The development and teaching of a new honors course for first- and second-year students on philosophical, legal, and literary perspectives on the criminal.

This course will form part of the UNH's University Honors Program new curriculum, which will be launched in 2014 or 2015. It will be one of four core courses on "Justice and Ethics," a cornerstone theme of the revised curriculum.

The development of an upper level humanities course focusing on the study of changing concepts of nature from the ancient world to the age of Darwin.

What is Nature? How have past cultures conceived of the natural world and ways of knowing about that world? This course traces the history of changing experiences and concepts of nature from the ancient world to the age of Darwin. Students will read a sequence of major texts from the Western tradition alongside supplemental treatises and excerpts from religious and scientific documents to understand the broad contours of thinking about the natural world in the Western cultures of Europe, the Eastern cultures of China and India, and the Arab-World and Africa. "What is Nature?" will be offered as an upper-level humanities course at Keene State College, New Hampshire's Public Liberal Arts College. The course will be offered in the Integrative Studies Program (ISP), has no disciplinary prerequisites and is open to all students at the College.

The development of public humanities outreach through the travelling speakers' bureau, "Humanities to Go," the cable television program "Human Ties," and expanded website content. This grant will enable the Council to reach a wider variety of individuals and be an even greater resource for organizations. An attractive new print catalog and a readily-accessible online catalog continues to attract new users, including schools, libraries, historical societies, senior centers, clubs, and civic groups large and small.

We the People grant funds will enable the NH Humanities Council to offer essential opportunities for discovery and life-long learning through Humanities To Go, our most popular programming vehicle. Over 12,000 NH residents will examine American history and culture through a broad range of lectures and living history presentations in every discipline of the humanities.

An endowment to redesign and relaunch the “Humanities to Go” (HTG) speakers bureau program.

The New Hampshire Humanities Council will transform its popular Humanities to Go speakers bureau into a portable and accessible “center for the public humanities.” Not a bricks-and-mortar project, this “center” will exist in every city and town in New Hampshire. Through Socratic discussions, experiential opportunities and reinvigorated presentations, NH residents will be given the tools and knowledge that enable them to connect local stories, concerns, and traditions with global questions about the human condition. The infrastructure is in place -- the partnerships; the delivery mechanism; and the statewide credibility now enjoyed by Humanities to Go. The need is for occasions for the public not only to listen but to experience and practice the humanities. This new endeavor promises to deliver the intellectual joy and civic virtue of the humanities throughout NH and far into the future.

"Crossing Borders" tells the story of the Irish American Fenians, who launched attacks on Canada and traveled to Ireland in the 1860s to foment rebellion -- all in the unsuccessful effort to win Ireland's independence from British rule. The Fenians were arrested and, despite their status as naturalized American citizens, tried for treason as British subjects. The British treatment of the Fenians provoked an uproar in America, and prompted a major change in the history of citizenship law. For the first time, the United States and England explicitly recognized the right of expatriation, that is, the individual's right to give up his citizenship and pledge allegiance to a new sovereign. Expatriation was revolutionary in emphasizing the power of individuals to choose their political homes. Yet, the new laws were also tied to "state-building" campaigns in the United States and Western Europe, as emerging nation states formed new "rules of exit" for their own strategic reasons.

I am at work on a study of the intersections of crusade and liturgy between ca. 1095 and 1400. Liturgy was a "weapon" of crusading warfare, a mechanism of sacralization of holy war, and an expression of the core ideals of crusade. Yet historians of the crusade have yet to fully exploit liturgical and ritual evidence in their exploration of crusading cultures. Through rituals of departure, processions performed on the march and in battle, daily liturgical requests for the destruction of enemies, and prayers for Holy Land relics brought back to Europe, I chart the development in the ideals of devotion, Christianity, and holy war over three centuries. Liturgy itself is not the object of study but the means by which to explore the evolution of crusading mentalités. It was also a vehicle by which the larger project of the crusades helped create "Europe" out of the individual localities of the early medieval west.

I seek NEH funding to write a book on advertising by global firms in western India between 1918 and 1940. Relying upon theories that suggest that advertisement needs to evoke "prior meanings" that resonate among consumers, my book argues that professional advertisers in this region drew upon and transformed notions of modern conjugality already circulating among an emerging middle class. The study will be based upon extensive research in business archives and upon analysis of texts and images in numerous advertisements I have collected in India. The book will be the first full-length study to establish the connection of advertising to key processes of historical change in South Asia, especially the formation of the middle-class family. It will also contribute to recent efforts to place South Asian history in a global framework by discussing how the circulation of commodities and discourses about consumption on a world scale became involved in the making of the Indian middle class.

A four-week seminar for college and university faculty exploring the philosophical responses to empiricism of Kant, Hegel, and the 20th-century American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, to be held at the University of New Hampshire.

18th century empiricism evoked a radical response from Kant and Hegel, the German Idealists, emphasizing the agency involved in knowledge and experience. 20th century empiricism evoked a parallel response from Wilfrid Sellars that has left its mark on contemporary philosophy. Juxtaposing readings from historical and contemporary sources, the central issues in this seminar concern the nature of sensory experience, the concepts used to make sense of it, the possibility of radical conceptual change, the role of the empirical sciences in ontology, and the sources of the normativity essential to human agency. Participants will also present their work in progress to the group for discussion.

A history of the development of Americanist anthropology as a collaboration between scientists in Latin America and Europe.

This book project examines the genesis of Americanist anthropology in the late-19th century, a crucial moment in the centuries-old transatlantic enterprise to unearth new knowledge about the fundamental nature of humankind. It follows Americanists' own evidence trail, from physical artifacts to linguistic and cultural evidence, in the context of comparative study of Latin American civilizations. It identifies prominent figures and debates in anthropology on two continents as scientists grappled anew with existential questions -- what are the measures of civilization? Is there a single model of human social development? Can diverse peoples coexist in the same nation? It also explores how Americanist anthropology shaped key aspects of the transnational political culture of the era and outcomes in law locally, for example, practices of integration or exclusion of Native Americans and mixed race groups, the instruction of Native languages, and the return of human remains.

In 2008 I published I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies with Cambridge University Press. I Was Wrong provides a nuanced framework for the ethical meanings of apologies from individuals and collectives. I have discussed I Was Wrong on NPR (an hour-long interview with Diane Rehm), CNN, BBC, CBC, Philosophy Talk, and various other national and international programs. I now seek support for Apologies in Law (Cambridge University Press). Apologies in Law will apply the framework for the ethical meanings of apologies from I Was Wrong to acts of contrition in civil and criminal law. As a recently tenured J.D./Ph.D. experienced as a litigator in a major Manhattan law firm and as a staff attorney for the U.S. Court of Appeals, I hope to use my upcoming sabbatical to complete a draft of Apologies in Law. I will revise the draft during the summer of 2009.

The poetry of Greek-Egyptian C.P. Cavafy continues to attract new readers. There are at present more than ten comprehensive English translations in print, most of them coming over the past ten years. Yet despite such evidence of persistent if not growing interest in the writer whom Joseph Brodsky characterized as the greatest poet of the twentieth-century, Cavafy’s prose writing is little known beyond the world of Cavafy specialists, even in Greece itself. At the invitation of the newly established Harvard Early Modern and Modern Greek Library series from the Harvard Department of Classics, I have undertaken to translate a generous selection of the poet’s work in prose for a bilingual volume entitled "C.P. Cavafy: The Major Prose." The volume will also include my extensive commentary on the texts, locating them in the context of Cavafy’s life and work, and within the cultural and political world in which they were written.

Leo Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata and Gleb Uspensky's sketch "One on One" (1885) focus on murderous husbands. Whereas Tolstoy's protagonist is fictional, Uspensky examines the-then sensational but now forgotten trial of Vasily Pishchikov who brutally killed his pregnant wife. Despite the different verdicts (an acquittal and a life sentence), both writers are unhappy with the legal proceedings they describe. Their critique of law, however, reverses the common argument that attributes the supremacy of literary imagination over legal reasoning to literature's commitment to human singularity. Law fails not because it deals in abstractions but because it is distracted by details; literature succeeds not due to its heightened attention to particularity of experience but due to its ability to strip this experience of the incidental and unrepeatable. The utopian politics and literary aesthetics the two works advocate depend not on highlighting but on attenuating human unrepeatability.

Implementation of a three-year, statewide project examining immigration to New Hampshire through a wide variety of formats, including oral histories and reading and discussion programs.

The New Hampshire Humanities Council requests support for Fences and Neighbors: New Hampshire's Immigration Stories, a three-year statewide initiative on immigration. The project is designed to create and implement public humanities programs that foreground face to face conversations and also to support grass-roots humanities programming and oral history collection where immigrants and refugees have settled in the densest numbers along the I-93 corridor. Programs will a)increase knowledge about immigrants and refugees and about our immigration policies in general; b) enable collaborations among municipal, legal, civic, and religious organizations that can plan and implement humanities-based public programs on immigration; c)assist immigrants and refugees to acquire language and cultural literacy; d)encourage the exchange of stories among older immigrants and new arrivals to raise cultural awareness for New Hampshire residents.

A series of six case studies in locations in the United States and internationally to further methods in aerial thermography, an imaging process that allows non-destructive photography and data collection for archaeological sites.

Archaeologists have known since the 1970s that aerial thermal images can reveal a wide range of ancient cultural features including buried architecture, artifact concentrations, as well as roads, fields, and earthworks. Until recently, technological hurdles have largely prevented aerial thermography from being deployed in archaeological research, but our work on a Level II Start-Up grant brought together a small drone, a lightweight thermal camera, and photogrammetry software to explore new methods for aerial thermal surveys. The proposed project seeks to build on this success by using a newly developed radiometric thermal camera, improved drone technology and new processing methods to undertake a series of aerial thermal surveys at sites in the US, Mexico, Cyprus and Iraq. Results of the project have the potential to transform understanding of the various sites under investigation, and will develop a new set of protocols for collection and processing of thermal imagery in archaeology.

A cooperative agreement to organize a two-day workshop that would encourage the cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas and best practices in crowdsourcing across the humanities and sciences, particularly in libraries, archives, and museums.

Engaging the Public: Best Practices for Crowdsourcing Across the Disciplines is a proposed workshop to be held in May 2015, at the University of Maryland, that would build an important intellectual and networking bridge for crowdsourced humanities projects, supported by a Cooperative Agreement among NEH, Dartmouth College, and the University of Maryland, with additional support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Sloan Foundation. Throughout the workshop, our central concern will be on the question of how institutions might best adopt and employ crowdsourcing strategies for increasing public engagement, integrating data into existing collections, and increasing knowledge in the humanities and related domains. In obtaining support for the workshop from three different funders, with their own distinct communities to bring into the conversation, we will be ensuring a rich cross-disciplinary dialogue, sending a very public signal about the importance of these emerging practices.

Text analysis of 15 editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica employing natural language processing, network analysis, and information visualization in order test computational methods for tracing changes in formation and evolution of concepts and ideas across domains of knowledge over time.

We propose to map out the History of European thought over last three centuries using as a proxy the history of changes in 15 editions of Encyclopedia Britannica. Editors of each new edition had to build a new consensus on what to include and what to exclude, how much volume a subject deserves, and what are the relations between subjects. These decisions may be captured and analyzed by methods of natural language processing, network analysis, and information visualization, thus providing tools for identification and analysis of various historical trends within and across domains of knowledge, such as discussion of theories and ideas, evolution of concepts, growth of reputations and such.

The implementation of a software system that would use game play to allow users to contribute high-quality descriptive information about digital collections of humanities materials held by cultural heritage institutions.

Our team received Level II Start Up funding to create a pilot of Metadata Games (MG), a software system that uses computer games to collect information about artifacts in libraries and archives as they strive to go digital. Games are useful in that they can entice those who might not visit archives to explore humanities content while contributing to vital records, and they create much more metadata than typical staff can do alone in the same timeframe. The system is open-source and is easily customized to meet each institution’s needs. The full project employs new techniques to make the system smarter and more trustworthy. We will also create new game components. MG can be used to enhance knowledge about artifacts in particular disciplines and fields, or with interdisciplinary collections. MG has the potential to unearth new knowledge that could radically enhance scholarship in the humanities, expanding what records we can encounter in our quest to understand the human experience.

Ancillary public humanities programs to accompany the NEH on the Road: Wild Land traveling exhibition.

Keene State College is honored to host the Thomas Cole Wild Land traveling exhibition. Thomas Cole was a significant influence on the artists of the region, especially those from the 19th century Dublin Art colony. Since the early 1800's, the area around Mount Monadnock, which is in nearby Dublin NH, was a Mecca for artists, writers and other intellectuals. The Monadnock region has a long tradition of landscape painting and the appreciation of the natural world, which continues to this day. This programming grant will allow us to provide supplemental programming to highlight the exhibit and deepen its impact.

Improvements to the headquarters of the New Hampshire Historical Society to protect a significant collection documenting New Hampshire history from damaging environmental conditions, while reducing heat loss and energy consumption. Upgrades would include insulating the roof and skylights, protecting the collections from ultraviolet light, and replacing heating and mechanical systems.

The New Hampshire Historical Society proposes a rehabilitation of its National Registered-listed headquarters in Concord, the state capital. The Society's headquarters houses the single most comprehensive collection of the materials of New Hampshire history. Guided by the Secretary of the Interior's standards for Rehabilitation, the project will protect these nationally significant holdings against damaging internal environmental conditions and hazards; reduce heat loss, energy consumption, and the Society's carbon "footprint;" and protect the architectural character of the 1911 building. To accomplish these goals, the project will address current heat loss and gain through the building's roof and skylights, eliminate damaging ultraviolet radiation from natural light, and replace century-old heating and mechanical systems in order to safeguard collections, conserve energy, and maintain levels of temperature and relative humidity appropriate to an archive and museum.

Hiring an outside consultant to conduct a fire safety study and the purchase of environmental monitoring equipment, including temperature/humidity monitors and a visible light meter.  The Portsmouth Athenaeum maintains an encyclopedic collection of materials related to the history and culture of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Founded in 1816, the Athenaeum holds diverse collections including important materials relating to the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the Russo-Japanese War. Other collection highlights include a 1979 dockyard model of the Portsmouth-built ship H.M.S. America and King George II’s 1737 proclamation settling the boundary between New Hampshire and Massachusetts. This proposal responds to a 2014 collections conservation assessment report identifying fire safety and improvement of the building envelope as a critical priority in the Athenaeum’s long-range collections planning.

The proposed project will support a fire safety study at the Portsmouth Athenaeum, and fund purchase of environmental monitoring equipment. Project activities will take place between January and March 2016. A recent collections conservation assessment identified fire risk and environmental conditions as our top collections care priorities. This project will lay the foundation for creation of an integrated master environmental improvement plan for the Athenaeum. The Athenaeum is steward to an extraordinary collection of manuscripts, objects, art, photographs, and rare and historic books and printed materials. These collections document the cultural, economic and political life of Portsmouth, New Hampshire's only major seaport, which played a significant role in American colonial, Revolutionary, and Early Republican history. Spanning centuries and representing historic cultural encounters worldwide, the Athenaeum's collections are of regional, national and international importance.

Funding supports a general preservation assessment of the library's collection of approximately 1,700 items including town and family histories, city directories, vital records, and published works by Exeter authors.

The Exeter Public Library, Exeter, NH is seeking funding in the form of a $5,050.35 grant for a general preservation assessment of the Exeter Public Library's historical collection. The historical collection is located in its own room off the main part of Adult Services. The assessment would be completed by a consultant from the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, MA. This would include a general review of the condition of our paper-based historical collection, an assessment of the risks to the collection, an evaluation of the library's policies and procedures as they apply to preservation and recommendations for improving storage and handling practices. The goal for this project is to insure access to the collection and, at the same time, insure its safety.

A preservation assessment of the library's general collection, Special Collections, and Archives, with particular attention to materials in the history of photography. The Teti Library serves as a regional art library for academic institutions and the general public.

New Hampshire Institute of Art's Teti Library is seeking funding to support a general preservation assessment of the main library, Special Collections and Institute archives. This funding will support a site visit conducted by a Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) consultant who will assess facility issues, library policy, and material condition and housing. The consultant will create a written report that will help the library prepare a short-, medium-, and long-term preservation plan for the collections. Using this information as a point of departure, the library will prepare a formal preservation policy and conduct materials re-housing and other preservation measures as prescribed by the consultant.

The hiring of a consultant to develop a disaster preparedness and recovery plan and to provide training in emergency response to better care for the college's special collections and archive of historical films relating to New Hampshire filmmaking and the history of the cinema. The college's collections also include the records of the Dublin Art Colony Collection, a late 19th-century art organization established by Abbott Henderson Thayer associated with Rockwell Kent, George de Forest, and Frank W. Benson.

The Wallace E. Mason Library of Keene State College seeks support for a project to (1) create a disaster preparedness and recovery plan for the College’s archives, special collections, and film holdings; (2) provide staff with training in emergency preparedness and response planning; and (3) prepare disaster supply kits. The project fulfills one of the primary recommendations of the 2010 Preservation Needs Assessment conducted by the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (CCAHA) for the College. The holdings consist of over 250 linear feet of archival and manuscript material and over 6,000 volumes of print and bound materials, covering predominantly the disciplines of history, literature, poetry, film studies, Holocaust studies, and anthropology. The Film Archives holdings include approximately 1,000 color and black and white motion picture films. Work will be completed over a seven-month period, beginning in January 2012 and ending in July 2012.

The development of processes and guidelines to facilitate the use of historical film and video from the civil rights era, with a focus on enabling access for blind and visually impaired users.

The Accessible Civil Rights Heritage (ACRH) Tier II proposal seeks to develop processes and guidelines supporting the delivery of annotated archival video to the higher education community with a particular focus on blind and visually impaired (BVI) users. The ACRH project will research the creation, curation, and consumption of online humanities collections by developing a test corpus of culturally significant newsfilm on American civil rights, dating from the 1950s to the 1980s. ACRH will then combine the deep knowledge of experts on the era with the work of archivists and human-cognition researchers to develop new cataloging and access procedures that deliver high-quality, meaningful experiences to BVI users about culturally significant material. The team will produce evidence-based accessibility guidelines and software that will be published as open resources for use by educators and archivists.

Collaborative planning for creating access, through an online portal, to regional Native American writings held by small tribal archives across New England. Three pilot projects to test workflow for digitizing these materials would be undertaken and protocols and agreements for future collaborative work would be drafted.

The project will convene a group of regional Native American knowledge keepers, humanities scholars, and digitization and intellectual property experts for project and planning activities associated with the online portal, "Writing of Indigenous New England." At present our growing collaboration includes scholars, librarians, web developers and tribal historians from New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. We seek NEH funding to accomplish three initial goals: (1) convene a 2-day editorial board meeting and planning session, from which we will (2) write up our editorial guidelines and priorities, agree on culturally-sensitive intellectual property protocols, and establish technical specifications for the website; and (3) run three pilot projects at the Tomaquag Museum (RI), Indigenous Resource Collaborative (MA), and Passmaquoddy Heritage Center (ME), to help us establish workflow, clarify budget and staffing expectations, and begin drafting some larger funding proposals.