Director’s Message: Zooming Out on An Unusual Year

Hopefully in the not-too-distant-future, phrases like “challenging times” and “a year like no other” will become relics of the past, rather than reminders of the present. But while there may be much to the pandemic era we’d rather forget, it should be remembered how Emerson faculty, students, and staff showed remarkable nimbleness and creativity in keeping the College on-course and –remarkably– avoiding the kind of severe outbreaks and lockdowns that have made national news on other campuses. It hasn’t been an ideal year, to be sure, but it’s one that will surely figure into future tellings of Emerson’s history. It’s a story that deserves to be recounted with pride.

To paraphrase Lee Pelton, disasters can also present opportunities, if we are wise enough to look for them. In ORCS’s corner of the Emerson universe, the transition to Zoom meetings enabled us to provide many more one-on-one consultations with faculty to discuss their research goals, potential funding sources, and proposal strategies. In that same spirit of adaptability, we are working on enhancements to our services, resources, and training opportunities that will better serve faculty research and scholarship, including an overhaul of our omnibus grant opportunity list, and more targeted workshops on topics such as funding searches, project management, and fellowships for sabbaticals.

We have also launched the ORCS Newsfeed blog, which will serve as the foundation for this newsletter, and will be used to disseminate funding announcements, news on policies and procedures, federal funding updates, faculty research/scholarship news, and other pertinent announcements.

As always, it has been our privilege to support the Emerson faculty this year, including our new faculty in the Marlboro Institute– the new breadth of disciplines they bring to the College can only help increase the potential for new, inter-disciplinary projects and research.

Best wishes for a restful and healthy summer,