The Office for Research & Innovation and the Office of the Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies are delighted to announce recipients of the 2024 - 2025 Explore Seed Grant program. 

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In 2023, OR&I launched the Explore program to foster scholarship that may not be well served by established funding mechanisms, and Explore encompasses both seed grants for launching new projects and completion grants for bringing ongoing projects to fruition.  Explore grants are open to all regular-rank faculty at Duke, with a preference for supporting work in the humanities, arts, and interpretive social sciences. 

In the program's second year, Explore will fund the following 7 promising projects from a field of 12 excellent applications. 

headshot of Andrea Woods Valdes

Andrea Woods Valdes, Associate Professor of the Practice of Dance

The Dance Opera River Project

The EXPLORE grant will provide funds for a workshop performance, or the first draft of a dance opera, and the development of a website for future promotion. The dance opera centers our concern for the rivers, our source for food and water, and entails a research component of how rivers, the veins of the earth, connect us a people in the African Diaspora. The grant will provide funds to build a curriculum around river studies and environmental performance as this work follows a tradition of bringing awareness to environmental issues through art practices. In addition, this dance opera models embodied scholarship, practice, and performance for students in the Dance Program.

Head shot of Chris Sims

Christopher W. Sims, Associate Professor of the Practice in the Sanford School of Public Policy

A Visual Archive of Transnational Contact Zones on U.S. Military Bases in Bavaria, Germany

This project takes up questions of power, the connection between local stories and the dynamics of decisions made at national and international levels, and fundamental questions of German identity in an age of migration. The EXPLORE grant will provide funds to create a new cache of documents that will serve to illuminate critical questions specific to our shared cultural moment, and to help make sense of the histories unfolding now, including specifically how Germany’s demographic, cultural, and economic identities have been transformed by military occupation and, more recently, as a home to immigrant communities.