Preparation for print and web publication of fifteen to seventeen volumes of medieval literary texts, focused on the 13th to 16th centuries. (36 months)

The Middle English Text Series (METS) is an ongoing project, now in its 24th year. 78 volumes have been published. This proposal requests funding that will produce approximately 15 more volumes. Above all else, the purpose of METS is to make available for scholarly use reliable editions of Middle English literature deemed essential for literary and historical investigation. The focus of this project is upon literature from the 13th to the early 16th centuries that complement the better-known canonical authors and reach to the boundaries of what was rapidly becoming a considerable corpus of vernacular literature and the beginnings of English literary study. Given its print and online formats the Series has demonstrably enhanced Humanist inquiry of English and Anglo-Norman culture worldwide -- from France, Italy, and Germany to China, Korea, India, Australia, and New Zealand.

Preparation for print and digital publication of American philosopher George Santayana’s Three Philosophical Poets (Volume 8), Winds of Doctrine (Volume 9), Scepticism and Animal Faith (Volume 8), and to begin work on Realms of Being (Volume 16). (36 months)

The Works of George Santayana consists of unmodernized, critical editions of philosopher George Santayana's (1863-1952) published and unpublished writings. The goal of the editors is to produce texts that accurately represent Santayana's final intentions regarding his works, and to record all evidence (in the textual apparatus listing variants and emendations) on which editorial decisions have been based. The Works of George Santayana is projected to consist of 37 books published in 20 volumes. The proposed project is to publish Volume VIII, Three Philosophical Poets; Volume IX, Winds of Doctrine; and Volume XIII, Scepticism and Animal Faith; and begin preparatory editorial work on Volume XVI, Realms of Being. The Works of George Santayana is published by The MIT Press (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England).

Preparation for publication of two volumes (19 and 20) of the papers of John Adams (1735-1826), Revolutionary leader and second president of the United States, and two volumes (13 and 14) of his family's correspondence. (36 months)

The Adams Papers Documentary Editing Project is a comprehensive edition of the diaries, letters, official records, public writings, and literary miscellanies contained in the Adams Family Papers manuscript collection at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, supplemented by Adams documents in other collections and archives. The project focuses on three generations of Adamses: John Adams, Abigail Adams, John Quincy Adams, Charles Francis Adams, and their families.

Preparation of a digital edition of 17th-century poet George Herbert's Complete Works. (36 months)

This project expands The Digital Temple, our edition of George Herbert's English verse, to include all of his known writings. Complete Works includes high-resolution images of the earliest witnesses (first editions, all manuscripts) to Herbert's prose works and poems not in The Temple; TEI-encoded transcriptions that preserve original spellings and orthography while providing modern spellings in the code base; edited reading texts; translations where appropriate; extensive critical apparatus; and a user interface with which to navigate these materials, including a search-and-retrieval portal that takes advantage of the rich encoding. The edition will be a valuable resource for humanities scholars and educators -- literary critics and bibliographers, teachers and students of seventeenth-century literature, historians, and general readers -- who will enjoy unprecedented access to the artifacts captured here in digital form, alongside extensive commentary and other expert apparatus.

Preparation for print publication of volumes 5 (1788-1795), 6 (1795-1829), and 7 (personal and family papers) and online publication of volumes 4 and 5 of the papers of John Jay (1745-1829), a member of the Continental Congress, first Chief Justice of the United States, and governor of New York. (22 months)

The Selected Papers of John Jay is a scholarly edition of the Founding Father's papers, conducted at Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Jay represented New York in the Continental Congresses, was a negotiator of the peace of 1782, and was Secretary for Foreign Affairs during the Confederation. He authored five of the Federalist Papers, was the first Chief Justice of the United States, negotiated the Jay Treaty in 1795, and was Governor of New York. The letterpress edition, published by the University of Virginia Press, will consist of seven volumes of letters and documents, annotated and interspersed with commentary. The edition will bring together, for the first time, all of Jay's most significant documents in context. The published material will become widely available online through the University of Virginia's Rotunda Founding Era series. The edition refers readers to the Jay digital archive, adding value to the online database by providing historical context and interpretation.

Preparation for an English translation of Cuban writer Lydia Cabrera’s (1899-1991) “La Lengua Sagrada de lost Nanigos” (The Sacred Language of the Abakua). (36 months)

We propose a scholarly English translation of La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos - Lydia Cabrera's study of the ritual language of the Cuban Abakua society. Researched in Havana and Matanzas from the late 1930s to 1960 and published in Spanish in Miami in 1988, the book is Cabrera's urgent call for her compatriots to know their African heritage. Although this monograph is the most substantive and critically supported document of the speech and customs of any diasporan group originating from the West African Cross River area, it remains inaccessible to English-speaking scholars including the very Nigerian and Cameroonian linguists most qualified to identify the sources and meanings of Abakua terms and practices. The Abakua example is also important to Americanists more generally, as it demonstrates the expansion of an African-derived identity into the wider population of European, Asian and Amer-Indian descendants, evolving from a racial/ethnic category into a cultural community.

The preparation for print publication of volumes 43, 44, and 45 of the Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, and publication of volumes 39-41 in an existing online archive. (36 months)

Begun in 1970, the Duke-Edinburgh edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas [TC] and Jane Welsh [JWC] Carlyle is regarded by biographers, historians, critics, students, and general readers as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century. Forty-two volumes have been published to date in book form by Duke University Press, and the first thirty-eight volumes have been published in the Carlyle Letters Online (http://carlyleletters.org), with volumes 39-41 now in the process of being encoded, edited, and set for release in spring 2015. This culmination of a thirteen-year effort to bring the Carlyles to the digital world has greatly increased the global accessibility of the edition. Through November 2014 of the current grant period, which began in October 2012, the CLO has had more than one million of its full-text pages accessed in more than 180 countries and has established itself as a leader in the now essential field of digital humanities.

Preparation for online publication of the collected papers of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), colonial American pastor, author, educator, and theologian. (36 months)

The Edwards Works Online utilizes the most current standards for electronic documentary editions and provides a broad range of resources to assist readers and researchers. In the next phase, 2015-2018, the Jonathan Edwards Center, intent on staying current with technological developments in digital humanities, will completely update its platform and website; it will use this new platform not only to re-present its current online archive but also to prepare and present previously unavailable texts, focusing on the sermons Edwards delivered during the "Great Awakening" of the early 1740s and to Native Americans during the 1750s, providing an unprecedented view of him as a preacher in these crucial periods; and it will link these documents to a newly scanned bank of manuscript images.

Preparation for online publication of materials from the pre-congressional career of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), 16th president of the United States. (36 months)

The Papers of Abraham Lincoln is a long-term documentary editing project dedicated to identifying, imaging, transcribing, annotating, and publishing all documents written by or to Abraham Lincoln during his lifetime (1809-1865).

Preparation for publication of two volumes (volumes 9 and 10) of the papers of inventor Thomas Edison (1847-1931), covering the period 1888-1892. (36 months)

The Papers of Thomas A. Edison is a fifteen-volume book edition that will contain 6,500 transcribed and annotated letters, notebook entries, autobiographical writings, and other documents from Edison's lengthy career. This proposal seeks funding to complete the editing of Volume 9: Competing Interests (1888-1889).

Preparation for publication of three volumes of the complete works of Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), with editorial work on nine additional volumes. (36 months)

The critical edition of the complete works of Giuseppe Verdi is a joint publication of the University of Chicago Press and Casa Ricordi in Milan, which aims to make available to scholars, students, and performers, reliable editions of Verdi's music that are both faithful to the sources and suitable for performance. The works included in the project are at the core of the nineteenth-century operatic repertory, from Rigoletto, Trovatore, and La traviata, to Un ballo in maschera, Otello and Falstaff. Also included are Verdi's Messa da Requiem and other sacred choral works, as well as lesser known vocal and instrumental works, such as the songs and the string quartet, some of which are not available in other editions. Having completed a successful transition in editorial leadership, the project has laid plans for broader dissemination through digital publication, a new series of study-scores in reduced format, and the creation of a new website hosted by the University of Chicago Press.

Preparation for online publication of translations of approximately 3,000 pages of documents testifying to Soviet and Russian perspectives on Islam. (36 months)

George Mason University has launched a major new international multidisciplinary scholarly program, the Russian/Soviet Perspectives on Islam (RPI). The project, with primary support from the Luce Foundation, seeks to facilitate scholarly and public understanding of cultural coexistence and conflict in multi-ethnic and multi-confessional societies through the digitization, exploration and dissemination of a large document collection on the encounter and evolving relationship between the secular state and the Muslim regions, groups, individuals, and ideologies on the territory of the former Soviet Union and neighboring countries. Since the Luce Foundation grant does not include support for translation, the present application for NEH's Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant seeks to expand the impact of that program through the translation and online publication of a carefully-chosen subset of those documents.

Preparation for digital publication of the personal and public papers of three South Carolina statesmen: Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (1746-1825), Thomas Pinckney (1750-1828), and Charles Pinckney (1757-1824). (36 months)

This "born-digital" edition will focus on three Pinckney men who participated as military, political, diplomatic, and economic leaders in South Carolina and the nation during and after the American Revolution: brothers Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (1746-1825) and Thomas Pinckney (1750-1828) and their cousin Charles Pinckney (1757-1824). The edition, to be published by the University of Virginia Press, will identify, collect, transcribe, verify, annotate and publish in a selective digital scholarly edition transcriptions, not digital facsimiles, of approximately 3,000 documents of the three men's personal and public papers created between 1750 and 1828. We request funding for three years of the second phase of a projected seven-year project, to be completed by 2020. The project will be housed within the History Department of the University of South Carolina. It will use a DocTracker/FileMaker Pro database system to manage the editorial process and prepare content for digital publication.

The preparation for print publication of volumes 3-5 of a projected 17-volume edition of American author Ernest Hemingway's complete letters. (36 months)

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, being published by Cambridge University Press, is a comprehensive scholarly edition of the some 6,000 surviving letters of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), about 85% previously unpublished. Winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, Hemingway made a profound impact on modern prose. His life and work still command enormous popular as well as scholarly interest worldwide. The letters not only provide important new biographical information and insights into the artistic achievement of this most influential American writer, they constitute a running eyewitness history of much of the twentieth century. The edition is planned for publication in 17 volumes at two-year intervals. Volumes 1 and 2 (spanning 1907-1925) were published in 2011 and 2013. The Project is requesting three-year funding (October 2015-September 2018) to see into print volumes 3 and 4 and complete the manuscript of volume 5, encompassing Hemingway's letters from 1926 through 1934.

Preparation for publication of an edition and translation of Convent Paradise (1643) and Lament for the Death of Regina Donati (1650), devotional works written in early-modern Italian by Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-1654). (24 months)

Arcangela Tarabotti was the most radical female writer in Counter-Reformation Italy. Tarabotti's stunningly modern thought has been the object of intense critical interest, but an important element of her oeuvre -- her devotional writing -- has been almost entirely ignored. We propose to produce, in English translation, the first modern editions of Tarabotti's Paradiso monacale (Convent Paradise, 1643) and Le lagrime per la morte di Regina Donati (Lament for the Death of Regina Donati, 1650). The volumes will show that Tarabotti's radical social thought cannot be separated from the broader context of religious life in 17th-century Venice. Our study of the interaction between early modern religious culture and Tarabotti's protofeminism will change the understanding of this foundational writer as it more broadly investigates the essential role devotional writing -- long ignored by critics -- played in women's wider intellectual life.

Preparation for digital and print publication of Volume 4 of the papers of social reformer and political activist Jane Addams (1860-1935). See website at http://janeaddams.ramapo.edu/.

The Jane Addams Papers Project (JAPP) at Ramapo College of New Jersey’s Salameno School of Humanities and Global Studies (SSHGS) will publish documents covering the years 1901-1935 in two formats. The first, a freely available digital edition will publish images, transcriptions, and metadata for all correspondence and writings between 1901-1935. The second is the Selected Papers of Jane Addams, which will transcribe and publish about 3% of the most historically significant texts, providing detailed annotation and a narrative theme. The digital edition will be drawn from a digitization of an existing microfilm and the proceeds of an updated archival search. An overarching aim of the project is also to serve as a lab for undergraduate students to gain practical experience in historical research, writing, public history, and digital humanities.

Preparation of an English translation of the course lectures Die Frage nach dem Ding (The Question Concerning the Thing) by German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).

The project director and his collaborator propose to make available an English translation of an important course of lectures held by Martin Heidegger at the University of Freiburg during the winter semester of 1935/6, based upon the standard German edition, published as volume 41 in Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe (Collected Edition).

Preparation for publication of the final volume (1600-1750) of a three-volume anthology of Japanese urban literature (1600-1920), with translation into English.

Following the publication of two volumes of an anthology of early modern Japanese literature, one of late Edo-period and the other of Meiji-period works, the proposed project aims to complete a volume representing the early Edo-period. Tentatively entitled, "A Kamigata Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Metropolitan Centers. 1600-1750," it will be the last volume to be published of this series. Focused on the cities of Osaka, a thriving hub of commerce, and Kyoto, the ancient imperial city, Japan saw its first blooming of urban popular culture and the roots of later artistic phenomena including the current fashion of media arts in Japan. Interested in establishing reliable English texts, this volume represents the original style and tone as much as possible, making the works available to a broad range of American readers, including scholars and students. Particular emphasis is placed on the presence and quality of pictocentric features of popular art.

Preparation of an online open-access critical edition and translation of a 16th-century manuscript of an artist's recipes for painting and metalworking techniques and observations on scientific processes. See website at http://www.makingandknowing.org/.

The transcription, English translation, and open-access digital critical edition of a late 16th-century manuscript containing techniques, recipes, and experimental notes, written in French (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Ms. Fr. 640). This exceptionally detailed and self-reflective how-to text includes unprecedented information on techniques, materials, and observations from an artisan's workshop. It sheds light on the day-to-day creative process of the 16th-century craftsperson, and the acquisition and transmission of skilled practice. The edition’s critical commentary will demonstrate the continuity between the craft workshop and scientific laboratory at a pivotal moment in European history when artists began to write down their practices, and their methods provided models for the emerging experimental culture of a new philosophy—the nascent modern science. How-to texts like this manuscript gave rise to the culture of practical knowledge that underpinned the Scientific Revolution.

Editorial work on Volume 8, on family and kinship, for the nine-volume series, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. See website at http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/. 

The Freedmen and Southern Society Project is editing Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, a nine-volume documentary history of the transition from slavery to freedom in the U.S. South. The edition documents a critical juncture in American history: the moment four million slaves gained their freedom. It constitutes a social history in the words of emancipated slaves and their contemporaries. Six volumes are in print; the manuscript for the seventh will go to the press in late 2016; and work on the eighth will be well advanced by the beginning of the proposed grant period. Each volume of Freedom is between 800 and 1,100 pages, twice the size of the volumes in most editions. The editors have published four additional volumes for general audiences and use in the classroom, as well as article-length collections of documents. The project's web site provides both documents and interpretive material; it has been cited as one of the best sites for humanities education.

Preparation for print and digital publication of volume 14 of the correspondence of James K. Polk (1795-1849), member of Congress, governor of Tennessee, and eleventh president of the United States. See website at http://polkproject.utk.edu/.

The James K. Polk Project produces an annotated edition of letters by and to the eleventh U.S. president. So far it has published twelve volumes of the Correspondence of James K. Polk, covering up to July 1847, halfway through his presidency. These make important primary-source documents accessible to scholars and students. The final two volumes will feature letters from the second half of Polk’s presidency and his brief retirement. During this time the United States annexed the Southwest, gold-seekers entered California, the United States recognized France’s revolutionary government, and Americans debated slavery. Polk corresponded with diplomats, reformers, novelists, scientists, clergymen, educators, and Native American chiefs. The letters will nourish scholarship on politics, international relations, African American studies, Native American studies, literature, religion, education, and the history of science. Volumes will be available in both hardcover and free digital editions.

Preparation of a critical edition and English translation of the 16th-century Theologia Indorum (Theology of the Indians) composed in Maya, the first work of Christian theology written in an indigenous American language.

The Theologia Indorum (“Theology for the Indians” or “Theology of the Indians”) by Spanish Dominican friar Domingo de Vico is the first original Christian theology written in either North or South America and remains to this day the longest single text ever written in any Native American language. And yet, since its composition in the central Maya highlands of Guatemala in the 1550s the Theologia Indorum has never been translated into any non-Mayan language, apart from some sporadic sections periodically by various scholars since the 1980s. Whereas most of the scholarship on the early colonial Maya has focused on their now famous writings—such as the Popol Wuj, Xajil Chronicles (or Annals of the Kaqchikel), the nine Books of Chilam Balam, et cetera—which consist of the earliest post-contact literature by indigenous American peoples, critical studies of the specific influences of Catholicism in these Maya texts has only recently been begun within the past decade.

Preparation of a critical edition and translation of a selection of writings by the Belgian architect and art critic Henry van de Velde (1863-1957).

As a painter, designer, architect, teacher, and theorist Henry van de Velde (1863-1957) was a highly original and influential figure on the European art scene and an early champion of abstraction. Our volume presents the artist's most influential writings published between 1889 and 1914. These writings address the origins of abstraction; the interrelationship between painting, architecture, and the applied arts; the role of art in the modern state; and modern art and politics. His corpus is so large and dispersed that it has resisted systematic investigation, and it remains inaccessible to most readers, since his essays were published in three different languages. We have made a selection of van de Velde's texts and are requesting funds to support the work of translation into English, annotation, and introduction that will take place over a three-year period and that will result in an edited volume.

Preparation for publication of a translation of the manuscript journal of Johann Peter Oettinger, a 17th-century German barber-surgeon, describing his travels in Germany, the Netherlands, the Caribbean, and Africa.

From 1682 to 1696 the barber-surgeon Johann Peter Oettinger (1666-1746) traveled across Germany and the Netherlands and sailed on Dutch and Brandenburg slave ships to the Caribbean and Africa. He recorded his experiences in a vivid manuscript journal, but until now his text was known only through an incomplete and heavily manipulated “edition” published in 1885-86, and from a partial English translation (1985) of the 1885-86 text. In 2010-11 Zaugg and Koslofsky discovered a copy of the original manuscript in a Berlin archive. Rich in detail on Africa, Oettinger’s journal contains a rare description of the court of King Agbangla of Hueda (Benin), and is the only German-language account of the slave trade and the Middle Passage from this era. The full manuscript will be vital to historians of medicine, race, and the Atlantic world. Our annotated English translation will make this text readily available and replace the deeply flawed 1885/86 German text and its partial English translation.

Preparation and online publication of an English translation of three lecture series by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995).

The project participants will initiate a translation of the seminars given by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) at the University of Paris between 1979 and 1987. The translations will be available online in a critical edition with annotations on a site hosted jointly by Purdue University and the University of Paris. This is a project in digital humanities that is being undertaken in conjunction with the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris.