Special Collections Research Center Awards Two Faculty Fellows Grants for 2025-2026
Syracuse University Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) recently awarded its two Faculty Fellows grants for the 2025-2026 academic year. Arun Brahmbhatt, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion, and Zeke Leonard, Associate Professor and Associate Director in the School of Design, have each committed to a four-week summer residency in 2025 at SCRC that includes workshops and training sessions on handling special collections materials, teaching students how to research within and across collections, and designing hands-on, individualized, creative and critically-minded assignments with rare materials. The fellows, who applied and were selected by a committee of librarians and curators, will use what they learned and the materials from SCRC to teach newly developed courses the following year.
SCRC Instruction and Education Librarian, Jana Rosinski, is looking forward to having the fellows bring attention to areas of unique strength in the SCRC collections as follows:
- Arun Brahmbhatt will rework his course The Art of Devotion in South Asia (REL 300), rooted in the H. Daniel Smith Poster Archive. H. Daniel Smith was the first to hold a position in Hindu Studies in the Religion Department at Syracuse University, a position Brahmbhatt now holds. The poster archive, comprising over 3,500 specimens of visual and print material Smith collected on his many trips to India, serves as a unique lens into South Asian visual culture from the 1950s through the 1980s, offering snapshots of how devotional iconography functioned within the spaces and activities of daily life. With his students, Brahmbhatt will deeply examine the commonalities in these visuals that transcend the boundaries of genre, religious tradition, time and space, while remaining sensitive to the specificities of historical circumstance, to explore how the language of devotional love is used to both uphold and challenge social norms and communal identity. On the significance of the collection to the focus of the course, Brahmbhatt explained, “When we think about religious images, we often focus on works of ‘high art.’ On the contrary, by exploring the Smith archive, students will train their eyes on images that may seem unremarkable from an artistic perspective, but that nonetheless play an outsize role in Hindu devotional lives.”
- Zeke Leonard is re-envisioning his long-standing course Sustainable Furniture and Lighting (DES 561), a design and build studio in which students create both a lighting and seating object. By making use of hand diagrammatic drawings from draftspersons, along with original captures of the design process in conceptual sketches and material research of designers, Leonard’s students will fully engage with the process of design as functional art and craft. Making use of the papers of iconic mid-20th century industrial designers such as Jens Risom, Egmont Arens and George Nelson & Co., Inc., Leonard and his students will explore function and form critically, contextualizing design in response to aesthetic style, cultural movements or moments historically, and the needs of bodies and spaces. Leonard stated, “As a design/build class, this class has always been a making class. However, at its core it is a design class. By accessing process documents from historic standouts in the field, the students will be contemplating and learning from another type of making, that of making ideation drawings, sketches and technical drawings for production.”
Syracuse University Libraries’ SCRC Faculty Fellows Program aims to support innovative curriculum development and foster new ideas about how to transform the role of special collections in University instruction. Each fellow receives a $5,000 payment along with guidance on how to provide students with a unique opportunity to research, analyze and interpret SCRC’s primary source materials in their class, and ongoing course support.
George Bain G'06, a member of the Library Associates, and William F. Gaske ’72, a member of the Libraries Advisory Board, provided generous gift funding towards the SCRC Faculty Fellows Program. Original funding for the program was made possible through the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, which promotes the advancement and perpetuation of humanistic inquiry and artistic creativity by encouraging excellence in scholarship and in the performing arts, and by supporting research libraries and other institutions that transmit our cultural heritage.
To learn more about the Faculty Fellows Program or teaching with SCRC, contact Jana Rosinski, SCRC’s Instruction and Education Librarian at jrosinsk@syr.edu.