“Faculty research is the lifeblood of a leading university like Dartmouth. The Rockefeller Center is delighted to support the important public policy and social science research conducted by Dartmouth faculty," says Rockefeller Center Senior Associate Director and Senior Policy Fellow and Research Assistant Professor of Government Herschel Nachlis. These grants support projects at various stages, including via early seed and pilot funding, funding to collect and analyze data, and late-stage book manuscript workshops, among others.
Two recent awardees published books based on parts of their Rockefeller Center grant-funded research. The first of these projects is Sociology Professor and Rockefeller Faculty Council Member Janice McCabe’s new book (the cover of which is above, on the left) Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends: How Campuses Shape College Students’ Networks (University of Chicago Press, 2025). McCabe’s book examines how college students build and maintain support networks across young adulthood. The second of these projects is Sociology Professor Emily Walton’s work on the changing demographics of rural New England and their relationships to race and exclusion, which culminated in the publication of her recent book (the cover of which is above, on the right) Homesick: Race and Exclusion in Rural New England (Stanford University Press, 2025).
Each grant cycle, the Rockefeller Center Faculty Council reviews applications, including as the Center has expanded the funding available to support such research over the last few years. The Council also engages with Dartmouth’s Social Science community and works to connect its departments with the Center.
In the 2024-2025 academic year, Center awarded funds to 14 projects across the departments of History, Government, Geography, Economics, and Sociology. Topics ranged from the exploration of the impact of soil health on food (Geography; Susanne Freidberg, “Healthier Soil, Healthier Food? Regenerative Agriculture Envisioned as Nutritional Solution”) to the impact of social media in the aftermath of the 2020 U.S. election results (Government; Brendan Nyhan, “Evaluating Social Media’s Role in the Effort to Overturn the 2020 Election,” part of the BrightLineWatch project from which the data below is drawn).
Other grantees from this pool of projects include Sociology Professor Casey Stockstill, awarded to research the impact of race in shaping childcare investments (“Structural Racism and Investments in an Age of Privatization”) and History Professor Julia Rabig, awarded for “The Library Exception: Defending Public Space in an Age of Privatization,” which examines the shifting role of public library systems in the wake of policy and cultural changes.
For this most recent review cycle, Fall 2025, The Center awarded grants to the following projects:
- Economics Professor Madeline McKelway: “The Impact of Pre-Marital Counseling on Women’s Empowerment and Couples’ Wellbeing: A Field Experiment in Indonesia.”
- History Professor Darrin McMahon: “Whaling, Lighting, and Enlightenment: The Nantuckois of Dunkirk and the Struggle to Illuminate the World.”
- Economics Professor Paul Novosad: “Who Becomes an Elite in the U.S., 1900-2025.”
- Geography Postdoctoral Fellow/Lecturer Geneva Smith and Anthropology Professor Maron Greenleaf, “Science in Times of Scarcity.”
- Economics Professor Nathan Zorzi, “The Labor Market Costs of Transitioning to Electric Vehicles.”
If you are interested in learning more about eligibility and requirements, please see the Faculty Research Grants page on the Rockefeller Center’s website.