For the next two years, 11 faculty members from three IU campuses will explore the concept of wonder as it pertains to the natural world, according to an IU news release.
“Wonder can be a variety of things,” program coordinator for “Wonder and the Natural World” Abby Gitlitz said. “So it can be a child at play in a field of grass, but it also can be the awe inspired by an erupting volcano destroying your village.”
The two-year thematic project “Wonder and the Natural World” is sponsored by the Consortium for the Study of Religion, Ethics and Society. The consortium is an interdisciplinary association made up of scholars, academic programs and research centers from all eight of IU’s campuses, according to a press release.
The consortium’s director is Lisa Sideris, a religious studies professor at IU-Bloomington.
“We received a truly impressive array of proposals, linking wonder to many facets of human and nonhuman life,” Sideris said in the release. “The successful proposals reflect on the light and dark dimensions of wonder, as well as wonder’s ethical, emotional, cognitive, pedagogical, aesthetic and religious forms. It will be exciting to see the conversations that emerge from these diverse studies of wonder.”
The funding is meant to encourage faculty to engage with the idea of “wonder” in every one of its forms in multiple disciplines, according to the University.
Those who were awarded funding came from a variety of disciplines, including religious studies, English, bioethics and anthropology.
“What we were hoping was to draw people from lots of different areas,” Gitlitz said. “And then also to encourage people to work out with other faculty that they might not have thought of working with to come up with projects that were interdisciplinary.”
One such awardee is Richard Gunderman, professor and vice chairman of radiology at the IU School of Medicine. The research Gunderman will conduct is titled “Medicine: Wonder-less or Wonderful?” according to the release.
Gunderman is looking to explore the disconnect between what medical schools teach students — dispassionate science of treating injury and disease — and the influence of wonder for both the patient and the physician.
“Every time a physician sees a patient, there is something awesome in bringing hidden things to light and assisting natural healing processes,” he said in the release. “Birth, death, illness, regeneration — these are the physician’s daily stock and trade, and they are pregnant with mystery.”
In the Department of Religious Studies, assistant professor Heather Blair was also awarded funding for her project “Super-Natural: Configuring Childhood Virtue in Contemporary Japanese Picture Books.”
“This project examines representations of the natural world in post-war Japanese children’s literature with a particular emphasis on contemporary picture books designed for children ages 3 to 6,” she said in the release. “Broadly speaking, it aims to introduce the study of Japanese children’s literature into ongoing conversations about childhood, character education, religion and ethics.”
The grant funding is just phase one of the two-year initiative.
The next phase is a symposium in May 2015, where the grant awardees will be able to discuss their ongoing work. The third and final phase will be an international conference to take place in 2016, Gitlitz said.
Once this grant cycle is done, a new theme will be chosen for the next two-year initiative.
