The Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship at Kelvin Smith Library has announced the selection of the 2022-23 Freedman Faculty Fellows. The annual fellowship program supports tenured or tenure-track faculty as well as clinical research faculty and aids these researchers in integrating digital tools and technology into their work across multiple disciplines to support learning and advance scholastic discoveries.
The 2022-23 Freedman Faculty Fellows program is generously funded by the Freedman Fellows Endowment, established by Samuel B. and Marian K. Freedman.
This year’s faculty recipients are highlighted below.
George Blake
George Blake studies music and urban life. Prior to working as a teaching fellow in SAGES, he was the postdoctoral scholar in the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at CWRU. He also taught a range of classes in the Department of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara pertaining to geography and cultural production. His SAGES offerings include university seminars on digitally mapping musical Cleveland and music and labor, and a first-year seminar on art, culture and the city in the context of globalization. His Freedman Fellows project explores the hidden histories of jazz in Akron.
Anastasia Dimitropoulos
Anastasia Dimitropoulos is a professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences studying cognitive and behavioral characteristics of individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders. Additionally, she serves as the director of the Schubert Center for Child Studies and the co-director of the childhood studies program. Much of her recent work is focused on designing an efficacious play-based intervention for children with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS), a rare genetic disorder characterized by hyperphagia and food preoccupation, as well as several social cognitive and behavioral challenges that warrant intervention in early childhood.
The Play-based Remote Remote Enrichment To Enhance Development (PRETEND) program expansion project will use a web-based platform to disseminate the PRETEND Program for children with PWS. Previous results have indicated that this program is highly feasible and acceptable to parents and effectively improves children’s cognitive and affective play skills. The aim is to train a variety of play facilitators, from parents to professionals, through a web-based training platform to administer the PRETEND Program intervention, giving more families and clinicians access to one of very few behavioral interventions for children with PWS.
Kevin Inouye
Kevin Inouye is an assistant professor of movement, acting and stage combat in the Department of Theater. His project, “Scene Work in Motion Capture,” will attempt to use his previous experiments in motion capture as a pedagogical tool into the realm of paired scene work for performers. The technical challenges of producing a finished scene with multiple performers go beyond those attempted thus far, but could provide an excellent case study in pure performance, where it doesn’t matter who an actor is, only what they do. This could also open up further realms of collaboration, future employment for students and performance opportunities.
Inouye is author of The Screen Combat Handbook, The Theatrical Firearms Handbook and other publications. He is an award-winning fight choreographer, union stunt performer, certified teacher with the Society of American Fight Directors and the National Michael Chekhov Association and instructor level I with Margolis Method.
Einav Rabinovitch-Fox
Einav Rabinovitch-Fox teaches U.S and women’s and gender history at Case Western Reserve University. Her research examines the intersections between culture, politics and modernity, and the visual and material culture of social movements.
“The History and Legacy of the ERA” is a curatorial project that aims to highlight the complex history of the struggle to achieve gender equality in the U.S through the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and to connect it to contemporary discussions on women’s rights and gender equality. Commemorating the centennial since the Amendment was first introduced to congress, this project is modeled as an experiential course, in which students and Rabinovitch-Fox will create a physical exhibition that will be complemented with a digital exhibit website and an educational database.
Rabinovitch-Fox’s book, Dressed for Freedom: The Fashionable Politics of American Feminism (2021) explores women’s political uses of clothing and appearance to promote feminist agendas during the long 20th century. Her writing has been published in the Journal of Women’s History, the International Journal of Fashion Studies, American Journalism: Journal of Media History as well as The Washington Post, The Conversation, Public Seminar and Dismantle Magazine. Follow her on Twitter @DrEinavRFox .