Thanks to the Smith Faculty Enrichment Fund, Partner and two other Duke professors will spend months this year studying outside their chosen fields. For Partner, an expert in modern Japanese history, this award gives him an opportunity to study fiction writing and write his novel about Japan.

Anna Lin, a physicist, will take a semester's leave to study new aspects of biology and new lab techniques.

This is the fourth year that grants have been awarded, courtesy of the Barbara and Randall Smith Faculty Enrichment Fund. Each professor will take a leave during the fall semester. The award amounts are tailored to fit each winner's needs, whether that is a research budget or a partial salary.

For each winner, the award provides a rare chance to step into a new academic realm. The end result, the professors say, is they will grow as scholars and teachers.

"Most grants reward one's past work, in anticipation of new work in the same vein," said Cathy Davidson, vice provost for interdisciplinary studies. "The Smith award supports a scholar who is heading out in a dazzling new direction, in an area where there might not be a track record. It allows a scholar to become a student again for a year -- whether one is a junior scholar or a distinguished senior researcher. And it is a point of pride that Duke has faculty who are bold enough to take advantage of such a rare and precious opportunity."

Partner, an assistant professor of history, studied literature as an undergraduate but spent the decade after college as a banker and management consultant. He eventually decided to return to school and earned his Ph.D. in modern Japanese history at Columbia University.

Fascinated with the story of Japan -- particularly its short history punctuated by economic achievement and natural disaster -- Partner has written two books the past seven years. The first, Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer (1999), explores how Japanese electrical goods companies convinced consumers they really needed items such as washing machines and televisions. His second book, Farewell to the Soil: the Transformation of the Countryside in Twentieth Century Japan (2003), will trace the transformation of Japan's peasantry.

While he tried to write both books in a lively voice and convey his own excitement at the topic, he felt frustrated at the constraints of academic writing. Despite his best efforts, Partner realized that academic books are usually read by a limited, academic audience.

In writing a historical novel, Partner hopes to reach a wider audience.

Partner has already started writing his novel, set in the 1920s around the time of the Great Kanto Earthquake, when Japan faced myriad problems including unemployment and colonial resistance in Korea. After the earthquake, 1,200 Koreans living in Tokyo and other cities were massacred, suspected of acts of sabotage. The main character is a British-educated Japanese woman living in the Korean community.

He has joined a writers' workshop at Duke and plans to enlist the help of a private tutor as his writing progresses. He said he is "trying to get to know the characters" and is beginning a new type of research, one which requires him to know minute details so his novel will be accurate. For example, as he writes about a character riding a train, he needs to know what the seats would have looked and felt like.

He hopes to have a draft done by fall, so he can spend his time away editing.

"It's unbelievable," Partner said. "People need to be aware that the university will support these slightly unconventional approaches."

Lin, an assistant professor of physics, said her research will help her build and sustain an experimental neurodynamics research program in the physics department. She has always been interested in using her expertise to better understand living systems.

"It's intellectually satisfying to be able to develop a new branch of research," she said. "It won't be short-term. It's a starting point."

Lin's field is nonlinear dynamics and pattern formation, and through research she has developed expertise in the ways that patterns develop and how to describe those processes. When a pattern changes, that signals a transformation has taken place, a transformation that Lin can quantify through data analysis methods she has developed.

Up until now, she has focused her explorations on chemical reactions. This grant will give Lin the opportunity to take her knowledge into a new realm: nerve cells.

This summer and fall, she will study, with the help of a post-doctoral student, the dynamics of glial cells, the interaction between glia and nerve cells, and large nerve networks. Nerve cells are always found in the presence of glial cells, which were thought to act as a sort of "scaffolding for nerve networks." Now, researchers are beginning to see that glial cells are even more significant and may play a signaling role in the central nervous system. Her work will attempt to describe the patterns that develop when calcium waves travel through glial cells.

"The idea is, can we contribute something to understanding how the nervous system and the brain can capture memory or perform different functions," Lin said.

The grant will allow her to perform experiments on rat brain cultures, become more familiar with neurobiology and physiology, and develop new lab techniques and instrumentation. She plans to visit other labs, take courses at Duke and attend seminars here and at UNC. She will use this new expertise in biophysics to mentor students interested in this emerging field and create an undergraduate biophysics course.

Clay has written eight books on classical literature, philosophy and archeology, but has been interested in Dante since his freshman year in college. He has taught Dante's Divine Comedy, and is writing a book on the subject. After commencement, he will travel to Italy again to continue his research of depictions of hell before and after Dante.

For about a month, his research will take him through chapels in Florence and Pisa and into San Gimignano, Orvieto, Venice, Rome and Capua, near Naples. He will search for supporting documents in archives and at Harvard University's Center for Italian Renaissance Studies outside Florence.

A member of the Dante Society of America, Clay calls his project "The Art of Hell."

"No one has ever done a comprehensive study on the impact of Inferno on the scenes of the Last Judgment," Clay said. "It establishes the important link between literature and art. It's really reciprocal. There's art that came before Dante that influenced him, and there's art that came after that was influenced by him."

The project began in 2000, when he was teaching Dante's Divine Comedy at the Duke in Florence Program. He realized then that visual representations of heaven and hell are key to understanding Dante's Inferno. Since the project began, he has collected some 200 slides to illustrate how the depiction of hell changes from the early 14th century to 1579, when the frescoes in the Duomo of Florence were completed.

He doesn't expect to finish his project by next spring, though he does aim to have completed a catalogue and slide library that will be the foundation of his work.

Clay, who grew up in Reno, Nev., feels lucky to have won a $10,000 grant to support his research.

"It's really exciting," he said. "It gives you the feeling of being on a new frontier."