Professor leads team that won MacArthur Foundation grant

Emerson Assistant Professor Eric Gordon is part of a team that has won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation grant. The $170,000 grant comes from the Foundation's highly competitive Digital Media and Learning Competition, which had nearly 1,000 applicants and fewer than 20 awards granted. The awards were announced April 16 at a ceremony and showcase of last year's winners in Chicago.

Gordon, a scholar of new media with a special interest in place-based digital communities, social networking, and virtual environments, is the co-principal investigator and director of research and design for a project called Participatory Chinatown (http://hub2.org), a collaboration among Emerson, the Asian Community Development Corporation and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. He said a portion of the grant will enable him to hire Emerson students to assist with the development of the project. "The main goal of the project is to augment the community participation process in Boston's Chinatown with immersive gaming technology to enable richer and more sustainable urban conversations," he explained. "Participants sit side-by-side in physical space and simultaneously co-inhabit a 3D virtual space where they engage in rapid prototyping and testing of urban design proposals."
According to Gordon, the project encourages Chinatown residents "to actively experience, transform, and interact in proposed urban developments [and] enables residents of all ages and abilities to understand and articulate their own vision of a better neighborhood."

Gordon's book The Urban Spectator: Concept Cities from Kodak to Google will be out this fall. He is published widely.

Supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as part of the Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative, the Digital Media and Learning Competition is an annual competition that provides $2 million in awards to innovators shaping the field of digital media and learning.

Tobin wins Guggenheim
Professor Daniel Tobin, chair of the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing, is among the nine poets to receive a 2009 fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The winners are selected on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment. He will be using the fellowship to "research a sequence of poems about Georges Lemaitre, the 20th-century Belgian physicist and priest who was among the first to fully theorize the concept of the universe beginning in a 'big bang'," according to the Boston Globe. Tobin's Belated Heavens will be published in 2010.

Tobin is also the author of four books of poems, most recently Second Things. Among his awards are the Discovery/The Nation Award, the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, and a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  A book of essays, Awake in America, is forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press, among other nonfiction and edited work.