By Megan Sherry
Dr. Rongqian Ma, Assistant Professor of Information and Library Science in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, has been selected to be a part of the Enhanced Mentoring Program with Opportunities for Ways to Excel in Research (EMPOWER) in its second year on IU Bloomington’s campus. Dr. Ma is the second ILS professor to be selected for this program, following Dr. Devan Ray Donaldson’s award in 2023.
The goal of this program is to provide junior faculty, especially those from historically marginalized groups, with the support they need to become successful externally funded researchers. Over the course of a year, participants work closely with a mentor to develop a project proposal they will use to apply to external funding organizations.
It is not required that the mentor and mentee be in the same field, and in Dr. Ma’s case, differing disciplines are an advantage. Since Dr. Ma’s chosen project involves using digital and computational methods to analyze Chinese poetry and literature, she chose to work with Dr. Manling Luo, associate professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, who specializes in pre-modern and traditional Chinese literature.
Dr. Ma is excited for the challenge of combining her previous academic background in East Asian Studies and her current interests in digital humanities and computational literary studies with the help of Dr. Luo.
“By working with a mentor,” said Dr. Ma, “this project may be able to contribute both theoretically to Chinese literature studies and also to the methodologies in digital humanities.”
This is not the first time Dr. Ma has been a part of a collaborative research project. In spring 2023, she was awarded the IAS Collaboration Research Award to support a project about the use of visual representations in digital humanities scholarship with researchers from the University of Tennessee and IUPUI (now IU Indianapolis). Dr. Ma is also an Initiative for Digital Art & Humanities Faculty Fellow.
Dr. Ma’s goals for her time in EMPOWER include developing a specific research proposal from an idea to a project, as well as improving her overall grant-writing skills for future projects. Dr. Ma also believes the opportunity to work with a mentor who is an expert in her field to be invaluable. Finally, not only does she hope that this can grow into a major project for her research career, but she is also excited to see if the results of this interdisciplinary research can be expanded further.