A four-week institute for 25 higher education faculty on law in medieval England as represented in legal, literary, and historical texts.

This institute focuses on law in medieval England (600-1300), showing how laws were embedded into medieval culture by studying literary works and historical sources. The literary and historical materials will provide contexts for and illustration of medieval thinking about right and wrong, rule and justice, and the negotiation of disputes. By analyzing law codes, literature, and documents, participants will learn how to deploy legal texts in their teaching and research.

A two-week institute for 25 college and university faculty to study Latinx art history in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

The University of Houston (UH) in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and its International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) request funding for a Level 1 NEH Summer Institute for higher education faculty. The institute would provide the intellectual environment for twenty-five university and college teachers to explore the full range of Latinx art history. The two-week institute will be held June 7-21, 2021.

A four-week institute for 25 college and university faculty, to introduce humanists to the scientific, ethical, and social dimensions of bioengineering.

With the development of genome editing, tissue engineering, stem cell research, and neural interface design, bioengineering is dramatically influencing, and potentially fundamentally altering, what it means to be human. Humanists must take a leadership role in guiding the development and use of novel technologies by educating their students to engage in critical discussions and societal deliberations about our conceptions of ourselves, the shape of human society, and the nature of our shared future. Over the course of four weeks, participants will deliberate on these topics through the lenses of ethics, history, philosophy, literature, and film, while experiencing first-hand what it’s like to do science, from editing the bacterial genome using a do-it-yourself CRISPR kit to peering into the inner workings of a non-human primate research laboratory.

A three-week institute for 25 higher education faculty on the life and works of author Zora Neale Hurston.

This 3-week Institute for Higher Education Professionals focuses on author Zora Neale Hurston's diverse body of work, and its unwaning impact on American literature and culture. A novelist, folklorist, anthropologist, journalist, and precursor to the applied humanities, Hurston is the most prolific African American woman writer of the early 20th century. Her oeuvre, including an autobiography, novels, essays, and folklore collections published at the height of her career, is still expanding, as her previously unpublished work, namely short stories, plays, and ethnography, appear recurringly in print. "Hurston on the Horizon: Past, Present, and Future" is inspired by this as well as the enduring popularity of Hurston's seminal novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. The Institute will enable 25 participants to develop new perspectives and deeper appreciation of Hurston's texts in order to place her in 21st century contexts and foster new directions for teaching and research.

A four-week, residential institute for 25 higher education faculty to study womens roles in and contributions to Buddhism.

This 4-week, Level II residential institute program for college and university teachers is planned to take place June 6 to July 1, 2022. The Institute will be offered by the Asian Studies Development Program (ASDP), a national initiative of the East-West Center, and is designed to meet the needs of twenty-five educators in community colleges, liberal arts colleges and universities.

A three-week, residential institute for 25 higher education faculty to study the modernist movement in Chicago.

The Newberry Library seeks Level I support for a residential, three-week summer institute for twenty-five college and university faculty that will explore Chicago’s vital contribution to the modernist movement. From July 18-August 5, 2022, Making Modernism: Literature, Dance, and Visual Culture in Chicago, 1893-1955 proposes to explore the distinct, groundbreaking styles of Chicago modernism as well as the city’s connections to other metropoles. Directed by Dr. Liesl Olson (Director of Chicago Studies, Newberry Library) and Dr. Susan Manning (Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities, Northwestern University), Making Modernism will offer an expansive look at creative expression in Chicago across the arts. Participants will have the opportunity to engage actively and critically with the Newberry’s archival collections in order to understand the networks that contributed to the explosion of cultural styles associated with the modernist period.

A three-week, hybrid institute for 25 higher education faculty to study religion and borders, with a focus on Mormonism in Mexico.

This three-week Institute will use the history of Mormonism in Mexico as a case study to explore the impact of borders and migration on religious change in the modern world. The concepts of borderlands and migration are central to many fields in the humanities, and the Institute will consider them in terms of religious, political, cultural, and social history. The Institute will proceed in three units: first, considering theoretical work on the topic of borderlands and its relationship to religion, as well as an introduction to the history of Mormonism in Mexico; second, focusing on major themes dealing with Mormonism in Mexico and pursuing projects related to the topic; third, discussing participants' projects and how they engage with the dynamic space of religion on the US-Mexico border. In examining Mormonism in Mexico, the Institute will engage in questions far beyond Mormonism itself, relevant to educators interested in a wide range of topics surrounding migration and borderlands.

A three-week, residential institute for 36 higher education faculty to examine Civil War and Reconstruction history through the lens of the archival turn.

This two-week residential institute for higher education faculty places Civil War and Reconstruction history within the context of the “the archival turn,” a scholarly intervention that explores how ideology, politics, bias, and history itself shapes the contents of archives. While scholars from Asian to European history have examined this question in relation to their fields, few Civil War and Reconstruction historians have probed this question, despite the overwhelming abundance of Civil War archives throughout the country. This institute provides an opportunity for 36 historians to investigate how the archival turn can generate new ways of looking at old documents in an effort to breathe new life into the social and cultural history of the Civil War Era, which spans 1830-1877.

A three-week, residential institute for 25 college and university faculty on the history of the book in the American Revolution.

Florida Atlantic University proposes hosting an interdisciplinary institute on the history of the book in the American Revolution. Printed material played a crucial role in circulating the ideals of the Revolution. The institute combines readings and discussions on theoretical aspects of book history with hands-on experience with rare books and workshops that allow participants to create their own paper, use a historic printing press, and construct a book. This practice will provide a deep understanding of the book as not only a collection of text but also a historical object produced by the labor of a diverse group of Americans who were key actors in the history of this country. While learning about the history of the creation and use of books, we will develop ideas about how the physicality of these objects and their place in history can be explained and represented in classroom teaching even when an institution does not have access to a rare book collection.

A two-week institute for 25 higher education faculty that would bring a transnational perspective to Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx cultures in the United States.

The Transnational Dialogues in Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx Studies Institute will explore transregional, transnational, and interdisciplinary scholarship and curricula addressing the African diaspora in Latin America and its diasporic populations in the U.S. Organized into three parts - Historical Dialogues, Cultural Dialogues, and Afrolatinidad Futurities - this two-week program is proposed for June 6-17, 2022. It will support 25 higher education faculty who seek a deeper scholarly engagement at the intersections of Africana, American, Latin American, and Latinx studies. Participants’ intellectual and pedagogical growth will be facilitated through presentations, discussions of texts and primary sources, mentoring opportunities, workshops, and excursions. All sessions will be available in a residential-hybrid format.

A four-week residential institute for 30 higher education faculty on knowledge and globalization in the early modern period.

"Global Geographies of Knowledge" enriches scholarship about the complex human, material, and ideological entanglements which characterized the first age of globalization. Drawing on historical geography and sociology; economic, legal, and literary history; and the intersections of the histories of art and science, our institute emphasizes how forms of knowledge conditioned and transformed perceptions of places. This framework reveals the global, polycentric dimension of how ideas were generated, refashioned, and transmitted. New courses and research projects will emerge from this Institute, along with innovative teaching modules on place and the construction of knowledge in world history surveys and upper-level undergraduate courses on empire, religious encounters, trade, travel, migration–coerced and free–and other forms of cultural interaction.

A four-week, residential institute for 30 higher education faculty to engage with the scholarship, interpretation, and performance of ancient Roman comedy.

This National Endowment for the Humanities Institute for Higher Education Faculty, “The Performance of Roman Comedy,” will train college faculty and graduate students in the latest developments in the scholarship, interpretation, and stagecraft of the ancient theater of Plautus and Terence. Over the course of four weeks in summer 2023, trainees will, under the instruction of visiting experts representing three generations of scholarly excellence, study ancient evidence for and modern experiments in the performance of these plays; the social, historical, and literary contexts of the plays; and their continuing significance and influence. Trainees will put their instruction to use by rehearsing scenes from Roman comedy in multiple styles, and in both Latin and English, as well as developing pedagogical modules to apply and share what they have learned from the training and instruction. The Institute will conclude by filming the performances of those scenes and preparing post-Institute

A three-week residential institute for 26 higher education faculty to explore the concept of place in religious studies.

"Revisiting Religion and Place," an NEH Summer Institute with the UVA’s Religion, Race & Democracy Lab, will bring together religious studies faculty and advanced graduate students for an immersive 3-week exploration of critical new perspectives on the theme of "place." Given recent, dramatic advances on the study of place in the environmental humanities, social sciences, legal studies, and indigenous studies, the time is ripe for rethinking place as a fundamental feature of the study of religion. We wish to introduce scholars in religious studies and related fields to this enormously productive re-thinking of the idea of "place" that has occurred across disciplines, to assist scholars in developing a richer and more nuanced understanding of the opportunities and pitfalls that come with using the category of "place" in thinking and teaching about diverse manifestations of human engagement with the world.

A two-week residential institute for 25 higher education faculty to explore place-based and archival approaches to the life and works of American novelist Willa Cather (1873-1947).

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln seeks funding to support an institute exploring place-based and archival approaches to the life and works of American novelist Willa Cather. At UNL participants will have access to unparalleled archival holdings of Cather materials and expertise of a leading center for digital humanities, and at the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, they will experience landscapes and buildings represented in Cather’s fiction that function as a kind of archive. The institute will take a critical approach to all three kinds of archives (special collections, digital resources, and place), considering how they are mediated and what is absent. Cather’s fiction celebrated the achievements of recent European immigrants who settled on the Great Plains but ignored the then-recent forced relocations of indigenous people to make way for settlement. Both the European immigrant presence and absence of the Pawnee will receive particular attention.

A three-week combined-format institute for 30 higher education faculty to study disease, public health, and U.S. history from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. 

This three-week combined institute will immerse educators in gripping historical case studies of disease outbreaks and health crises that shaped American history and led to the development of organized public health. The participants will study in-depth how institutional, political, economic, cultural, and ideological factors have influenced efforts to protect the public’s health and prevent disease in America over the past 250 years. They will produce syllabi, lectures, and interactive pedagogy focused on these case studies and will integrate them into their teaching.

A three-week residential institute for 26 higher education faculty to study ways of reconstructing Black histories, using South Carolina as a case study. 

Reconstructing the Black Archive: South Carolina as Case Study, 1739-1895, based primarily at two institutions located in Upstate South Carolina, aims to uncover ways to understand and reconstruct notions about early Black lives. We will create a community of inquiry allowing us to collaboratively learn analytical strategies from interdisciplinary fields of the visual arts, community-focused research, historical studies, and a swath of other creative fields. Our approach is one of biographical mediation whereby we will take institutional documents, statistics, and seemingly inhumane archival evidence and demonstrate ways that the broad humanities and values can be recognized. We aim to resurrect the hidden narratives of the Black experience in our work.

A four-week institute for 25 higher education faculty about the history of U. S. higher education.

This 4-week Summer Institute on the history of higher education in the United States will combine residential and virtual components. The institute will be offered for the first time by the Higher Education Program (HEP) and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University, located near Washington, D.C. The 25 Summer Institute participants will include full- and part-time faculty, including tenured, tenure track, and non-tenure track, as well as advanced doctoral candidates who teach or plan to teach the history of higher education in the United States. Through deep engagement with history content and history as a discipline, the Summer Institute will enable participants to improve their capacity for teaching the history of higher education. The project will result in a robust Open Educational Resource (OER) on the history of higher education to facilitate teaching nationwide.

A three-week, combined-format institute for 25 college and university faculty on African American and Indigenous contributions to social and landscape history in Richmond, Virginia.

Using Richmond, Virginia as a backdrop, this institute challenges higher education participants to re-examine how we research and teach history through the lens of people in place with a focus on expanding critical spatial literacy. The Institute will lead participants through encounters with monumental and natural sites (such as the James River) that hold legacies of so-called historical firsts, including segregation and publicly contested public spaces commemorating the Lost Cause. Local groups who curate Black and Indigenous histories of Richmond’s cultural landscape will lead tours and participate in discussions to foster participants’ capacity to interpret patterns and narratives of erasure and racialized landscapes and to, in turn, teach and share with students and colleagues.

A two-week residential institute for 25 college and university faculty exploring intersections of geography and social justice in public-facing humanities scholarship.

This summer institute will bring together 25 faculty members from institutions of higher education to explore the possibilities and productive tensions at the intersection of geography and the humanities. Using the city of Boston as a touchstone, the lectures, discussions, site visits, and methodological workshops will explore how geographic concepts and spatial methods can enhance humanistic inquiry and how participants can more fully engage with space and place in their own work. The institute welcomes emerging and established scholars who have not yet used spatial concepts and methods in their work, and as well as those seeking to strengthen existing spatial engagements. The institute will facilitate reflection on how spatial ideas can support the work of public humanities to engage diverse publics in the humanistic inquiry and praxis and expand social and racial justice, equity, and accessibility.

A one-week residential program for 28 philosophy instructors to explore social and political philosophy from Indigenous perspectives.

The philosophy profession lacks diversity, and a core curriculum focused on Western Anglo-European philosophy is a major contributor to this problem. Many philosophy teachers are not familiar with underrepresented areas of philosophy, making it difficult for them to competently teach those areas in their courses. To help address this issue, Northeastern University will host an Institute for Higher Education Faculty on Native American, Indigenous, and Land-Based Social and Political Philosophy. The program aims to provide a cohort of philosophy instructors from colleges and universities across the country with a deep understanding of Indigenous knowledge traditions and the social and political issues facing Indigenous peoples of North America, which will help them successfully integrate this new material into their undergraduate philosophy courses. The program team includes five Indigenous philosopher-educators who will design and run the curriculum.

A three-week residential institute for 25 higher education faculty about trauma-informed approaches to research in archival collections.

Humanities scholarship and teaching rely on collections, primary and secondary sources both human and material, to explore and understand history and human relationships with other ecologies. Without the archives and the material record, we would know much less about key historical events and how they have shaped human and non-human interactions. This NEH Institute brings the humanities tools of observation, reflection, critique, and communication to bear on museum and archival collections, as well as on the practices integral to gathering, creating, storing, and disseminating knowledge through these institutions. By the end of the institute, participants will develop plans for working through and past trauma to engage collections as places and resources for learning, healing, and growth instead of sites for potentially painful or even debilitating encounters.