The Eugene M. Lang Fellowship awarded grants to five Weissman professors for the 2021-22 year. The recipients received from $3,500 to $8,000 to help support their research.

The Eugene M. Lang Foundation began in 2008. It has been awarding junior faculty at Baruch with grants to assist them with any difficulties they may face while working on their projects.

Christopher Stults, an assistant professor of psychology, won the grant to support his research on his project called “Intimate Partner Violence Intervention for Young Gay and Bisexual Men.”

He highlighted that violence in relationships between gay and bisexual men is more frequent, but there is a lack of initiatives to help combat that.

“I wrote my submission,” Stults said. “Titled ‘Development of an Intimate Partner Violence Intervention for Young Gay and Bisexual Men,’ in order to obtain funding to develop an intervention program to help prevent IPV among young gay and bisexual men.”

For Stults, this fund will help him not only continue his research, but expand it to a larger data set.

“If this intervention appears to be successful, we can use the data from the study to obtain a larger grant to fund a more comprehensive study of the intervention,” Stults said. “In other words, if the preliminary data from this study is promising, we can use it to secure funding to test the efficacy of the intervention on a larger scale and over a longer period of time.”

Laura Kolb, an assistant professor of English, teaches courses about Shakespeare. She specifically teaches Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” which is what her article focused on.

“The article asks a simple question: why doesn’t the play’s central female character deliver a soliloquy?” Kolb said. “Her male counterpart does have a solo speech, and, like many stage soliloquies, it explains his strange behavior in social situations.”

She went on to explain that this observation led to a broader analysis of a female’s role in early modern drama and the common trope of “female silence” used by both Shakespeare and others around his time.

For Kolb, inspiration for this particular project came from teaching “The Taming of the Shrew” to her students at Baruch.

“I usually start Shakespeare classes with Shrew, since it’s an early play and a great introduction to Shakespeare’s language,” Kolb said. “Over the years, talking about the play with my students, I’ve become increasingly aware of just how ambiguous Katherine’s character is, especially at the play’s end.” Zoe Griffith, an assistant professor of history, teaches courses that revolve around the Middle East and Islamic world. For her project, “Cities of Clay and Stone: Empire and Society in the Ottoman Mediterranean, 1680-1830,” she wanted to explore pre-colonial Egyptian society.

“Egypt is very important in Mediterranean history dating back to early human history,” Griffith said. “But there’s a big gap in our knowledge for the period during which Egypt was ruled under Muslim empires so before the arrival of European capitalism I was interested in, ‘What were Muslim merchants doing?’”

When asked about the Eugene M. Lang Fellowship’s impact on her research, she explained that it was used to fund an artist’s drawing of maps and family trees for the book.

“It’s nice to kind of have a bit of validation and some approval that you’re on the right track and people read your proposal and that they think this is worth supporting is really nice,” she added.