surgical records in real-time to enhance care delivery. Through partnerships with Safe Surgery South Africa and cross-disciplinary collaboration, we will advance sustainable, culturally relevant digital health solutions. Our goal is to improve surgical outcomes, reduce health disparities, and facilitate AI innovation in LMIC healthcare systems.

Cool Frontiers: Exploring Dust and Ice in the Cosmos | Shazrene Mohamed (Astronomy), Phil Arras (Astronomy), Robert Garrod (Astronomy), Ilse Cleeves (Astronomy), Paul Torrey (Astronomy), Yifan Zhou (Astronomy)

The Summer Program in Astrophysics (SPA) is a six-week interdisciplinary program combining graduate training with collaborative research on front-line astrophysical topics. Hosted at UVA, SPA 2025 will explore cosmic dust and ice—tiny nano-to millimeter-sized particles ubiquitous in space and critical to the formation and evolution of planets, stars, and galaxies. Supported by CGII GPOD, we will bring together students and global experts in astrochemistry, stellar and planetary astrophysics, galaxy evolution, and cosmology to address enduring questions about the origin, properties and roles of dust and ice in, and their intricate connections across, these diverse environments.

Cville Tulips: Creative Approaches to a Global Health Challenges | Bonnie Gordon (Music), Fern Hauck (Family Medicine, Public Health Sciences), Elizabeth Wittner (Center for American English Language & Culture), Jessica Row (Family Medicine)

Cville Tulips and the International Family Medicine Clinic work with students, faculty, and staff across grounds to offer culturally responsive English, Health Education, and youth programming to recently arrived Afghan and Syrian women. Our humanitarian work embeds culturally responsive health education in English learning circles. Cville Tulips emerged as a local effort to ameliorate some of the painful consequences of a humanitarian crisis, the massive displacement of Afghan people. Our research aims to mitigate the barriers that Afghan and Syrian women face in accessing healthcare and to provide global opportunities for undergraduates, medical students and Residents.

See the CGII Grants webpage for information on upcoming grant cycle deadlines!