Office for Sponsored Faculty Projects

The Ohio Arts Council’s (OAC) Individual Excellence Awards program recognizes outstanding accomplishments by artists in a variety of disciplines. This year’s winners from Kenyon: Claudia Esslinger (interdisciplinary); Hao Zhou (media arts); Karen Snouffer (visual arts 2D); Manami Ishimura (visual arts 3D).

James P. Storer Assistant Professor of Asian History Lin Li has been awarded the Journal of Women’s History’s Annual Scholars Research Grant for her project “Fighting the Memory War: A Transnational History of Remembering ‘Comfort Women.’”

Associate Professor of Japanese Kai Xie has received the Northeast Asia Council (NEAC) Japan Studies Grant for her research titled “Sino-Japanese Interplay in Linked Verse Compositions of Japan, 14th to 17th Centuries” at Waseda University this June and July, 2025.

Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities Katherine Elkins has received an invitation to participate as Interdisciplinary Artist-in-Residence for the Global Lab at Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s (WPI) series on "Intersectional AI: An Artist-in-Residence Series Exploring the Social Implications of Emerging Technologies."

Associate Professor of Economics Katie Black along with Jeremy Weber (University of Pittsburgh), Max Harleman (Georgia College and State University) and Shawn McCoy (University of Las Vegas, Nevada) have received a Resilient Energy Economies Grant for their project “Can Improved Waterway Quality Enhance Economic Resilience in Coal Communities?”

Assistant Professor of Biology Kathy Gillen has published “Regeneration of Lumbriculus variegatus requires post-amputation production of reactive oxygen species” with co-author Freya R. Beinart ‘24 in Development, Growth & Differentiation, 2025.

Professor of Chemistry Mo Hunsen has published “Evaluation of the Antibacterial and Antioxidant Properties of Chemical Constituents of the Roots of Woodfordia uniflora: An Integrated Approach of Experimental and Computational Study” in Biochemistry Research International, December 2024.

Associate Professor of Art History Brad Hostetler has published “Latin Responses to Greek Inscriptions (Twelfth–Thirteenth Centuries): Texts and Objects,” in “Latin Translations of Greek Texts from the 11th to the 13th Century,” edited by Paraskevi Toma and Péter Bara, Brill, 2025.

Assistant Professor of French Ian Curtis has published “Restoring Realism to the Fairytale, or, The Banal Optimism of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Mes Contes de Perrault” as part of the special issue “Depictions of Good and Evil in Fairytales,” edited by Katherine Elkins in humanities, 2025.

One of the primary aims of the OSFP blog and Twitter feed is to share your accomplishments and achievements with the broader Kenyon community and beyond. Send your publications and honors to OSFP@kenyon.edu.