A preparatory program and three discussion groups for 60 veteran and active-duty service members from Colorado Springs and surrounding areas.

To the Battlefield and Back Again: Conversations on War, Trauma, and Life After Service, seeks to facilitate an extended, community-based exploration of three themes: “Discourses on Going to War,” “The Modern Battlefield: Warfighters and Trauma,” and “Coming Home/Home Front.” Within each theme, we will consider the Trojan War, World War II, and Afghanistan/Iraq, enabling participants to situate and compare diverse military experiences across time and cultures. Leaders and participants in each thematically-based discussion group will come from the Colorado Springs civilian and veteran communities, and from the many active-duty service members and military-associated civilians who are housed in and around the military installations in the Colorado Springs/Pikes Peak region.

A discussion leader training program and three eight-week discussion groups for 70 incarcerated veterans, co-sponsored with the DE-CRUIT program.

New York University, the DE-CRUIT Veterans Transition Program, and NYU’s Prison Education Program propose a series of discussion groups for veterans who have been previously incarcerated. The groups will examine writings by Shakespeare and other plays, poetry, short prose, and historical texts and will apply that examination to an analysis of events and experiences connected to World War I and the War in Afghanistan. The discussions will illuminate the following themes: (a) the insights that can be gained from exploring war and the veteran experience in supporting the post-prison transition, and (b) the role of camaraderie and community in overcoming trauma and readjusting to civilian life. All of the veterans who will train to be discussion leaders will have previously completed the DE-CRUIT program and have served as DE-CRUIT facilitators. Authors of many of the key humanities sources will co-lead discussions of their writings alongside the veteran discussion leaders.

A graduate course to prepare Emory students to lead discussions for veterans, followed by their facilitation of four parallel discussion series on the experiences of war read through The Aeneid and selected works on the Vietnam War.

Emory University proposes to organize a program of discussion groups that will meet five times. In Talking about Service, participants will explore aspects of the concept of duty from wars in ancient Rome to World War II and Vietnam through a close reading of Virgil's Aeneid, transcriptions from interviews of veterans collected over the past ten years in Georgia, and other historical documents. They will also discuss readings from the anthology Standing Down: From Warrior to Civilian and Bloods: Black Veterans of the Vietnam War: An Oral History by Wallace Terry. A discussion leader preparation program will draw on the expertise of Emory faculty. A distinctive feature of this application is the institutional context, which includes a vibrant Humanities Center and significant relationships with regional Veterans Administration services, the Centers for Disease Control, and an extensive network of health and wellness programming designed specifically for veterans.

A preparatory training program hosted by Oregon Humanities and three discussion sessions for 15-20 participants, to be held in Dorchester, MA; Blacksburg, VA; and one remote session utilizing the SAKAI learning management system.

Our goal for these Dialogues is to explore the call to military service and offer opportunities for reconciling and repurposing that call into service in civilian life. These three Dialogues will engage 15-20 students (mostly veterans plus invited civilians) with primary sources drawn from moral philosophy, US history, literature, and images. Through letters, speeches, essays, poems, fiction, music, painting, photography, film, and architecture, we will explore Homeric epics, the American Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and WWI, to ask questions that challenge our assumptions about service, duty, and equality. In keeping with NEH’s goals for A More Perfect Union, studying these wars through the lens of service, allows us to better understand how US history informs and guides our service to our democracy, both as soldiers and citizens. The Dialogues will be team-taught over a series of 14 weeks and culminate in a service-learning project. (Dialogues faculty Jack Cheng and Jim Dubinsky are

The training and mentoring of student veterans at two universities to lead campus- and state-wide dialogues on female combatants in the Civil War and the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Working with an advisory committee consisting of veterans (emphasis on student and women veterans), faculty from CMVE member colleges and universities, veteran administration counselors, corporate veteran’s association representatives, and community members, Michigan Humanities will develop a program designed to train student reflective conversation facilitators, and hold at least three reflective community conversations both on campus and in the community.

An undergraduate seminar to train ROTC cadets and student veterans as discussion leaders, followed by a series of discussions with local veterans focused on personal and public memory in the Civil War and the Vietnam War through letters, literature, and historical writings.  

The Bowie State University (BSU) Department of History and Government, the BSU Department of Military Science, and the Honors College proposes to conduct a three-part program under the auspices of the NEH Dialogues on the Experience of War grant. The program, which will train Senior Army Reserve Officer Training Corp (ROTC) cadets and advanced student veterans to conduct discussion groups with local veterans, will explore how two wars, the Civil War and the Vietnam War, are imagined and remembered through three central themes: service, sacrifice, and reintegration. At the core of memories of war is an array of collective meditations on war and the victims of war. Before it became history, war became memory, since the experience of a great tragedy was felt at an individual, personal level. The narratives of war are thus made after an irrevocable “privatization” of the tragedy. The soldiers and civilians directly affected by the tragedy are faced with the direct, concrete, detai

An eight-month preparatory program for veteran curator-artists and museum studies graduate students, followed by their collaborative facilitation of public discussion programs on veterans’ artistic responses to war experiences.

The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), in partnership with the emerging Veteran Art Movement (eVAM), proposes an NEH Dialogues on the Experience of War program that incorporates academic study, curatorial practices, and focus group discussions culminating in veteran-led discussion forums at the second National Veteran Art Triennial and Summit at the Chicago Cultural Center and Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, Illinois. Through this partnership, UIC and eVAM will develop a comprehensive program that prepares a cohort of predominantly Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) veteran artists/community leaders who served in the Global War on Terror (GWOT) as humanities discussion leaders.These veteran fellows will study an interdisciplinary cross-section of humanities sources that illuminate the connections and contradictions between the eighteenth and nineteenth-century US “Indian Wars” and twenty-first-century “GWOT” across time and space.

A 12-month program resulting in the creation of an ROTC course and a public discussion series dealing with case studies of the U.S. military’s involvement with genocide, preceded by a preparatory program for discussion leaders

This program will facilitate a stronger relationship between veteran and ROTC students through the creation of a training and discussion program using the lens of the US military and genocide. We will focus on four themes in this relationship, and each theme will revolve around a linked case study: Perpetration and genocide against the Native Americans with a focus on the Seminole Wars, Liberation with a focus on the Holocaust, Witness with a focus on ISIS genocide against the Yazidis, and Prevention with a focus on Afghanistan. We will use a variety of humanities sources: music, letters, poetry, art, photography, and oral history. Student Veterans will be trained to lead a semester-long class of primarily ROTC students; in the following semester, three public discussions will be led by the trained veterans.

A two-year series of preparatory and discussion programs exploring the histories of marginalized military service members for veterans and others in three communities in Minnesota and at sites in Maine and Mississippi 

The Complicated Service discussion series will bring together Veterans and community members to examine the experiences of service members who identified themselves as female, Black, Native American, LGBTQ, or an immigrant, and the dynamics, reasoning, and strength behind serving a country that does not always serve you in return.

A one-year project to train two pairs of veteran center staff and art historians to lead discussions on visual arts and the experiences of war, followed by their facilitation of two discussion series for students and members of the public.  

This project will create and support two discussion groups of student-veterans, veterans, military family members, and others with military ties, one at Sinclair College and one at Wright State University. Both colleges are located in Dayton, Ohio, with large numbers of active and retired military personnel due to the presence of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the Dayton Veterans Administration Hospital, the Museum of the United States Air Force, and many aerospace-focused companies. The discussion groups will discuss the experience of war, covering themes such as propaganda, combat, comradeship, leadership, death, homecoming, and memorialization, using works of visual art - sculpture, painting, prints, and photography - from global traditions and periods of time ranging from the ancient to the present, with a special focus on the American Civil War and the Vietnam War.