Emerson Faculty Awarded Travel Grants to Support Research

Three Emerson College faculty were awarded 2026 Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation fellowships, funding their travel for research that will contribute to their courses and teaching:  Adam Franklin-Lyons, Jon Papernick, and Kimberly Dahl. 

The Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation provides travel fellowships to New England university and college professors to study abroad, or away from their home institution, to improve and enhance the quality of their instruction. This year, the foundation received 144 applications and awarded 56 fellowships. 

Adam Franklin-Lyons is an associate professor of history in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts. The Whiting Fellowship will support his project, “Using Mapping and Photography to understand the history of  Surveillance and Piracy in the Balearic Islands.” He will travel to the Spanish Balearic Islands and the Universitat de les Illes Balears in Palma to expand on a new project that integrates photography with documentary research and geographic analysis. His project contributes to his advanced interdisciplinary perspective course on cartography, as well as several other courses on medieval history.

Jon Papernick is an assistant professor of creative writing in the department of Writing, Literature and Publishing. He will use the fellowship to support “Rabbinic and Jewish Storytelling Traditions in the Baltic States: Memory, Story, and Literary Practice.” Papernick will travel to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to study Jewish storytelling traditions in the places where they were once told and preserved, to bring a deeper understanding of these story forms into his creative writing workshops at Emerson.

Communication Sciences and Disorders Assistant Professor Kimberly Dahl will spend two weeks in Minnesota for an immersive observational study to support her project, “Enhancing clinical expertise through immersive observation at Mayo Clinic Rochester.” The trip is intended to elevate the quality and clinical relevance of her teaching in her graduate-level motor speech disorders course.

Since 2013, the Whiting Foundation has awarded fellowships to over 20 Emerson faculty. This year’s Emerson fellows received approximately $5,000 in travel funding each.

New Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society

Franklin-Lyons also was awarded a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society to support his project, “Surveillance and Communication in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon,” specifically covering primary source collection at the Girona city archive, and new location photography across Catalonia and Northern Spain.

Since 1933, the American Philosophical Society has awarded small grants to scholars in order to support the cost of research leading to publication in all areas of knowledge. The Franklin program is particularly designed to help meet the costs of travel to libraries and archives for research purposes.

Prepared by Diana Potter, Senior Associate Director, Grant and Proposal Production, Office of Research and Creative Scholarship