Nora Gilbert, Department of English
Several years ago, UNT was invited to become a member of the Dickens Project Consortium. The chief goal of this prestigious consortium is to promote research on Charles Dickens and his works' relationship to nineteenth century British culture more broadly, and to bring the results of this research before both a scholarly audience and the general public. The marquee event of the Dickens Project is its annual, week-long summer research institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz, called "Dickens Universe." As an institutional member of the consortium, we are required to send one faculty member and one graduate student to the institute per year, and this mentoring grant will help fund my attendance in the Summer of 2023. While the mentoring benefits for the graduate students that we send to DU may be the most apparent, the benefits for faculty members are quite robust as well. Personally, I know many people working in the field of Victorian Studies who have developed ideas for and received feedback on collaborative projects (essay collections, special issues, conference panels, etc.) during their week together at Dickens Universe. As I am currently in the early stages of co-editing a new book on Gaslighting in Global Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture―which will address both the gaslighting that occurs within certain Dickens novels and the gaslighting that Dickens himself has been accused of perpetrating―I am looking forward to reaping precisely this kind of mentoring benefit at next year's Universe.

Karla Horton, Department of Social Work
This micro grant will support the training for the Inside-Out Program. This online training program provides training for those interested in developing and teaching a semester-long course held in a prison, jail, or other correctional setting. The current expansion of this program has included different forms of educational and community programming. Using this grant to fund this training will further my collaboration efforts with colleagues in the Criminal Justice department who have already begun teaching an Inside-Out course here on campus. Additionally, this training and collaboration will enhance my research in parental incarceration.

Brooke Nodeland, Department of Criminal Justice
Faculty mentoring programs provide faculty at all ranks unique opportunities to serve their departments, university’s, and the discipline. There is widespread agreement that new faculty need mentorship to assimilate into their new role, to learn both formal and informal department and university expectations, and to develop an active research agenda. However, the need for mentoring is not exclusive to new university faculty. In fact, during the transition from Assistant to Associate Professor, a mentoring relationship can be particularly valuable as junior faculty learn new skills and expectations for their new and expanded role. Since this transition is often accompanied by a faculty member taking on more significant service loads and aspiring toward leadership opportunities, mentoring remains an important and necessary component in orienting transitioning faculty to the rules and norms associated with their new rank, navigating new challenges, and identifying new skills that will be necessary for success in the next stage of their career. This award will allow me to experience direct and indirect mentoring opportunities under the supervision of an established, accomplished, and prominent leader in my discipline.

Yu (Kelly) Shi, Department of Public Administration
Stepping into a New Role: Developing Transition Strategies 
The objectives of this project are to develop several transition strategies and to be equipped with tools learned from outside campus mentors. The department of public administration has a MPA program which was established in 1961 and has ranked #1 MPA program in Texas. The department also has a PhD program which has successfully placed doctoral graduates into faculty positions in international and domestic universities. Given that graduate students’ graduation rate is one of the important criteria for maintaining R-1 university status, Dr. Shi plans to use the grant fund to visit her outside campus mentors and their labs. The ultimate outcome of this visit would be to create transitional strategies for stepping into a new role for graduate programs. To be more specific, several important goals are expected from this project, including preparing for the new role with strategic plans, learning lessons about how to manage graduate programs from the outside mentors and institutions, tooling faculty with strategies to market programs and to enhance program reputations with increased enrollment number, and visiting multiple labs in the college and learn some experiences about lab establishment.
 
To learn more, please contact Kelly Shi at yu.shi@unt.edu