Stephen Schottenfeld Awarded 2025 President’s Ferrari Humanities Research Award
The $25,000 award will support Schottenfeld’s innovative multimedia project, Neighborhood Watch, exploring aging and loneliness through interactive storytelling and gaming.
Stephen Schottenfeld, a professor of English, has been named the 2025 recipient of the President’s Ferrari Humanities Research Award for his project Neighborhood Watch.
The award recognizes creative research by a faculty member at the University of Rochester who is affiliated with the Humanities Center. It comes with a $25,000 prize endowed by Trustee Bernard T. Ferrari ’70, ‘74M (MD) and his wife, Linda Gaddis Ferrari.
“Professor Schottenfeld is a decorated novelist and his project, Neighborhood Watch, is a multimedia research project revisiting the themes of aging and loneliness in his 2023 novel titled This Room is Made of Noise through new experiments in narration in gaming and interactive storytelling,” said Peter Christensen, the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Director of the Humanities Center.
The 2025 award will support a collaboration between three departments and a team of Rochester students who will build a prototype of the video game central to Schottenfeld’s novel-in-progress.
“I feel so fortunate to have the encouragement of the selection committee,” says Schottenfeld. “And, of course, I’m exceedingly thankful for the financial support of the Bernard T. and Linda G. Ferrari Humanities Fund.”