A two-year project for faculty to study and develop courses on food studies.

The “Coastal Culinary: Tasting Food Narratives” project is a two-year (25 month) effort to strengthen the teaching and study of humanities within the Galveston region, specifically at Galveston College, a small Hispanic serving community college. The humanities topic of focus is food studies, food pathways, and the use of personal narratives informed by family recipes – story-telling focused on food. Twelve faculty participants in addition to the Director and Co-Director (n=14) will engage in a four-phase professional development sequence of (1) group study, (2) curriculum re-design, (3) implementation, and (4) assessment of practice through self-study.

A multi-year collaboration between humanities and culinary arts faculty and students exploring Latino history and culture through foodways.

The Food and Humanities Project is a multi-campus learning community which links humanities and culinary arts courses at the City University of New York to develop an understanding of Latin American history and culture. Students in history courses are guided by an expert in the field to conduct primary research in Latin American food history. The recipes they select as reflective of important moments in the region’s development will be created in the kitchens of a culinary arts program. This process will be filmed and the resulting videos first shown to the participating history students during the course of the project and then made public as teaching resources through the project’s permanent web site.

A one-year planning grant to develop new courses in food studies and create a food studies minor.

Virginia Tech proposes a new humanities-focused food studies minor that brings the insights and methods of the liberal arts to the critical study of foodways and food systems. The minor requirements will include a new Introduction to Food Studies course; electives from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences; one-credit hands-on courses, and a capstone course with an experiential learning component. We will begin the planning grant period by holding a workshop guided by directors of other food studies programs. Over the course of the year, the planning committee will continue monthly virtual discussions with these consultants and others as we craft collaborative course proposals and the minor proposal. By the end of the year we will have submitted paperwork for the new courses and minor, created a plan for recruiting students, and developed a shared community around these aims.

To support research and publication of a Wyoming cookbook documenting Wyoming food traditions and history, a new theme in the Reading Wyoming book discussion program and the film discussion series dealing with food and foodways, and a one-day tour to Salt Lake City to explore the impact of immigrant groups on American food traditions. These programs will complement the Wyoming tour of the traveling exhibition, "Key Ingredients: America by Food".

The programs in We the People: Food and Foodways in Wyoming lead up to and take place during the Wyoming tour of Key Ingredients: America by Food, the Museum on Main Street traveling exhibit about American cuisine through regional traditions and international influences. These programs will explore American food traditions and encourage examination of our own regional food traditions.

Two one-week Landmarks workshops for eighty school teachers on the Mississippi Delta region, its rich history, its diverse peoples, and its impact on the American imagination.

We propose two six-day workshops that will introduce participants to major heritage themes in the Mississippi Delta, a place with a history that is simultaneously unique and quintessentially American. Participants will learn how the Place of the Delta has affected its culture, specifically in regard to its settlement and ethnic composition, its music and art, its civil rights struggles, its foodways, its literature, and its contributions to American popular culture. The workshop will be highly experiential, giving participants the opportunity to learn how to use Place to both learn about culture and facilitate learning by their own students.

The writing of a book-length history of the Jiankiang Empire in China, 200-600 CE.

This project studies the evolution of the ethnic identity of the Han Chinese by focusing on a vitally important period in its development, the early medieval era (200-600 CE) which followed the fall of the Han Empire. Using insights from critical Han studies as well as GIS-based spatial analysis, I will analyze the environmental, cultural, military, and political genesis of the Jiankang Empire, a southern successor to the Han Empire which was one of the great Asian empires of its time. Its history has been submerged by traditional historiography’s focus on the political and military history of northern China, and the emphasis on cultural and ethnic unity. The resulting book will demonstrate the contingency of the evolution of a Han Chinese ethnicity and polity, the very real prospect of alternative ethnogenesis in East Asia, and the significance of this development for Chinese, East Asian, and world history.

Research for a book on how economic and environmental forces have affected ecological and human health on the reservation of the Hopi Tribe in northern Arizona.   

Shifting Nature: Agriculture, Environment, and Health on the Hopi Indian Reservation since 1882 is the first book to analyze how economic and environmental forces transformed one of North America’s oldest and most biologically diverse food systems, disrupting human and environmental health in the process. Intertwining archival research with oral histories conducted collaboratively with the Hopi Tribe, the book asks questions at the heart of environmental humanities: How do communities lose or maintain control of the cultural, economic, and environmental resources in which their subsistence is rooted? How does the erosion or resilience of traditional foodways shape human and ecological health? And how can oral history help us understand historic shifts in indigenous food systems, disease, and the environment? The project illuminates these questions by using the Hopi story as a microcosm through which to explore shifting histories of subsistence, ecology, and health in modern America.

Planning of an exhibition that examines the relationship of barbecue to regional and national culture and how themes of race, politics, social class, religion, and concepts of community and identity can be recognized and celebrated with food.

The Atlanta History Center (AHC) seeks support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for the proposed exhibition, Barbecue Nation. Utilizing a distinct American food, the exhibition examines the relationship of food to regional and national culture and how themes of race, politics, social class, religion, and concepts of community and identity can be recognized and celebrated with food. AHC has been considering the concept of a barbecue-based foodways exhibt for nearly 10 years and we have assembled a distinguished panel of advisors composed of leading experts in the fields of history, sociology, foodways, culinary arts, journalism, and barbecue cooking to provide a strong scholarly and culinary base for the exhibition. Barbecue Nation is founded in the concept of place by which the culture of a region ? or a nation - is expressed by a product of the region?s character - how the foodways characteristics of place can be used to describe place, community, and existence.

Implementation of a historic site tour and interactive media that would tell the stories of immigrants who settled in New York City after 1945.

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum requests a $400,000 Implementation Grant to create the tour content and interactive media for an exhibit that will tell the stories of immigrants who settled in New York City after WWII. The Museum will install this exhibit in a recently acquired 1888 tenement at 103 Orchard Street. This project will draw on humanities scholars whose expertise spans such themes as ethnic succession, pluralism, lived religion, immigrant foodways, the garment industry, and immigration. The project's principal deliverable is a dynamic exhibit telling three stories of contemporary immigration through: 1) an interactive and multi-layered apartment; 2) Storylines, an interactive subway map; 3) educator instruction, provided by humanities scholars, and scholar-produced essays that will be used as training material; and, 4) a series of public programs under the auspices of the Museum's free evening lecture series, Tenement Talks.

To support planning for the reinterpretation of Philipsburg Manor with emphasison enslaved African Americans, with public programs, interpreters, concerts, museum theater, foodways, demonstrations, and education programs.

The hiring of an audiovisual preservation consultant to conduct an assessment of 800 oral histories and 102 documentary films that include approximately 700 hours of raw interview footage.  The materials were collected over the course of 25 projects documenting the diverse food cultures of the American South.  Footage from the collection has already contributed to several publications in the series entitled Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People, and Place; a quarterly academic journal called Gravy; and documentary films.  So far, the oral histories have been organized along four culinary trails—tamales, boudin, barbecue, and gumbo—with additional specialty topics ranging from Greek restaurants in Birmingham, Alabama, to the Southern food traditions that traveled north to Chicago during the Great Migration.

The Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA), based at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture (CSSC), will use the NEH Preservation Grant to hire the consulting firm AV Preserve to review primary source materials, both physical and digital archives, to assess their condition and offer recommendations for preservation as the first steps of creating a new and central SFA archive housed at the CSSC, which will be able to be accessed via research visits and a website. The SFA collection offers a window into the American South through its changing foodways, amassing primary resource materials important to academic work in humanities fields that include U.S. economic, social, and political history; immigration history; labor history; cultural studies, gender studies, race studies, studies, geography, and cultural anthropology. The SFA collection includes 802 completed digital oral histories and 102 documentary films including 700 hours of raw interview and b-roll footage.

The purchase of archival quality storage supplies to complete the rehousing of 223,928 inventoried archaeological artifacts from 12 counties in northwest Arkansas and 16 counties in northeast Arkansas in the collections of the University of Arkansas Museum. These artifacts represent the legacy of Archaic period peoples through the mound-building Mississippian culture and span the period from 5,000 BCE to CE 1,500. They include stone tools and pottery shards, 5,244 fragile whole ceramic vessels, and organic artifacts including moccasins and baby cradles.

The project would provide an object-level preservation environment for the University of Arkansas Museum's archeological collections from northwest Arkansas bluff shelters and northeast Arkansas mound sites. The bluff shelter sites are unique in that they include preserved organics such as cane, grass, wood, and seeds, materials not normally preserved in archaeological contexts. The mound sites represent the material culture of the populous Mississippian peoples in present-day Arkansas that DeSoto met in 1541 on his march through the American southeast. Both of these collections are used to better understand the culture, lifeways, foodways, and religion of these Precolumbian peoples. These collections are currently stored in acidic boxes and trays. The purchase of storage supplies would allow us to transfer the collections into archival-quality boxes and trays for improved object preservation and access.

A week-long community digitization event and a public program to document the history of Clarksdale, Mississippi, known as the “birthplace of the blues.”  Through the digitization of photographs, legal documents, family recipes, maps, personal letters, business records, visual art, and audiovisual materials, the project would preserve Clarksdale’s history.  The proposed events aim to increase awareness especially of the “non-blues” history of this Mississippi Delta city, including the Civil Rights Movement, regional foodways, the Mississippi River and environment, religious practices, agricultural heritage, literary achievements, and Chinese, Lebanese, Jewish, and Italian immigration to the region.  The project involves collaboration with Clarksdale Carnegie Public Library, whose staff would run the digitization event, and Coahoma County Higher Education Center, where a community event highlighting notable items and describing their historical and cultural context would be held.  After the project, the library would make digitized materials available via a Common Heritage website.

Clarksdale, Mississippi, is one of the most culturally significant cities in the Mississippi Delta and is internationally famous as the "birthplace of the blues." However, important non-blues aspects of its history are often overlooked. The significance of its people and events as well as the ways in which normal citizens have contributed to the Delta's rich culture have not been documented. This project will be the first systematic opportunity for the citizens of Clarksdale to contribute to preserving their city's history through the digitizing and archiving of historical materials.

Three digitization days and one culminating exhibit of the materials gathered to showcase the historical and cultural foodways of South Jersey residents, to include the tools, recipes, and cookbooks they use and preserve among their families, along with an interactive storytelling concert. The digitization events would be hosted in three different counties in South Jersey, at the Burlington County Library, the Gloucester County Library, and the Homestead Youth Association in Camden County. Staff of the Folklife Center at the Perkins Center for the Arts, the lead organizer, would partner with other local organizations in the tri-county area—the Haitian Society of Willingboro, Zeta Phi Beta Sorority in Glassboro, the Polish American Society, the Caribbean Festival Organization, and the Boys and Girls Club of Camden—to encourage participation among the region’s diverse communities. A digital data curator from Rutgers University Library and a folklorist and foodways professor from Goucher College would advise the project team in planning and implementing the events and exhibit.

Tastefully South Jersey Family Heritage Preservation Project and public programming explores culture through the lens of food traditions in three southern counties of New Jersey. An event will be held in each county for community members to preserve heritage artifacts such as recipes, foodways tools, photographs, documents, and pottery through digitization. Communities targeted through fieldwork are West African influenced and Southern African-American, Dominican Republican, Haitian, Cuban, Polish, Ukrainian, Turkish, Mexican, Peruvian, and Guatemalan. The project includes audiovisual documentation of stories and contextual information. Participants receive a free digital copy. Permission will be requested to exhibit digitized items at the culminating exhibition, shared on our website and be housed in New Jersey State Libraries Digital Collections. The project explores topics on the importance of foodways in expressing identity, maintaining community cohesion, and performing ritual.

18 months of stipend support (2-3 fellowships) per year for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

The Schomburg Scholars-in-Residence Program (SIR) is one of The New York Public Library’s (NYPL) landmark research Fellowship programs. This project will bring three Fellows annually to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture during the 2019-2022 academic years. During 6-month residential fellowships, these SIR Fellows will have the opportunity to use the Schomburg’s renowned collections in their research into the history and cultures of the peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora, fostering the creation of new humanities publications in the fields of African, African American, and African Diaspora studies. NYPL is requesting National Endowment for the Humanities support from the FPIRI program to support 18 months’ worth of Fellowship stipends each year, totaling 54 months of support over the grant period, along with selection expenses for the 2019-2020, 2020-2021, and 2021-2022 cohorts.

Eighteen months of stipend support a year for three years at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Grant funds support fellows' stipends and help defray expenses related to the selection of fellows.

The New York Public Library and its Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture respectfully request a grant of $327,000 to support stipend and selection expenses for its Scholars-in-Residence Program from January 1, 2013 through June 30, 2016. Since 1986, the Scholars-in-Residence Program has encouraged emerging scholarship in the fields of African, African American, and African Diaspora studies by offering fellowships of six-months or a year to scholars whose work can benefit from extended access to the rich resources of the Schomburg Center and NYPL's three other research centers. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Program will support the fellowships of its 2013-2014, 2014-2015, and 2015-2016 classes of Fellows.

Excavation, analysis, and interpretation of archaeological remains of 18th-century slave communities in three locations in the Virginia Piedmont. (36 months)

Funding is requested over three years for collaborative, interdisciplinary archaeological research to document the material culture of slavery in the piedmont and to address the processes of community formation. Through an analysis of domestic space, foodways, environmental evidence, and artifacts, this project will critically examine how, over a 60-year period, a single community of enslaved men, women and children belonging to John Wayles and Thomas Jefferson materially expressed aspects of community life. How did enslaved communities form in the 18th-century piedmont? Did strategies for shaping the material and social worlds change over time? Did a distinctive regional culture develop? Three piedmont sites associated with this community will be investigated: Indian Camp, Wingos, and the North Hill quarter. New field and laboratory work will be initiated at Indian Camp, research will continue at Wingos, and final analyses will be completed for North Hill data.

Archaeological survey and excavation at two sites in Peru's Zaña valley, historical research in Peru and Spain for preparation for scholarly monographs, and a public interactive website. (30 months)

This proposal seeks funding to support archaeological and historical research on Spanish colonial forced resettlement (reducción) in Peru's lower Zaña valley -- specifically, through archaeological excavations and artifact analysis at two sites (Carrizales and Conjunto 125), as well as archival research in Peru and Spain. In particular, through the study of domestic space and foodways at Carrizales and Conjunto 125, we seek to understand how this Early modern social engineering project took shape in quotidian spaces and how indigenous communities adapted to the challenges of life in new settlements, under a new political-economic regime. Our proposed research incorporates two months of additional archaeological excavations, extensive archival research and artifact analysis, and the publication and presentation of results to both public and scholarly audiences, through digital and printed media.

FolkFabulous at the South Carolina State Fair, a 12-day series of narrative stage performances, facilitated dialogues, and “pop-up-museums” that focus on an expanded and deeper understanding of the cultural and geographic specific traditions of the Southeastern United States.

McKissick Museum of the University of South Carolina proposes partnering with the South Carolina State Fair (SCSF) and the Eastern Cherokee, Southern Iroquois & United Tribes of South Carolina to transform a signature one-day event--FOLKFabulous--into a twelve-day program series through which we aim to significantly enhance and deepen the educational dimension of SCSF offerings, while broadening, building, and energizing the emergent humanities community McKissick has built over the past 40 years. Building on our annual Diverse Voices exhibit themes, these activities shine a light on tradition bearers representing South Carolina’s diverse cultural landscape—storytellers, material culture artists, musicians, dancers, and foodways specialists, among others—who will demonstrate or perform, conduct hands-on workshops and participate in narrative stages. Interactive “Pop-up museums,” are a new feature, in which the pubic brings their own artifacts to share and interpret with others.

The development of a regional folklife festival and trail that accurately depicts the cultural and historical nuances of central Appalachia.  

The Heritage Food & Dance Trail will map the venues, restaurants, farms, and other cultural heritage sites that authentically represent the stories, people, places, and experiences from central Appalachia's past and present. In collaboration with partner institutions, Hindman Settlement School will host a series of asset mapping sessions at locations throughout the region to engage artisans, citizens, historians, community leaders, businesses, and others with an interest in the project; gather information and historical context; and identify individuals for further discussion during formal oral history interviews. These oral histories and asset maps will serve as the basis for the development of a trail and series of events designed to engage the public in thinking critically about their Appalachian roots and encourage further engagement in regional traditions focused on foodways and dance.

An oral history project that will collect and present the stories of rural Vermont.

In partnership, the Vermont Farmers Food Center (VFFC), Shrewsbury Institute for Agricultural Education(SAGE), and the Shrewsbury Historical Society will create the Root Words project; a forum for collecting and presenting the stories of rural Vermonters. The sharing and study of great works of poetry and literature will inspire our participants and guide our process as we consider the elements that make a story powerful and accessible. Collaboratively, we will host a series of live storytelling events that will culminate in an audio visual story series shown at SAGE’s Russellville Schoolhouse and made publicly available on all participating organization’s websites. Community members will have ongoing access to our work through a permanent, interactive, historic photo installation at VFFC. This program will solidify our position as leaders in the community who understand our past, honor the individual while considering the whole, and create new histories from this thoughtful position.