Curricular improvements to an oral history course focused on African American women from the rural and small-town South, as well as archival preservation of interviews with these community elders.

In August of 2002, students at Spelman College were introduced to The SIS Oral History Project, a new course that would: (1) open the lens of age in studies of history and literature; (2) identify oral history as a major methodology for research in the humanities; and (3), through student-conducted interviews, give voice and visibility to African American women elders of the South. That “new course” is, today, a demanding project that transforms teaching and learning in the humanities. The project meets criteria for NEH funding for Humanities Initiatives at HBCUs in the following ways: (1) it strengthens students’ skills in writing, critical thinking, oral articulation, and research across disciplines; (2) through a partnership with AUC Robert W. Woodruff Library Archives Research Center, it insures that project research will be preserved and disseminated for use in humanities courses across the nation; and (3) it produces age-conscious scholars for the twenty-first century.

A project to digitize the archives of an important early African American literary and cultural society and to carry forward its legacy through interdisciplinary public lectures and forums.

Collaborating with the Howard University Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (MSRC) and Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church (MAME), the Department of English at Howard University requests funds to support “Bethel 21,” a project that revives and reimagines the Bethel Literary and Historical Association in the 21st century. Like the original society, this project will consist of lectures from scholars and public figures and literary and cultural arts presentations from authors and performers. This iteration of the Bethel, however, as a collaborative project in the humanities between a historical society and a university, will also include critical engagement with the archives of the Bethel Literary and Historical Association’s collection at MRSC and will organize public forums for the community to promote civil, civic discourse as a life skill.

A three-year curriculum development project that would create a new interdisciplinary minor in digital humanities.

Grambling State University's departments of English and History will design and implement a new interdisciplinary minor in Digital Humanities. Grant funding will go toward bringing outside expertise onto campus to train humanities faculty in interdisciplinary techniques and in pedagogy appropriate to the Digital Humanities during planning stages for the minor.

A one-year curriculum development project integrating local oral histories into six humanities courses.

This project utilizes oral histories of New Orleans African Americans who achieved the “American Dream” of homeownership in the second oldest American all-black “suburb in the city” in the 1950s and early 1960s and the first in New Orleans to tell a larger story. Denied by “redlining” from buying homes in the rest of the city, they formed their own community. The project strengthens the teaching and study of the humanities at SUNO by developing new resources in the form of these oral histories, creating a digital Teaching Module for sharing them in humanities courses, teaching them in humanities courses, and preserving them digitally.

A two-year project organizing digital humanities workshops for faculty to incorporate digitized materials about campus history.

Faculty and staff from Humanities disciplines within the College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at North Carolina Central University will form a cohort to participate in a two-year project (2022-2024) that uses the NCCU materials at Digital NC (especially the newspapers and yearbooks) and the materials in the NCCU Archives to develop teaching materials to be implemented in their courses. In the first year, we will coordinate with the Digital Humanities Research Institute at CUNY for workshop materials and instructors who would be willing to run a week of workshops. After the workshop, faculty members will be expected to create and implement course modules using this digital archival material. In the second year, faculty members will participate in a symposium discussing their results and will engage with other faculty members in their disciplines as well as the greater university community and the citizens of Durham, NC.

A two-year project to develop an open educational resource textbook that would examine Black intellectuals’ engagement with Russian/Soviet intellectuals and the cultures of the Soviet Union.

The project “Exploring the Dimension of Russia and Otherness” will focus on an underexamined aspect of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REEES): how African Americans and Black intellectuals have interpreted their encounters with Russian/Soviet intellectuals, and how Russian/Soviet intellectuals have interpreted their encounters with African Americans and Black intellectuals and their culture(s), to include cultural exchanges with national minority cultures of the former Soviet Union and Russia’s near abroad.

A two-year project to develop faculty, curriculum, and other resources for a humanities-centered African American studies program.

Prairie View A&M University, a federally designated Historically Black College and University (HBCU), seeks funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for faculty enrichment and curriculum development to bolster support for the university’s newly launched African American studies program.