Four faculty members awarded $112,500 in research grants
Four Connecticut College faculty members in various departments have been awarded grants to further their research projects and enhance the expertise they offer to Camels. Topics include the Ancient Greek poet Callimachus, autonomous robots, a Columbia conference on a classic Chinese chronicle, and the U.S. election system.
Investigating Callimachus and the Royal Court
Assistant Professor of Classics Brett Evans won a $39,137 international research fellowship from the Harvard-run Loeb Classical Library. The portable fellowship, awarded to scholars working on major projects in the fields of Classics and Classical archaeology, will allow him to spend the Fall 2026 semester close to campus as he works on a book project investigating the royal court society of Ptolemaic Egypt in the third century B.C.E. as presented by the court’s premier scholar-poet, Callimachus.
Evans explains, “Callimachus has long been imagined as an ivory tower intellectual owing to his surviving poetry’s immense learning. My book aims to demonstrate that, in this poetry, he in fact enmeshes himself in the status competitions among all kinds of courtiers—commanders, diplomats, athletes, scientists and artists among them—and that in so doing he makes a compelling case for why the Ptolemaic court needed his services as a poet to achieve their political and cultural ambitions. The pop culture success of franchises like Bridgerton and Game of Thrones show that court societies continue to enthrall us today.”
Refining robots in space
Computer Science Systems and Lab Specialist Jim O’Connor ’13 earned Conn’s first faculty research grant, for $5,000, from NASA’s Connecticut Space Grant Consortium to fund new sensors and hardware for his project “Evolutionary Sensor Compression for Autonomous Robot Navigation.” The project is aligned with NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate and the problems facing Artemis surface operations and future Mars missions.
Autonomous robots, particularly those in space or other extreme environments, navigate from sensor data under significant constraints such as communication delays or sensors that degrade over time. “This project is a natural fit for what we do in the Autonomous Agent Learning Lab,” O’Connor explained. “We've tested an evolutionary method we’ve been developing, called SCOPE, on game environments and hexapod locomotion, but now we can expand our tests to the much more real-world and practical domain of multimodal sensor data.”
Along with Summer Science Research Institute participant Artem Kyselov ’28, a physics and computer science double major from Dnipro, Ukraine, O’Connor will test whether evolutionary sensor compression can produce navigation controllers that are smaller, cheaper to run and more robust when sensors start to fail. Kyselov will perform the in-lab work and will co-author the resulting paper to be submitted for publication in an international conference.
Finding common ground for a Confucian chronicle
Professor of History Sarah Queen has won a grant of $20,000 from the Tang Center for Early China at Columbia University to organize an international conference at Columbia in 2027 titled “New Perspectives on Spring and Autumn Historiography and Hermeneutics.” The event will bring together scholars from the U.S., Europe and China to share and build upon recent work on the classic Confucian text The Spring and Autumn Annals. The goal is to “transcend the discursive silos that have developed within different traditions of scholarship of the Spring and Autumn to create a common ground of inquiry and move the current state of scholarship forward,” Queen said. “We hope that the conference will yield an edited volume of New Perspectives on the Spring and Autumn, culled from the best papers presented over the weekend.”
As Queen wrote in her project proposal, “Such an intervention is exciting to contemplate as it suggests the possibility of mapping important, shared hermeneutical and historiographical ground between these commentarial traditions, common ground that has only begun to surface in a handful of recent scholarly endeavors.”
Making sense of voting systems
Associate Professor of Government Mara Suttmann-Lea will receive a grant of $48,379 from the MIT Election Data & Science Lab for a project aimed at improving public understanding of, and confidence in, voter registration systems and list-maintenance procedures. From this summer through early 2027, in partnership with election administrators in Indiana, Suttmann-Lea will field national and Indiana-specific surveys measuring public knowledge, misconceptions and information needs pertaining to voter registration and list maintenance. Findings will be translated into the design of evidence-based public education materials.
“Conducting research that has practical implications for the health of American democracy has always been foundational to my work,” Suttmann-Lea said. “I am very honored to be supported in efforts that will have such an immediate, tangible impact on the election officials who administer American democracy. I hope that this work becomes a model for other scholars to engage in research-practitioner partnerships with election officials and other public servants that are mutually beneficial.”
