A project at Dillard University to infuse New Orleans Creole culture, history, and literature into humanities courses and to produce digital and media materials for the university and the wider public.

The project, "Defining, Documenting, and Teaching New Orleans Creole Culture at Dillard," aims to create a digital archive and enhanced humanities course offerings at Dillard University that explore critical aspects of the historic, multi-cultural, and racial identity in New Orleans. Using selected oral histories to document the evolution of Creole culture, the first area of course enhancement is to create themed freshmen writing courses open to cohorts of students majoring in humanities programs. Additionally, faculty will create a new English course, "Black Creole New Orleans" and create enhanced content on Creole culture to be infused into existing English courses, "Caribbean Literature" and "Linguistics," and the African World Studies course, "Black New Orleans." The oral histories collected will form a new digital archive at Dillard University, and be presented in a short documentary. A culminating event will consist of a panel of Creole scholars from Dillard, LSU, and Tulane.

A summer faculty development institute, curricular enhancement activities, and a series of campus and community dialogues on environmental history and literature at Virginia State University.

Imagining Sustainable Environments: Exploring Culture and Place in a Global Community proposes ways that faculty can promote students' global learning through humanistic approaches that explore the intersection of history, culture, gender, class, ethnicity and nationality and environmental issues. This approach helps redefine narrow concepts of environment and unravel the complexities of humankind's engagement with the natural and built spaces we occupy. Through integrating environmental thought and representation into humanities courses, students gain cross-cultural perspectives of global environmental challenges that communities encounter daily. Thinking and writing critically about these connections enable students to understand complex debates about ethics and the cultural parameters of the environment. The program includes a Summer Faculty Development Institute on Environmental Humanities; Curriculum Enhancement in the Humanities; and Campus Awareness/Community Dialogue.

A two-year program that would bring the history of William Holtzclaw, an important but overlooked black educator, to the institution he founded, to the region, and to the nation.

The topic, Black Man’s Burden: Holtzclaw and The Mississippi HBCU Connection, will allow us the opportunity to integrate the history of the institution into our humanities courses by developing summer faculty workshops; creating curriculum and teaching toolkits; and digitizing the work product. The founder, William H. Holtzclaw, utilized his connection to Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee to implement the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute model to create educational opportunities for African Americans in Mississippi. Holtzclaw was a pioneer of the ‘sustainable agriculture’ movement.

A two-year project that would establish a center for historic preservation at Bethune-Cookman University and that would enhance the program in public history at the institution.

The intent of this program is to bridge the gap between academia and the public through research, publications, presentations, and public programming while training the next generation of historic preservationists. In order to accomplish this goal, this project will assist in the creation of a Historic Preservation Center. This center will provide academic research (which includes preservation practicums) with public programming (which is geared toward community development through historic preservation). The creation of a new Public History academic program completes the foundation necessary to complete the overall task at hand. It will be combined the Swisher Library Archives and the Mary McLeod Bethune Foundation and Museum. However, the creation of a Historic Preservation Center will consolidate the work and efforts of the three entities in a concerted effort.

Faculty development workshops leading to the establishment of a Museum and Heritage Studies Minor at Albany State University.  

The Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Albany State University seeks funding for the development of a multi-disciplinary minor in Museum Studies. The minor serves the common good by promoting diversification of museum fields and providing training for staff and trustees of regional organizations through open workshops with guest lecturers. Additionally, the program has the potential to supplement the regional workforce with student interns during field studies experiences. ASU is the largest HBCU in the state and geographically located to extend these opportunities to a more diverse and underserved population. The need for this initiative is two-fold: to prepare African-American students for fields involving museology, preservation and archiving, and to create career paths for humanities majors while extending opportunities in the humanities to students working in other areas of study. Finally, the Museum Studies minor is part of a larger, ongoing objective to promote the holdings of the university and the cultural institutions in the area.

A two-year faculty and curricular development project at Tuskegee University to integrate humanities study and architectural training and create an interdisciplinary minor in African-American studies.

The“Lifting the Veil” initiative seeks to integrate humanities approaches into the professional training of architects; it also seeks to expand humanities offerings by developing a new minor in African-American studies. The initiative will begin by exploring, both historically and philosophically, African-American education. Booker T. Washington advocated educating the whole individual—the hand, heart, and mind; he also advocated “co-relation,” applying academic study to practical work. Similar questions in our own time probe how to best connect humanities study to the professions. As one of only seven HBCUs currently offering accredited degrees in architecture, Tuskegee University provides an ideal setting to uncover past and current educational theories and philosophies. Tuskegee's Robert R. Taylor School of Architecture and Construction Science (TSACS) will lead this initiative by developing an African-American Studies minor and enriching its architecture history.

Curricular improvements to an oral history course focused on African American women from the rural and small-town South, as well as archival preservation of interviews with these community elders.

In August of 2002, students at Spelman College were introduced to The SIS Oral History Project, a new course that would: (1) open the lens of age in studies of history and literature; (2) identify oral history as a major methodology for research in the humanities; and (3), through student-conducted interviews, give voice and visibility to African American women elders of the South. That “new course” is, today, a demanding project that transforms teaching and learning in the humanities. The project meets criteria for NEH funding for Humanities Initiatives at HBCUs in the following ways: (1) it strengthens students’ skills in writing, critical thinking, oral articulation, and research across disciplines; (2) through a partnership with AUC Robert W. Woodruff Library Archives Research Center, it insures that project research will be preserved and disseminated for use in humanities courses across the nation; and (3) it produces age-conscious scholars for the twenty-first century.

A project to digitize the archives of an important early African American literary and cultural society and to carry forward its legacy through interdisciplinary public lectures and forums.

Collaborating with the Howard University Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (MSRC) and Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church (MAME), the Department of English at Howard University requests funds to support “Bethel 21,” a project that revives and reimagines the Bethel Literary and Historical Association in the 21st century. Like the original society, this project will consist of lectures from scholars and public figures and literary and cultural arts presentations from authors and performers. This iteration of the Bethel, however, as a collaborative project in the humanities between a historical society and a university, will also include critical engagement with the archives of the Bethel Literary and Historical Association’s collection at MRSC and will organize public forums for the community to promote civil, civic discourse as a life skill.

A three-year curriculum development project that would create a new interdisciplinary minor in digital humanities.

Grambling State University's departments of English and History will design and implement a new interdisciplinary minor in Digital Humanities. Grant funding will go toward bringing outside expertise onto campus to train humanities faculty in interdisciplinary techniques and in pedagogy appropriate to the Digital Humanities during planning stages for the minor.

A one-year curriculum development project integrating local oral histories into six humanities courses.

This project utilizes oral histories of New Orleans African Americans who achieved the “American Dream” of homeownership in the second oldest American all-black “suburb in the city” in the 1950s and early 1960s and the first in New Orleans to tell a larger story. Denied by “redlining” from buying homes in the rest of the city, they formed their own community. The project strengthens the teaching and study of the humanities at SUNO by developing new resources in the form of these oral histories, creating a digital Teaching Module for sharing them in humanities courses, teaching them in humanities courses, and preserving them digitally.

A two-year project organizing digital humanities workshops for faculty to incorporate digitized materials about campus history.

Faculty and staff from Humanities disciplines within the College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at North Carolina Central University will form a cohort to participate in a two-year project (2022-2024) that uses the NCCU materials at Digital NC (especially the newspapers and yearbooks) and the materials in the NCCU Archives to develop teaching materials to be implemented in their courses. In the first year, we will coordinate with the Digital Humanities Research Institute at CUNY for workshop materials and instructors who would be willing to run a week of workshops. After the workshop, faculty members will be expected to create and implement course modules using this digital archival material. In the second year, faculty members will participate in a symposium discussing their results and will engage with other faculty members in their disciplines as well as the greater university community and the citizens of Durham, NC.

A two-year project to develop an open educational resource textbook that would examine Black intellectuals’ engagement with Russian/Soviet intellectuals and the cultures of the Soviet Union.

The project “Exploring the Dimension of Russia and Otherness” will focus on an underexamined aspect of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REEES): how African Americans and Black intellectuals have interpreted their encounters with Russian/Soviet intellectuals, and how Russian/Soviet intellectuals have interpreted their encounters with African Americans and Black intellectuals and their culture(s), to include cultural exchanges with national minority cultures of the former Soviet Union and Russia’s near abroad.

A two-year project to develop faculty, curriculum, and other resources for a humanities-centered African American studies program.

Prairie View A&M University, a federally designated Historically Black College and University (HBCU), seeks funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for faculty enrichment and curriculum development to bolster support for the university’s newly launched African American studies program.

A collaboration between the GenEthics Center of the National Humane Genome Center at Howard University and the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care to enhance the links between genetics and humanities at HBCUs.

We propose to advance teaching and scholarship in humanities and genetics by creating a pioneering, multidisciplinary, interuniversity collaboration between the GenEthics Unit of the NHGC and the Tuskegee Bioethics Center. The goals of the collaboration are to: 1) Develop Howard and Tuskegee faculty in the integration of humanities and genetics; 2) Incorporate humanities and genetics themes into relevant courses at Howard and Tuskegee; 3) Produce the curriculum for a humanities and genetics summer course for HBCU faculty; and 4) Plan and execute the inaugural offering of the HBCU faculty humanities and genetics course.

A program to enhance the comparative study of classic works of Western civilization along with selected non-Western and African American works for ten faculty members engaged in revising the core curriculum.

The project seeks to reinvigorate humanities teaching and learning at Kentucky State University by engaging a group of humanities faculty in reading and relating "paired texts" from selected "classic" texts in the Western tradition to African and African-American literature under the guidance of Dr. Thee Smith of Emory University who has developed a field-theory approach to comparative study of works from different cultures. Faculty participating in the project are also members of a curriculum review and revision committee for KSU's Integrative Studies Program (IGS), thus the project's outcomes have direct bearing on changes to the IGS curriculum, which consists of a sequence of four three-semester-credit-hour courses required of virtually all baccalaureate-degree seeking students at KSU. The primary project goal is to improve faculty teaching and to enhance student learning. After-project dissemination plans would extend the impact of the project to other insitutions.

A project on Richard Wright and his works, to include workshops and the development of teaching materials, for faculty and school teachers from the Mississippi Delta.

Funds from this project will be used to enhance MVSU faculty and area school teachers' knowledge of Richard Wrights literary works. The focus will encompass his fiction, non-fiction and little-known haiku. The program areas targeted by this proposal include: 1) to fund visiting scholars to review the university's humanities programs; and 2) to build ties between institutuions of higher learning and secondary schools. Our participants will be faculty and English teachers from the local school districts in the Delta.

A month-long summer program of study of Homer, Dante, Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, and Shakespeare for six to eight faculty members at Grambling and participants selected from neighboring Historically Black College and Universities.

Our month-long program is designed to enhance the comprehension, appreciation and teaching of world literature by exposing teachers from historically black colleges and universities like Grambling State University, Southern University at Baton Rouge, and Xavier University to nationally recognized scholars from elitte institutions like UC-Berkeley, Dartmouth, Barnard, Rice, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Kentucky at Lexington, and the University of Chicago. Major scholars from major institutions have agreed to lead sessions on important figures from the western canon: Homer, Dante, Christine de Pizan, and Shakespeare.

A project to create a historical simulation of the Underground Railroad in Virginia by using interactive gaming technology to educate high school and college students.

Waterways to Freedom: the Underground Railroad in Virginia, will create a digital simulation with historical content and interactive educational features. We are calling this approach Empathetic Simulation Competition Accessing Past Experiences (ESCAPE). Abolitionism was just as important in the South as it was in the North, albeit as an underground movement. For port areas, such as Hampton Roads, Virginia that lay on the east coast's most important waterways, the story about how individuals and networks of people organized this resistance continues to captivate the public's imagination. However, common myths circulating about the activities of the Underground Railroad distract from the realities of the stories, in part because these myths are dramatic and elicit empathy. By approaching this material using ESCAPE, we hope to combine realism and dramatic simulation to our educational objectives by infusing historically possible dialogue, motivations, and actions.

A two-year project on narrative medicine for twenty science and humanities professors to enrich undergraduate and graduate health care programs with literary studies.

The purpose of the project is to train science, English,and nursing faculty at Alcorn State University in the field of literature and medicine. During year one of the project, we will use seminars and guest speakers to disseminate information on narrative medicine. In addition, a year-long reading group will meet and discuss seminal texts on literature and medicine. The final phase of the project will conclude with a three day seminar during which science, English and nursing faculty will design courses in literature and medicine.

The development of a website and searchable database on the life work of pioneer journalist and civil rights advocate Ida B. Wells.

Rust College proposes to develop an online repository (database) with an innovative front-end website entitled, The Center for the Study of Ida B. Wells and the African American Heritage in North Mississippi. We propose a collaborative effort involving three humanities faculty members (in English, journalism and music) and one Social Science (history) faculty member to create content and educational material using web-based technology. Funds will be used to develop an electronically searchable collection of electronic texts written in or about Ida B. Wells and the African-American community of Holly Springs/Marshall County and North Mississippi from which she was born.

A humanities bridge program over two summers for selected high school students on the history, literature, art, and music of the Civil Rights Movement.

"Albany, Georgia: Gateway to the National Civil Rights Struggle" is a two-year project at Albany State University (ASU) supporting a humanities summer bridge program for students from Dougherty and nearby counties in Southwest Georgia. The project allows under-achieving students to learn about the history, literature, art, and music of the Civil Rights Movement. Under the leadership of project director Marva Banks (African-American, African, and Caribbean literature), the program engages tenth and eleventh graders in the study of the Civil Rights Movement, focusing on the catalytic Albany Movement (1961-1963), a collective protest against Jim Crow laws that laid the foundation for subsequent demonstrations in the South and throughout the nation. The project's goals are to improve the participants' critical reading, writing, and communications skills; to lead students in an examination of the history, art, and music of the era; and to involve them in collecting oral histories of surviving participants in the Albany Movement. "ASU alumni helped launch the Albany Movement," notes the project director, "while other activists joined students at Albany State . . . to advance the cause of Civil Rights." During each of two summers, twenty-five students spend six weeks learning about this important history. They study, for example, the role of Charles M. Sherrod, now on the history faculty at ASU and available for interview, as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who "helped lead the charge against segregation laws and policies in the city"; and that of former ASU student Bernice Johnson Reagon (Sweet Honey in the Rock) as one of the original Albany "Freedom Singers." They read works by Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, Rudolph Fisher, Ernest J. Gaines, Maya Angelou, Robert Frost, and Amy Tan, as well as study Billie Holiday's rendition of "Strange Fruit," an anti-lynching piece. They also travel to Montgomery and Selma, Alabama, and Atlanta, Georgia, to visit other sites related to the Civil Rights Movement in addition to those visited in Albany.

A two-year program of study, framed by two conferences, in which ten faculty would conduct research and develop teaching modules on Lincoln University's diasporic heritage.

"Lincoln University of Pennsylvania's Global Heritage and Legacy" consists of a two-year program of study, framed by two conferences, in which ten faculty members conduct research and develop teaching modules on Lincoln University's diasporic heritage. This project seeks to revive the humanities at what has become an increasingly science-dominated institution. It does so by shaping a program that harnesses Lincoln University's distinctive history as the first institution of higher learning for African Americans (1854), ample legacy of prominent graduates, and ongoing connections with Africa and the Caribbean. Lincoln University taught Liberian boys beginning in 1873 and, nearly a century later, students from the Caribbean and emerging African nations. It graduated the first president of independent Nigeria and the first prime minister of Ghana. Lincoln University's distinctive humanities alumni include Langston Hughes of the Harlem Renaissance; the late writer and musician Gil Scott Heron; Larry Neal, founder of the Black Arts Movement; and film historian Donald Bogle. The program opens with a four-day summer institute with topics including "Lincoln University poets and their impact on the world; the University's impact on African history and Africa's impact on the University; the University and the Civil Rights Movement; and Frederick Douglass as a catalyzing figure for humanities studies." Sessions also introduce faculty to the university's online archives and collection of African art. During the following academic year, ten core faculty, selected through competition, conduct research and develop course modules that build on the institute topics and university resources. They present this work at a two-day humanities conference in the fall of 2013. Though the summer institute and fall conference are be open to all faculty and the general public, priority for the core faculty would be given to those who teach first-year students in order to maximize the program's impact.

A three-year series of faculty workshops, public lectures, and course development activities leading to the transformation of Howard University's Classics Department into a Department of Ancient Mediterranean Studies.

The Department of Classics at Howard University requests NEH support for a series of workshops and public lectures by visiting scholars who work in two areas: (1) cultural connections in the ancient Mediterranean and (2) the classical tradition with emphasis on Classica Africana. The planned workshops will provide the intellectual underpinning for our process of transformation into a Department of Ancient Mediterranean Studies. The public lectures will introduce the Howard community to a new degree program in ancient Mediterranean studies planned to replace the former Classical Civilization degree, terminated as of 2015. The grant proposal requests funds to develop the full Ancient Mediterranean Studies degree program, especially (1) to provide funds to bring in outside scholars as guest lecturers/workshop leaders; (2) to procure reading materials to be used as shared readings for our core team; (3) to create opportunities for our core team to study, innovate and plan together.

A two-year archival digitization, faculty-student research, and course development project on the work and legacy of Booker T. Washington, to take place at Tuskegee University.

This project seeks to strengthen humanities education and scholarship at Tuskegee University by re-examining Booker T. Washington's influence in education, politics and civil rights, business, and literature and the arts. Although considerable scholarship on Washington already exists, the extent of his regional, national, and global impact has not been fully explored. The project will include faculty-student research collaborations; enrichment of existing English and History courses; development of a new interdisciplinary, team-taught course; a public symposium; creation of a new section of the Tuskegee University Archives Web site to include previously unexplored archival materials on Washington's life and work; and initiation of an ongoing Humanities Institute.

A curricular development project to bring humanities faculty from Central Valley community colleges to Modesto Junior College to study the local and regional culture of California’s Central Valley.

Five faculty members from the humanities disciplines (humanities, history, philosophy, and literature) will explore the diverse cultural backgrounds of the populations in our community in order to make the curriculum in these disciplines more relevant to the students in humanities courses. The project includes lectures by imminent scholars from California universities; multi-week seminars on specific topics; exploration of arts, museums, centers and festivals; development of learning modules that reflect the findings of the seminars; and a symposium to share findings with community college faculty from around the Valley. Humanities curriculum will be revised to reflect the local and regional culture of the people of California's Central Valley.