Arts & Sciences Awards SPARC Grants for 20 Faculty Projects

The College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences has awarded SPARC Grants to 20 faculty members, providing support for research, scholarship, creative activity and innovative projects across a broad range of disciplines. 

The Scholarship, Practice, Arts, Research and Creativity (SPARC) Grants program builds Arts & Sciences’ internal seed-funding program by expanding the ways faculty can use the awards and thereby providing support for new kinds of scholarly activities. The program has two categories: Research Grants, which may be individual or collaborative, and Special Project Grants, which support unique approaches to sharing scholarship with public audiences. 

 “The breadth and depth of scholarship represented in this year’s SPARC Grants reflect the intellectual vitality of Arts & Sciences,” said Christa Acampora, dean of Arts & Sciences. “These awards recognize the creativity and excellence of our faculty, and we look forward to seeing the many ways these scholars will advance their research, build collaborations and secure additional support.” 

Research Across the Disciplines 

Eighteen faculty members received SPARC Research Grants in the spring 2026 call for proposals for projects spanning the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences and for a wide range of activities including preliminary data collection, fieldwork, archival research, development of new tools and additions to existing projects that strengthen their competitiveness for external funding or publication. 

“Strong research often begins with a question, a new partnership or an idea that needs room to develop,” said Sarah Kucenas, associate dean for research at Arts & Sciences. “SPARC funding gives faculty that room while helping them build the evidence, collaborations and momentum needed to move promising work toward larger and more sustained projects.” 

Research Grant recipients are: 

Arts 

• Francesca Fiorani (Art), “Transforming a Digital Humanities Project into a Generative AI Platform: Leonardo da Vinci and His Treatise on Painting”  
• LaRissa Rogers (Art), “Subterranean Convergence”  

Humanities 

• Taylor Schey (English), “The Rhetoric of Racialization: Popular Romanticism and Everyday Antiblackness”  
• Kristina Richardson (Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures), “PEMBA: People and Environment in Maritime Bantu Archaeology”  
• Charlotte Rogers (Spanish, Italian and Portuguese), “Latin American and Caribbean Environmental Humanities”  

Sciences 

• Bradley Johnson (Astronomy), “Making UVA a World Leader in GHz/THz Filter Technologies for Astrophysical Instrumentation”  
• Nicholas Landry (Biology), “Understanding Information Diffusion on Social Media Through the Lens of Ideological Groups”  
• Robert Cox (Biology), “Extending the Organization-Activation Hypothesis from Traits to Transcriptomes”  
• Kevin Grise (Environmental Sciences), “Developing Atmospheric Circulation Constraints to Improve Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Precipitation Forecasts”  
• C. Daniel Meliza (Psychology), “Anticipatory Control of the Cochlear Amplifier”  
• Tobias Grossmann (Psychology), “The Prosocial Brain in Infancy”  
• Amrisha Vaish (Psychology), “The Impact of Inequality on Young Children’s Social Trust”  
• Alev Erisir (Psychology), “Development of Cell-Type Specific Viral Tools for Cross-Species Studies of Superior Colliculus Circuitry”  

Social Sciences 

• Roberto Rosado-Ramirez (Anthropology), “Living with Ancient Ruins: Mapping Community Regeneration in the Ancestral Maya City of Ake, Yucatan, Mexico”  
• Sandip Sukhtankar (Economics), “Building an Inclusive Workforce: A Mixed-Methods Evaluation of Interventions to Empower Women Police in India”  
• Jennifer Lawless (Politics), “Closing the Confidence Gap: A National Survey Experiment on Women’s Political Ambition”  
• Fiona Greenland (Sociology), “Interdisciplinary Human Rights Research”  
• Esra Sarioglu (Sociology), “Fluid Visions: Body, Politics, and Visibility at Berlin’s Freibäder” 

Bringing Scholarship to Wider Audiences 

Two faculty members received SPARC Special Project Grants, a new funding category designed to support projects that disseminate scholarship beyond conventional academic channels. 

SPARC Special Project Grants may involve developing a new platform for sharing scholarship, hosting a public event with educational value, or developing written works for the public.  These projects must demonstrate exceptional potential for impact in the field and society 

The Special Project Grant recipients are: 

• Marisa Williamson (Art) “The Theater of the Anatomical Theatre” 
• Ashleigh Wade (Media Studies) “Zora’s Legacy: Archiving Everyday Black Girlhood in the U.S. South” 

The next deadline for applications will be October 16, 2026. Visit the A&S Research Sharepoint Site for the solicitation and application portal.