Funded Projects Query Form
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Hawai’i Is My Haven maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands. This ethnography emerges from a decade of fieldwork with both Hawai’i-raised Black locals and Black transplants who moved to the Islands from North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Nitasha Tamar Sharma highlights the paradox of Hawai’i as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged anti-Black racism. While Black culture is ubiquitous here, African-descended people seem invisible. In this formerly sovereign nation structured neither by the US Black/White binary nor the one-drop rule, non-White multiracials, including Black Hawaiians and Black Koreans, illustrate the coarticulation and limits of race and the native/settler divide. Despite erasure and racism, nonmilitary Black residents consider Hawai’i their haven, describing it as a place to “breathe” that offers the possibility of becoming local.

The continued development and implementation of a digital recovery hub focused on surfacing the work of American women writers and promoting scholarship on their literary contributions.

The project team is seeking a Level II Digital Humanities Advancement Grant to fully implement a digital recovery hub (piloted under a Level I DHAG awarded in 2020) that will operate as a network of scholars grounded in diverse feminist and decolonizing methods under the umbrella of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW). The hub provides a much-needed infrastructure for project consultation and technical assistance for scholars engaged in the recovery of works by American women writers from all periods. The hub’s broader goals are to: 1) reinvigorate digital scholarship as a recovery method by extending traditional editing projects with network mapping, spatial analysis, and the distant reading of massive datasets; 2) provide support for projects at various levels; 3) act as a feminist peer reviewing body for in-process work; and 4) build a community of use to help recovery projects reach broader audiences through SSAWW’s membership and journal Legacy.

The continuing development of the open educational resource, Literature in Context, an open-access, curated, and classroom-sourced digital anthology of British and American literature in English in partnership with scholars and students from Marymount University.

We are applying for a Level III Grant to build out Literature in Context, a TEI-encoded digital anthology of literature in the English language from 1400 to 1925, designed for use by students, teachers, and the general public. Our project innovates by taking full advantage of the affordances of digitization to create an Open Educational Resource that incorporates interactivity, digitized page images of original editions, and other contextual materials, making it a true replacement for the costly print anthologies used in American and British literature survey courses across the globe.

The continued development of the Mapping Color in History (MCH) portal that allows scholars to analyze and compare pigment data from historical paintings.

Mapping Color in History [MCH] brings together the scientific data drawn from existing and on-going material analyses of pigments in Asian painting in a historical perspective. As a digital portal with a searchable online database, MCH does not only document pigments and their material properties, but also enable an in-depth historical analysis of pigment data through a search tool that identifies specific examples and their locations in both time and space. By developing a database ontology that can bring together fragmentary and uneven data with complex lateral and hierarchical relationships and by compiling pigment analysis data and deep historical research in a systematic manner, MCH enables truly interdisciplinary research and collaboration, connecting humanists and scientists.

The development of case studies about and professional development workshops on the use of BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) for humanities scholars and students interested in large-scale text analysis.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing since their introduction in 2018. By combining huge numbers of parameters with vast text collections, pre-trained LLMs offer advanced general-purpose language understanding off-the-shelf. As powerful as LLMs can be, however, we have seen clear examples of the problems that arise from a lack of good humanities-focused resources to interpret their outputs and to guide scholars in the field. The BERT for Humanists project produces research, training, and tools to inform, empower, and inspire humanities scholars to use LLMs in their disciplines in creative new ways. Together, the products of BERT for Humanists provide an intellectual framework for understanding and evaluating new computational language technologies, so that humanists can use — and critique, as appropriate — both the current generation of LLMs and their rapidly evolving successors.

The Community Heritage Empowerment Toolkit (CHET) project will create a prototype serves standards-based toolkit, consisting of video, written, and aural guides, instructing grassroots heritage preservation organizations how to document a structure’s Life History. Often the community preservationists who have the desire and time to do this recordation possess limited technical expertise or lack sufficient funding to purchase specialized equipment. There is one ubiquitous and empowering device that has the capability to change this: the smartphone. CHET will provide a comprehensive yet accessible smartphone-enabled digital recordation toolkit enabling the completion of small and medium-scale digital documentation projects. This will empower the entire community to actively participate in preservation and expand information capture locally.

The planning and development of a digital archive of oral histories of community members, built by faculty and students at the University of the Virgin Islands.

This project will engage University of the Virgin Islands students in Service Learning by training them in best practices of oral history research, collection, preservation, public engagement and linguistic practices, awareness, and recording. Oral history collection develops students’ critical communication capacities and analytical skills, while also helping to preserve the rich history, languages, and cultures of the Virgin Islands community. This funding will enable a team of UVI faculty members to continue to train and engage a young generation to contribute meaningfully to humanities projects on St. Croix, St. John, St. Thomas, and Water Island. This grant will allow students to further contribute to the preservation of these stories by transcribing and editing the videos to be uploaded into an online public access website, so that other researchers around the world gain appreciation for the history and cultures of the US Virgin Islands.

The continued development of the Digital Humanities Resource Infrastructure for Teaching Technology (DHRIFT) platform to provide technical training in digital humanities methodologies with a particular focus on faculty and staff for historically under-resourced institutions. 

Access to technical training in the digital humanities is inequitably distributed, especially among historically underserved institutions. Since 2018, and with funding provided by two NEH-funded IATDH grants, the Graduate Center, CUNY has supported development of over 30 local DH institutes and intensives by training 48 DH practitioners as part of the Digital Humanities Research Institute (DHRI). Building on the demonstrated success of these approaches, GCDI proposes a social and infrastructural intervention, Digital Humanities Resource Infrastructure for Teaching Technology (DHRIFT), to provide pedagogical support to a wider DH community. DHRIFT is conceived around flexible infrastructure for deployable sites—DHRIFT Core—that can be readily set up at local institutions and which provide ready-to-teach OERs and additional functionality to support DH pedagogy. By building community, curriculum, and infrastructure, DHRIFT aims to facilitate the more equitable development of DH skills.

A series of virtual planning meetings for the development of a prototype platform for builders of digital lexical resources and dictionaries for under resourced languages.

The project supports the creation and dissemination of digital dictionaries for low-resource languages. With many world languages at risk of extinction, online dictionaries & glossaries are increasingly crucial. Unfortunately, the languages most in need of such resources have the biggest challenges. The availability of digital infrastructure for a language is proportional to its representation - the more data that is available in digital format, the easier it becomes to automatically process it. Conversely, the less a language/culture is represented online, the higher the costs of retrieving and processing data about it. We propose to prototype a digital infrastructure that can help redress this inequality by drastically reducing the costs/technical expertise required to create, publish and maintain online dictionaries. A series of iterative development cycles will bring together user-testers, identify their needs, and prepare an alpha-prototype application to address these needs.

Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in Blackstone's England by Kathryn D. Temple focuses on William Blackstone's influential work, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769), which transformed English legal culture and became an international monument to English legal values. Blackstone believed that readers should feel, as much as reason, their way to justice, and as a poet as well as a jurist, was ideally suited to condense English law into a form that evoked emotions. In Loving Justice, Kathryn D. Temple reimagines the aesthetic and emotional world of 18th century English law and provides the first sustained close reading of Commentaries as a work of high art and sensibility. Employing a unique blend of legal, literary, and political history and theory, the author argues that Commentaries offers a complex map of our relationship to juridical culture and continues to inform our understanding of the concepts of justice and injustice today.

This project will publish the book Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golf, written by NEH Fellow Lane Demas (Federal Award Identification Number FT-61703-14), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access ebook.

This project will publish the book Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Century Brazil, written by NEH Fellow Eve E. Buckley (Federal Award Identification Number FT-62004-14), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access ebook.

In 1931, the United States and France embarked on a broadcasting partnership built around radio. Derek Vaillant provocatively examines this sonic alliance in an era of increased global media production and distribution. Focusing on the period from 1931 until France dismantled its state media system in 1974, Vaillant considers how different strategic agendas, aesthetic aims, and technical systems shaped U.S.-French broadcasting and its accompanying cultural politics. He examines mobile actors, circulating programs, and shifting institutions that shaped international radio's use in times of war and peace. Documenting the achievements, miscommunications and failures, and the limits of cooperation between America and France as they shaped a new media environment, Vaillant shows how radio's power as an instantaneous mass communications tool produced, legitimized, and circulated various notions of states, cultures, ideologies, and peoples as superior or inferior.

This project will publish the book Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds, written by Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger (eISBN 9781438480138), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The book analyzes beliefs that materials can have an effect on both humans and deities beyond human intentions. Flueckiger begins with Indian understandings of the agency of ornaments that have the desired effects of protecting women and making them more auspicious. Subsequent chapters offer more examples, from a south Indian goddess tradition that transforms the aggressive masculinity of men who wear saris, braids, and breasts, to the presence of cement images of Ravana in Chhattisgarh that perform theologies and ideologies that differ from dominant textual traditions. Accessibly written and based on extensive fieldwork, the book expands our understanding of material agency as well as the parameters of religion more broadly.

In Making Uzbekistan, Adeeb Khalid chronicles the tumultuous history of Central Asia in the age of the Russian revolution. He explores the complex interaction between Uzbek intellectuals, local Bolsheviks, and Moscow to sketch out the flux of the situation in early-Soviet Central Asia. His focus on the Uzbek intelligentsia allows him to recast our understanding of Soviet nationalities policies. Uzbekistan, he argues, was not a creation of Soviet policies, but a project of the Muslim intelligentsia that emerged in the Soviet context through the interstices of the complex politics of the period. Making Uzbekistan introduces key texts from this period and argues that what the decade witnessed was nothing short of a cultural revolution.

The first formally organized educational institution in Russia, the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, was established in 1685 by Greek monks trained in the Jesuitical tradition. When they created their school in Moscow, the founders emulated the structures, methods, and program of studies of their Jesuit prototypes. As Nikolaos A. Chrissidis shows in An Academy at the Court of the Tsars, this academy had a profound and lasting impact on Russian and Eastern Orthodox intellectual practices, Russian-Greek cultural relations, and contact between seventeenth-century Russia and Western Europe. By uncovering the origins of higher education in Tsarist Russia, this book details how the arrival of European pedagogy worked to eventually bring Russia into the modern intellectual mainstream.

In Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics, Janine Larmon Peterson investigates regional saints whose holiness was contested. She scrutinizes the papacy's toleration of unofficial saints' cults and its response when their devotees challenged church authority about a cult's merits or the saint's orthodoxy. As she demonstrates, communities that venerated saints increasingly clashed with popes and inquisitors determined to erode any local claims of religious authority. The case studies she presents detail how the political climate of the Italian peninsula allowed Italian communities to use saints' cults as a tool to negotiate religious and political autonomy in opposition to growing papal bureaucratization.

Throughout the history of the Crusades, liturgical prayer, masses, and alms were all marshaled in the fight against Muslim armies. In Invisible Weapons, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin focuses on the ways in which Latin Christians communicated their ideas and aspirations for crusade to God through liturgy, how public worship was deployed, and how prayers and masses absorbed the ideals and priorities of crusading. Placing religious texts and practices within the larger narrative of crusading, Gaposchkin reveals an aspect of crusading that is too easily forgotten—the practice of prayer and its dynamic relationship with the practice of arms—and urges us to remember that medieval Latin Christians were as serious about their faith as they were about their warfare.

This project will allow us to publish the book Racing the Great White Way: Black Performance, Eugene ONeill, and the Transformation of Broadway by Katie N. Johnson in an open access format under a Creative Commons license making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of five hundred dollars upon release of the open-access ebook.

Stalin's Quest for Gold tells the story of Torgsin, a chain of retail shops established in 1930 with the aim of raising the hard currency needed to finance the USSR's ambitious industrialization program. At a time of desperate scarcity, Torgsin had access to the country's best foodstuffs and goods. Initially, only foreigners were allowed to shop in Torgsin, but the acute demand for hard-currency revenues forced Stalin to open Torgsin to Soviet citizens who could exchange tsarist gold coins and objects made of precious metals and gemstones, as well as foreign monies, for foods and goods in its shops. Through her analysis of the large-scale, state-run entrepreneurship represented by Torgsin, Elena Osokina highlights the complexity and contradictions of Stalinism.

Heaven's Wrath explores the religious thought and religious rites of the early Dutch Atlantic world. D. L. Noorlander argues that the Reformed Church and the West India Company forged and maintained a close union, with considerable consequences across the seventeenth century. Dutch merchants, officers, sailors, and soldiers found in their faith an ideology and justification for mercantile and martial activities. The West India Company supported the Reformed Church financially in Europe and helped spread Calvinism to other continents, while Calvinist employees and colonists benefitted from the familiar aspects of religious instruction and public worship. Yet the church-company union also encouraged destructive military operations against Catholic enemies abroad and divisive campaigns against sinners and religious nonconformers in colonial courts.

In Among Women across Worlds, Suzy Kim excavates the transnational linkages between women of North Korea and a worldwide women's movement. Women of Asia, especially those espousing communism, are often portrayed as victims or pawns of a patriarchal Confucian state. Kim undercuts this standard analysis through detailed archival work in the international women's press, and finds that North Korean women asserted themselves in unexpected places from the late 1940s—just before the official beginning of the Korean War—to 1975, the year designated by the UN as International Women's Year.

Framed by four State Department-sponsored cultural diplomacy tours in Latin America that Aaron Copland undertook between 1941 and 1962, this project traces the exchange of ideas between Copland and the critics, composers, performers, and scholars he encountered. Author Carol Hess connects American classical music with Latin American music of the twentieth century while also connecting Copland’s cultural diplomacy to U.S. government objectives, arguing that the reception of Copland’s music by Latin American critics encapsulated many of the geopolitical tensions of the moment. Drawing on hundreds of Spanish- and Portuguese-language documents; on interviews and correspondence with composers who either knew or worked with Copland during his 1963 tour; and on Copland’s diaries, this project sheds new light on the composer’s biography, the reception of his music worldwide, and U.S.-Latin American relations as enacted via the broader narrative of cultural diplomacy and its policy agendas.

A bold, restorative vision of Mozart's works, and Western art music generally, as manifestations of an idealism rooted in the sociable nature of humans. Edmund Goehring's Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past offers an alternative vision of Mozart's works and of Western art music generally: such works as Mozart's radiate an idealism that has human sociability both as its source and its object. This fascinating 2018 book-length essay is addressed to any reader interested in the performing arts, visual arts, and literature and their relationship to the broader culture.

In Sorcery or Science? Ariela Marcus-Sells focuses on the scholars known as the Kunta who rose to prominence in the Western Sahara Desert in the late eighteenth century. The book shows how their prolific Arabic writings and pedagogical networks decisively influenced the development of Sufi Muslim though in West Africa. These scholars rose to prominence under the leadership of Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (d.1811). First Sidi al-Mukhtar, and then his son, Sidi Muhammad (d. 1826), established a vast pedagogical network; they produced prolific manuscript texts covering the breadth of the classical Islamic disciplines; and argued for their social authority as Sufi friends of God. Marcus-Sells demonstrates that the Kunta scholars understood human life as governed by the overlapping forces of the material, visible world and a vast invisible realm that both surrounds and interpenetrates with the world of the senses. These theologians presented and provided explicit instructions for practice.