Ashesh Prasann to Work on New Carnegie Project
HARTFORD, Conn. – Beth Notar, associate professor of anthropology, and David Branning, assistant professor of physics, have been awarded prestigious grants to continue their work, and Ashesh Prasann, ’08, has been named a Junior Fellow in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for 2008-09.
Prasann’s fellowship is exceptionally competitive; only eight to 10 students are chosen each year from among a pool of applicants from 300 colleges and universities. Prasann, who is from Jamshedpur, India, has a double major in international studies and economics. He spent his junior year studying at the London School of Economics.
The one-year fellowships are granted to uniquely qualified graduating seniors. Carnegie Junior Fellows work as research assistants with the Endowment’s senior associates. The Fellows work on projects such as non-proliferation, democracy building, trade, China- and South Asia-related issues, and Russian/Eurasian studies.
Prasann has been selected to work in the South Asia program and will work closely with Senior Associate Ashley Tellis, an advocate of the recent U.S.-India nuclear agreement, and with George Perkovich, a non-proliferation expert. Prasann will also be a research assistant on a new Carnegie project that will analyze the current and future strategic military balance between India, Pakistan and China.
The Fellows also have the opportunity to conduct research for books, co-author journal articles and policy papers and contribute to Congressional testimony. The positions are full-time, one-year positions. Junior Fellows are paid $35,000 a year.
Notar, who has already won plaudits for her book, Displacing Desire: Travel and Popular Culture in China, has been awarded a summer stipend for research from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The $6,000 grant will allow Notar to continue her research on “Autobiographies of auto-mobility: Narratives of car consumption and social distinction in contemporary China.” Notar, who is on a one-year leave, will work on the project during the summer.
Her book was named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2007 by Choice, a publication of the Association of College & Research Libraries, which is a division of the American Library Association. Notar has been a member of Trinity’s faculty since 2000. Her research focuses on the intersection of the cultural and the material, which has led her to examine the relationship between representations in popular culture, tourism and transformations of place in southwest China; and money as a symbolic, economic and political object. Her new project will focus on China’s emerging car culture.
Branning was awarded a one-year grant of $6,000 from the Connecticut Space Grant College Consortium under its Faculty Research Program. Branning’s research is on “USB interface for photon logic control.” He has been a Trinity faculty member since 2005 and his primary area of research is quantum optics, the study of single particles of light, called photons.
The Connecticut Space Grant College Consortium receives support from NASA, among other sources, and has its offices at the University of Hartford. This marks Branning’s second grant from the Consortium. He received a $6,000 stipend this year for research on “a new circuit board for counting simultaneous parts of photons.”