To support the purchase and development of films and video cassettes, the design of teaching modules and a workshop for Mississippi high school and two-year college teachers on the use of film as a teaching tool in language and literature courses.

It is a commonplace assumption that modernity comes late to England. This argument assumes that humanism and the Reformation create a sudden break for English history. "Recursive Origins" proposes a model of historical transition based in the continual engagement with the presence of the past. Rather than discovering an insular England fundamentally transformed by modernity, it suggests that fifteenth-century writers such as Lydgate, Malory, and Caxton developed a complex skepticism about textual culture inclusive of secular and religious authority, and profoundly influential to their strongest readers, Spenser and Shakespeare. Reading and writing: the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries exist in a circuit of cultural production.

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A book-length study of the National Council of Negro Women. 

This is the first full-length scholarly monograph on the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), the largest black women’s organization in the United States at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Era. Whereas recent studies of militant and visible civil rights efforts seek to retrieve and analyze a radical model of social change, this story examines how the middle class black women of the NCNW used their respectability, moderate reputation, and national network to gain access to and money from powerful political and business leaders from the late 1950s through the 1970s. Their private, non-governmental, self-help approach even appealed to conservative leaders. However, NCNW also funneled financial resources and support to projects and individuals deemed too controversial by mainstream America to gain funding on their own, thus challenging clear-cut boundaries between radicals and moderates, leftists and liberals.

Research and writing leading to a book on prosthetics and mobility aids in Victorian literature.  

Wheelchairs, Crutches, and Disability in Victorian Literature will be the first monograph to center mobility aids and their users in its approach to analyzing Victorian literary depictions of disability. I argue that mobility aids are not mere peripherals but profoundly shape disabled characters’ experiences, narrative arcs, and social and spatial relations within Victorian literature. This project contributes to the study of both literature and disability during a key period in the history of disability. I also contextualize literary representations with a broader examination of how mobility aids are discussed and pictured in nineteenth-century medical journals, newspaper articles, song lyrics, catalogues, and advertisements. An NEH Summer Stipend for June and July of 2022 would enable me to make progress on chapter 4 of the project, which focuses on disabled child characters in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) and Dinah Mulock Craik’s A Noble Life (1866).

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Consultation with a preservation specialist about preserving and making accessible audio recordings of oral history interviews documenting the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s.

The preservation of 200 audiotapes comprising 1,300 hours of oral interviews, meetings, and speeches documenting the Civil Rights Era in Mississippi from 1944 to 1979.

The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) maintains its library collections at three separate campus locations in Hattiesburg, Ocean Springs, and Long Beach. The USM Gulf Coast Library at the Long Beach campus contains monographs and special collections in paper and film formats. Since 1992, USM has had a Disaster Response Action Team (DRAT) that conducts regular drills and training based on a collections disaster preparedness plan. Days before the hurricane, the DRAT was activated and carried out many activities that included moving selected collections away from windows and pre-positioning plastic sheeting in storage areas. When staff gained limited access to the Gulf Coast Library, which sustained flooding on the first floor, and started a generator to regain control of the temperature and relative humidity, they discovered a mold outbreak in the collections. Following an assessment by DRAT and an architect, the decision was made to use a well-known library disaster recovery service to relocate the collections and begin stabilizing the environment by removing shelving, carpet, and some sheet rock walls. The service contractor is also providing a freeze method to dry and recover materials designated by the team for salvage. The contractor's estimate for its services is $110,000.

The digitization, transcription, and annotation of the papers of Mississippi state governors from 1859 to 1882 to include official correspondence, military telegrams, and letters and petitions from the public.

The Civil War Governors of Mississippi Digital Documentary Edition (CWGM) is an open-access collection of nearly 50,000 documents from the state’s governors’ papers from the late 1850s through the early 1880s that will be scanned, transcribed, and annotated over the next six years. CWGM is seeking a three-year NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant to fund the first three-years of this project. Mississippi's Civil War-era governors' records capture the everyday experiences of southerners from the period just before the American Civil War through the end of Reconstruction and into the New South. The project involves a cross-domain partnership between archivists at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, digital archives specialists at the Mississippi Digital Library, and a historian-led research team at the University of Southern Mississippi.

To support a consultant's advice in planning the arrangement, processing and cataloging of the Lena Y DeGrummond Collection of Children's Literature manuscripts, illustrations and books.

To support the preparation of a variorum edition of the poetry of John Donne.

Supports a comprehensive study of Mississippi before it gained statehood.

To support preparation of texts of ABSALOM, ABSALOM!, THE HAMLET, and the COLLECTED STORIES and UNCOLLECTED STORIES by William Faulkner prefatory to their inclusion in the Faulkner Computer Concordance.

To support work on THE VARIORUM EDITION OF THE POETRY OF JOHN DONNE.