EXPLORE 2024 - 2025 Recipients

Jingqiu Guan, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Dance

Iyun Ashani Harrison, Associate Professor of the Practice of Dance

Dance Film Adaptation of "Giovanni's Room"

Our project is a dance film based on the contemporary ballet adaptation of James Baldwin’s iconic novel Giovanni’s Room. The film will be directed by Jingqiu Guan, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Dance, and choreographed by Iyun Ashani Harrison, Associate Professor of the Practice of Dance. In September 2023, Harrison, Founder and Artistic Director of Ballet Ashani, premiered Giovanni's Room at Duke University’s von de Hayden Theater. This collaborative project between Guan and Harrison provides another form of adaptation, which renders the ballet into screen dance. It is a contemporary interpretation and reimagining of the narrative, recounting a heart-wrenching story of love, desire, alienation, and shame.

Angelina Lucento, Assistant Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies

The Politics and Aesthetics of Socialist Realism: Form Origins to Global Legacies

With support from an EXPLORE grant, Duke faculty members  would establish a working group for the study of the politics and aesthetics of Socialist Realism in Germany and the former Soviet Union including Central Asia and the Caucasus. It aims to examine the origins of the style’s diversity, its relationship to policy making organs, and its national iterations, topics that to date have either been ignored or under-explored in the canonical literature. This base will provide the project’s core investigators and external scholars with a comprehensive foundation for a broader understanding of the history and politics of Socialist Realism and its complex legacies across the post-socialist/socialist world.

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.

Victoria Szabo, Research Professor of Art, Art History, & Visual Studies

Visualizing Lovecraft’s Providence

This project repurposes the tools of digital art history and urbanism to create spatialized imaginative reconstructions of some of the locales and scenes in HP Lovecraft’s tale “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” The EXPLORE grant will provide funds to create 3D models and scenes associated with points of interest from the text, assemble them with the relevant audio and visual annotation materials, and to construct a mobile application that will display them for on-site use.

Yun Emily Wang, Assistant Professor of Music

Quiet Relations: a Minor Volume

Quiet Relations: A Minor Volume is an edited collection that investigates the social, political, and affective reverberations of quietude: the minor sounds, voices, and worlds that intentionally remain barely audible against the bustle of late capitalism and global political unrest. The OR&I Explore Grant will support a graduate research assistant and fund a public workshop-symposium at Duke for the contributors of Quiet Relations in early 2025, which, together, will bring the project to completion.

Gennifer Weisenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History

Advertising World (Kōkokukai) Database: An Anatomy of Japan’s Most Important Prewar Advertising Design Trade Journal, 1926-1941

The major Japanese trade journal Advertising World (Kōkokukai) was published by Seibundō from March 1926 until December 1941. The journal served as the most important mediating channel connecting Japan to the broader world of global advertising. No library in Japan or anywhere in the world owns the full print run of Advertising World, making it very difficult for design historians and media scholars to access this critical research resource. The EXPLORE grant will provide funds to digitize all available copies of Advertising World and to create a searchable visual and textual database with Dublin core metadata, including the table of contents for each issue, as a springboard for future research in the field.

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.