Office of Grants & Research Development

2022-2023 Grants, Awards, and Scholarly Work

Message from UNC Asheville Provost, Herman Holt

February 14, 2024

Please visit the Ramsey Library February 13-16 to view the extraordinary work of our colleagues including externally-funded grants, fellowships, publications, and scholarly work from the 2022-2023 academic year. The exhibit will be on display all week on the main floor of the Ramsey Library and includes 78 scholars with 131 submissions.

The works presented here are a culmination of effort that began with an idea that led to conversations with peers, students, and resulted in some really cool stuff. We acknowledge the time and effort that goes into these projects and creations. It is important, especially in times when we have limited resources, to establish external funding streams of support research and scholarly activities.

A few words from Chief Research Officer, Tim Elgren

February 10, 2024

Dear Colleagues:

Grant writing is one of the various ways in which we pursue our scholarly and creative interests. We write grants in support of innovating and cutting-edge projects that require resources and funding beyond what the university can provide. Writing proposals is a different aspect of our work as academics that allows us to think broadly and intentionally about our aspirations.

We gather annually to acknowledge the extraordinary time and effort that goes into submitting a grant proposal. Congratulations to all of you who have submitted proposals! Your creative and scholarly undertakings and commitments are a testimony to the extraordinary quality of our faculty and staff. The investment of the time and effort required to develope and submit a proposal can be daunting. A funded proposal is a particularly thrilling external validation of the quality of one’s ideas. Even with the disappointment of a denied proposal, there is an upside. The act of writing and crafting for yourself the trajectory of your scholarly work is an extremely useful exercise in developing a vision (a work plan) for this next period of your career. The collective numbers are truly impressive with over 100 proposals submitted in each of the last three years.

*at the end of the FY

And this year looks similarly impressive.

Ameena considers herself a “pracademic”, working closely with community organizations to co-conduct research for action, primarily program evaluations for improvement and funding and primary and secondary data collection to inform and advance policy change. Ameena utilizes approaches similar to community-based participatory research and action (CBPRA) and participatory action research (PAR) with partners and community researchers, identifying and implementing authentic and interactive methods, analyses, and sharing findings.

I have worked with community partners in my research and teaching since arriving at UNC Asheville in 2016. Like many early-career academics, I moved a lot to pursue degrees and teaching opportunities before embarking on my first tenure-track position at UNC Asheville. When I moved to a new place, I worked quickly to make contacts in my field so that I could conduct my research successfully there. When I started at UNC Asheville, I did the same, making contacts in the Asheville area, in arts and business, to build a network and conduct research. When I arrived, I was also inspired by the community-engaged teaching and scholarship that my departmental colleagues were already engaged in – including Lei Han and Curt Cloninger.

One of the first community partners I started working with in Asheville was Revolve Gallery in the River Arts District. I joined the board of Media Arts Project, which later became Revolve’s board of directors. Other community partners I have engaged with include the Center for Craft, Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, photographer Andrea Clark, The Asheville Art Museum, the Shiloh Community Association, Better than Unicorns, and recently, Asheville Creative Arts. Working with community partners begins with attending their events and introducing yourself. You need to show interest and a commitment to what they are doing and the values of their organization – volunteering first goes a long way to building trust and relationships. You also need to be aware of the dynamics between yourself as a representative of the university – one of the largest employers in Asheville – and the smaller nonprofit organizations or businesses.

Kate has worked in the field of Civic and Community Engagement in higher education for the past 15 years. Her responsibilities have included significant collaboration with community partners, including the coordination of ongoing networking and professional development opportunities for nonprofit partners at a previous institution. Currently, as the director of the Key Center for Community Engaged Learning, she supports partners via onboarding meetings, event and volunteer promotion, the Community Partner Database, and making campus connections.

Eric Klein has been crafting partnerships with public schools for more than a decade. For eight years, he worked on the school district side of those partnerships co-designing afterschool programs and summer camps as well as classroom and off-campus enrichment programs. Partners included higher education institutions, community organizations, individuals, small businesses, community members and large corporations. Before coming to UNC Asheville in 2022, he worked with a cohort of community colleges to design and implement academic enrichment programming with middle schools in their community. Here at UNC Asheville, Eric works to build and celebrate connections between the university and our neighboring communities through on-campus and in-district programming with their public schools.

In 2020, Ellen Holmes Pearson and Sarah Judson (History) founded “The 828 Digital Archives,” with a goal to center the voices of historically excluded individuals in the region by working with colleagues in New Media and Computer Science, as well as Asheville/Buncombe County community partners to design digital projects that craft a more inclusive and accessible history of western North Carolina. Their relationships with community partners such as the YWCA, St. John “A” Baptist Church, the South Asheville Cemetery Association, Kenilworth Residents Association, Buncombe County Special Collections, Southside Community Association, the Preservation Society of Asheville & Buncombe County, and local community and arts organizers and activists stretch back to the early 2000s. In recent years, Ellen and Sarah, along with Victoria Bradbury (New Media) have focused on co-creation of community histories related to African American women and the restoration and preservation of Asheville’s African American cemeteries. They and their students have worked with community partners in the Historic South Asheville and Shiloh neighborhoods to build digital exhibits highlighting African Americans’ contributions to their neighborhoods, to Asheville, and to the region’s society and culture. UNC Asheville student research helped Shiloh A.M.E. Zion church and Cemetery attain National Register designation in 2022. They continue to work with church and community members to create digital history projects on the community’s late-19th-century relocation from what is now Biltmore Estate property to its present location and on the history and contributions of prominent Shiloh families and individuals. In 2023, Ellen collaborated with the Land of Sky Council on a successful Americorps grant proposal to expand localized efforts to preserve African American cemeteries. This Cemetery Remembrance Project grant will establish a consortium of African American cemeteries in 15 western North Carolina counties to help reclaim, preserve, and restore our region’s cemeteries and to build richer and more diverse histories of our region.

NEMAC has a proven history of successful partnerships spanning academia, government agencies, non-profits, and private entities since our founding in 2003. Collaborations with organizations such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US Forest Service, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation have enabled us to develop tools and resources supporting climate resilience and adaptation efforts. We also work closely with state and local governments, regional planning organizations, and academic institutions to tailor solutions for specific environmental challenges through stakeholder engagement, co-designing tools, and providing training. Our commitment to collaborative problem-solving underscores our ability to bridge disciplines and sectors to achieve shared goals in environmental resilience and adaptation.

Irene Rossell is a Professor of Environmental Studies and Interdisciplinary Professor of the Mountain South. From 2018-1022, she directed Science on the Move, which brought Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) programming to children of migrant farmworkers. Science on the Move operated in close collaboration with the Buncombe County Schools’ Migrant Education Program and was funded by the Burroughs-Wellcome Foundation. Three UNC Asheville faculty and ten undergraduate students participated over four years, serving ~100 middle school and high school students, many of whom were not native English speakers and were newly arrived to western North Carolina. Activities took place on the UNC Asheville campus and throughout the region during the summer and academic year.