PROVIDENCE — Brown University is giving $85,000 in “seed” financing to six faculty members to foster education and health partnerships in key countries and regions, such as Brazil, China and Europe, a step designed to strengthen Brown’s international reputation and presence.

One project helps support a study of Brazil’s slum settlements and urban equality; another strengthens ties between Brown and Nanjing University, a major research institution in China, by helping to pay for a summer graduate program for Chinese graduate students studying computational mathematics.

“Funding these projects underscores our commitment to expanding global research and education,” said Provost David I. Kertzer. “These seed fund grants support our goal of further shaping Brown into the international institution we envision. Each project will bring about a new collaboration between our faculty and their counterparts around the globe.”

The other projects:

Scholars from Brown and Nanjing’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences will collaborate in the area of women and gender, specifically by editing the first-ever guide to female film directors, which will be published in both English and Chinese.

A team of international scholars from Brown and Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., Durham University in England and France’s Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art/ Universite de Paris will conduct research on Anglo-American antiquarians and early modern science. The researchers will make their writings and research available on the Internet.

A team of creative arts faculty, including from the music, visual arts, theatre, speech and dance departments, will provide a safe haven for artists working under threat in their own countries, similar to the International Writer’s Program. These artists will travel to Brown and spend a semester as an artist in residence, giving lectures and exhibiting their work.

A group of Brown’s health, science and engineering communities will work on plans to enhance education, research and international partnerships on the topic of global health, through the university’s Internationalization Committee’s Working Group on Global Health.

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