Funded Projects Query Form
54 matches

Planning and holding a conference on the roles of radio and listening in processes of decolonization in subaltern communities. (12 months)

This collaborative research convening project on radio and decolonization brings together an international cohort of scholars to produce and publish scholarship that will help radio archivists and producers, as well as scholars and students in a range of academic disciplines, to better understand and communicate the roles of radio broadcasting and listening in processes of decolonization. Its primary activity is to organize and host an interdisciplinary conference, which will include scholars with different points of view working in diverse fields including literary studies, music, history, sociology, anthropology, and media studies. The conference will be advertised to the public with attendance free of charge. Final outcomes include disseminating the conference via live streamed video, which will be recorded and uploaded to YouTube and linked to the conference website; paper abstracts; and short videos of the participants discussing the primary sources and material objects.

Writing of a book that describes a digital archiving project based in Puerto Rico and its contributions to disaster studies and the digital humanities. (24 months)

“Archiving Puerto Rico: Digital Memory and the Temporalities of Disaster” explores the intersections of critical disaster studies, digital humanities, and lived experiences in the Puerto Rican archipelago, utilizing the non-hierarchical collaborative strategies of AREPR. The proposed volume, composed of six chapters and an afterword, incorporates contributions from AREPR’s team members and community partners that are grounded in new theories of digital humanities and disaster studies that emerged from the project. Authors explore post-custodial archiving practices used in building AREPR’s digital repository that allow community partners and academics to cocreate research and collaboratively design project outputs. Related topics sit at the nexus of participatory design, memory work, social and climate justice, and digital time. Archiving Puerto Rico provides a framework for scholars, cultural institutions, and community organizations to develop similar collaborative projects.

Research and writing of a co-authored book revealing the stories of Cubans who fought in the Angolan Civil War. (36 months)

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” -- Viet Thanh Nguyen. From 1975 to 1991, over 450,000 Cubans participated in a civil war in Angola that became one of the many arenas of the Cold War. The Cuban state-constructed narrative about the war tells a story of heroism and sacrifice to pay back the debt of slavery and help end apartheid in South Africa. But how do the Cubans, who participated in the war, many of whom today live in the United States, remember their experiences and make sense of what they witnessed? Our manuscript will explore these memories. It will be based on archival research and 75 oral history interviews, including ten in-depth case studies. Given the dominance of the Cuban government’s ideological, heroic and racialized narratives about the war, these grassroots testimonies gathered in Cuba and in the diaspora (mainly South Florida) will offer a more nuanced and complex understanding of the war experiences.

Preparation of a series of peer-reviewed articles on the semantics of emotion in Latin texts from 200 BCE to 1700 CE, creation of a linguistic database and development of Latin corpora. (36 months)

We are applying for Manuscript Preparation funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Collaborative Research program for a mixed-methods study of psychology and emotion in Latin texts over two millennia. Leveraging the interdisciplinary backgrounds of our project team, which span classical philology, history of emotions, psychology, anthropology, data science, and natural language processing, we will explore key questions concerning the construction and operation of emotions in historical texts and how they reflect the psychological evolution of individuals and societies. Central to these efforts will be the creation of high-quality infrastructure and tools, including large diachronic Latin corpora, datasets profiling the semantics of emotions, and reproducible computational pipelines. Our work will be described in a coherent series of peer-reviewed articles targeted to a diverse range of audiences, all of which will be submitted by the end of the grant period in 2026.

A digital repository of findings and research templates based on humanistic research on the simulation of human language, communication, art, and culture by AI software. (36 months)

The Design Justice Labs are conceived as a networked scholarly digital project that connects researchers and students with community partners in the US, Australia, and South Africa to develop and share research on the “AI” modeling of human languages, communication, arts, and cultures (“generative AI”). Inspired by design justice principles as elaborated by Costanza-Chock (2020), our labs center groups that are marginalized by design processes. Rutgers will focus on large language models (LLMs) through “probing” experiments that assess bias and errors; explore the tendency for homogeneity and normalization in AI-generated storytelling; and propose new humanities-inflected benchmarks for machine “understanding.” Australian National University (ANU) will work with large image models (LIMs) to explore their visual logics, and the modes of creativity and politics they enable or foreclose in the context of decolonial and contemporary arts and media practices. University of Pretoria (UP) will extend the capacity of research with, and data creation for, local African languages, while exploring the socio-cultural impacts of LLMs that marginalize these languages. (Edited by staff)

Research and writing leading to a digital project exploring the cultural, economic, and social influence of four theater districts in early modern London. (36 months) 

Shakespeare’s Theaterscape: London Playhouse Districts (1576–1642) is a scholarly digital project that couples theater history scholarship with GIS technology to better understand the place of particular playhouses within their urban contexts. This collaborative project by an international team of scholars centers on digital cartographic reconstructions of four discrete theatrical and entertainment districts in early modern London. A fully open-access website will feature these interactive maps, a collection of edited source materials on which the maps are based, and a series of interpretive essays exploring the implications of the research. The first phase of the project will be completed in September 2026.

Preparation of a co-authored book on the Indigenous history of northeast Florida. (36 months) 

We are applying for Manuscript Preparation with a completion date of December 2026. We propose to develop the first comprehensive Indigenous history of Northeast Florida. Our book challenges pervasive colonial triumphalist narratives that erase Indigenous peoples to focus solely on colonial “firsts”: the “first” Protestant colony (La Caroline, 1564-65) and the “first” and “oldest city” (St. Agustín, 1565) in the present-day United States. Centering the Timucua-speaking Mocamas, Yamasees, and Guales, we intend a cohesive Indigenous history that does not begin or end with colonization. We will demonstrate how Indigenous people shaped and survived colonialism, undermining prevailing myths of Indigenous “extinction.” Our study will transform not only regional but also national understandings of Indigenous history, European colonization, and Indigenous survivance—advancing the effort to craft inclusive narratives that reshape the understanding of scholarly and public audiences alike.

A three-day conference at Emory University exploring how historical, political, and cultural norms have shaped tango as a transnational art form in the 20th and 21st centuries. (12 months)

This convening project will organize and host an interdisciplinary conference of international scholars and scholar-artists on tango. The project is centered on broadening the scholarly discourse on tango, its history, its influence on culture and society, and its application by uniting twenty-three scholars from around the world and of a variety of humanistic disciplines, including race and gender studies, political history, musicology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, dance history, and performance. The primary product of this project is a three-day conference at Emory University in Atlanta, GA in November 2024. A subsequent product will be a digital project consisting of building a website through the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship of the workshopped and edited conference papers and presentations in spring 2025. With these two outcomes, we expect to provide a model of how an art form like the tango is studied as a humanities concept and reinvigorates the human experience.

Planning for a website exploring the thirty-three unpublished notebooks of Ceija Stojka (1933-2013), an Austrian Romani Holocaust survivor, as art, literature, and social and political commentary. (12 months)

As a Planning International Collaboration opportunity, this project aims to transcribe, annotate, translate into English, and plan for digital presentation the thirty-three unpublished notebooks of Austrian Romani writer, artist, activist, and educator Ceija Stojka, who survived three concentration camps. Experts from the U.S., France, and Austria transcribe the notebooks, which are in phonetic Austrian German and Vlax Romany dialect, and meet virtually in fall 2023.The team convenes in Vienna in January, 2024, to review progress and to research in archives and museums. In spring, the team completes the English translations. In August, 2024, the team presents the project in Bad Ischl during an exhibit of Stojka’s art works. Finally, they develop a plan for the digital presentation that will provide an unexplored perspective on Romani cultures and history and contribute to Stojka’s multifaceted oeuvre and that of the Romani peoples, whose voices have yet to receive overdue attention.

Preparation of a coauthored book on the history of the Cherokee Nation (pre-1600 to 2010). (36 months) 

The most recent comprehensive history of the Cherokee Nation was written in 1963; it continues to sell more than 500 copies a year through an academic press. It fails to address key issues, such as gender and race, raised by social and cultural historians since the 1960s, let alone cover the last sixty years of Cherokee history. Cherokee Nation citizens, journalists, and academics understand its limitations and have requested an up-to-date book written in accessible, engaging prose. We are working with an agent to pitch this project to presses able to bring this book to the widest audience. As we identify a publisher and seek funding, we already are writing "Sovereign Kin: A History of the Cherokee Nation." With the support of the NEH Collaborative Grant, we intend to conduct research trips to the Cherokee Nation and the Oklahoma Historical Society and collect interviews with key Cherokee Nation citizens. We will complete a draft of the manuscript by August 2025.

Planning and holding a conference centering Indigenous people and knowledge-making in the study of North America’s borderlands. (12 months) 

We seek funding to hold a conference on Indigenous borderlands in North America–the first in a series of international conferences on Indigenous borderlands, crossings, histories, and futures in both American and global contexts–and to prepare a volume of essays for publication. The goal is not only to Indigenize our approach to the world’s borderlands, but also to bring these spaces and their crossings to the fore in humanistic approaches to planetary change. We seek nothing less than to center Indigenous histories and interrelationships as a bedrock of world history and to use this foundation to envision new paths into the future. Bringing historians into a strategic conversation with scholars of other disciplines and with Indigenous community representatives, we ask how cross-disciplinary and community-facing dialogue can advance humanistic knowledge, developing new ways to envision borders, crossings, histories, and futures in contexts of social and environmental change.

Research and preparation of a print manuscript and accompanying website about the Cataract House hotel in Niagara Falls, New York, an important stop on the Underground Railroad. (36 months).

In the Manuscript Preparation category, From the Cataract House to Canada highlights the activism of African American hotel workers who operated Niagara’s busiest Underground Railroad station. This project is a synthesis of archaeological and archival research, enhanced by an ambitious public information program. Results of excavations begun in 2017 will be integrated with new research identifying and exploring the experiences of an ever-changing staff of seasonal employees. Applying advances in borderland theory with an emphasis on Black agency, the team will examine how the hotel’s employees collaborated with African-descended people on both sides of the US-Canadian boundary to ensure safe passage for uncounted numbers of freedom seekers. Products will include an accessibly written, richly illustrated volume, complemented by a web-based StoryMap, QR-coded interpretive materials linked to the Cataract’s location, and a social media campaign inviting descendant participation.

Preparation of a special supplement to the Hastings Center Report composed of 18 essays analyzing cultural narratives concerning dementia in the US and Europe to be made available in print and online. (18 months)

The Meanings of Dementia: Interpreting Cultural Narratives of Aging Societies is an 18-month project to produce new critical writing on meanings of dementia in diverse social groups in the United States and other aging societies. Dementia refers to a group of common, age-associated, progressively debilitating, ultimately terminal conditions affecting thought, memory, speech, and behavior. Humanities scholarship has long studied personal narratives; this humanities-social science collaboration will consider how greater attention to cultural narratives – concepts expressed through metaphors, tropes, images, and other representations that circulate through a society to make meaning out of experience – can translate into public humanities work fostering greater inclusion for fellow citizens living with dementia or providing dementia care. We will produce a print and open-access digital volume of 18 essays for peer review and print publication as a supplement to a scholarly journal.

Preparation of a digital database and interpretive website about the modernization of Cairo between 1828 and 1914.

We request funding for a two-year (2022-2024) Scholarly Digital Project in the Collaborative Research grant competition. In this project, the participants study the impact of capitalism and bureaucratic agency from pre-industrial to industrial Muslim-majority urban societies through the example of nineteenth-century Cairo, the capital of the Egyptian province in the Ottoman Empire. A historian, a digital humanities specialist, five students at Duke University, and international collaborators in France and Egypt investigate this research topic through the creation of a born-digital tool (an XML TEI database of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish newspaper articles) and an HTML website about Cairo’s urban transformation. The products will include articles in peer-reviewed journals as well as the born-digital, peer-reviewed, and freely available dataset, short interpretative essays, and visualizations on the website, hosted by GitHub and double-stored at Duke University Library.

Ten planning workshops and a semi-public symposium on the filmic production and international organizational infrastructure of the United States Information Agency (USIA, known internationally as the United States Information Service, USIS) between 1953 and 1999. (12 months)

The “Legacies of USIA Moving Images Through International Lenses” project will bring together (virtually) a team of renowned international scholars and archivists who are committed to developing international studies of the USIA and its corresponding USIS acronym in offices around the world. This team will schedule a series of ten workshops that develop an interrogative process toward the production of granular analyses of hundreds of USIA films, which will lay the groundwork to identify the opportunities, challenges, and inter-disciplinary potentials to realize new humanistic research about the history and impact of USIA moving images (motion pictures and television/video), especially regarding select areas of the world: Latin America, East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the U.S. itself. This grant will entail two years of research, workshops, and granular analysis culminated by a major public conference plus publication in a blind-peer-reviewed online journal.

Planning and holding a conference on Black performance in early modern Iberia (1500-1800) and preparation of conference papers for publication in a journal special issue. (24 months) 

This project will convene a conference on 29-30 April 2022 focusing on how the Atlantic slave trade and resulting African diaspora shaped Iberia’s “Golden Age” of theater. Diverse modes of Black performance enriched this quintessentially early modern entertainment as it took shape in Portugal and Spain on the Iberian Peninsula. This theater also thrived across the Atlantic as these two maritime empires extended their reach. To explore this topic in depth, we will bring together nineteen scholars from North America, Europe, and Latin America to present papers at the conference, which will be free and open to the public, at New York University’s King Juan Carlos I Center. After going through peer review, papers will be published in the Bulletin of the Comediantes (volume 75, no. 1 & 2, 2023), reaching a worldwide audience through print and online editions.

A three-day conference and open access volume on the topic of climate change in South Asia. (24 months)

This application for Collaborative Research: Conference is a collaboration between Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, and School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai, India. This project includes conference and allied publications and outputs that will focus on humanistic approaches to climate change in South Asia. This conference will not only contribute to the emerging field of environmental humanities but also serve to curate the diversity of experiences of a changing planet in South Asia. The project will enable faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars based in the US and abroad to come together in punctuated outputs leading up and subsequent to the major conference convened at Cornell University in September 2022. These outcomes include monthly reading groups, a podcast series, a teaching tools online forum, and an open access edited volume.

Preparation for print publication of a co-authored monograph on the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in the First World War (1914-1918). (36 months)

We are applying for an NEH manuscript preparation grant in order to complete the research and writing of a co-authored book manuscript and two research articles on the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire in the First World War. Our work will consist of new archival research that focuses on the internal dynamics of the Habsburg State after war is declared and emergency law goes into effect. The project will build on recent trends in Habsburg studies which have brought to light the empire's political vibrancy and adaptability, in place of longstanding traditional narratives of its inevitable decline and fall. As such we hope to offer a critical new explanation for how the Habsburg Empire collapsed during the First World War and, more importantly, show how the story of the Habsburg Empire as a state collapse helps us to understand the political extremism and the fall of the rule of law during the twentieth century in Europe and the world.

A three-day conference and two edited volumes on the relationship between philosophy and money. (24 months)

“Philosophy and Money” is a two-year Conference Grant proposal in support of a first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary collaboration to survey the role of money in the history of ideas. Although the history of philosophy is rich in discussions of money, the topic has been largely neglected in contemporary academic philosophy. There are practical and moral implications, but this project foregrounds foundational questions concerning the relation between economic practice and the development of philosophical theories. In the first year a team of scholars across the humanities and social sciences convene in workshops hosted by The Toolbox Dialogue Initiative to share feedback on original research and to address methodological challenges to interdisciplinary collaboration. In a second year, participants reflect on the results of the conference to revise individually composed chapters and to co-author section introductions to Volumes One and Two of The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Money.

Planning and holding a workshop and virtual symposium on Indian, British, and American contributions to the architecture, collections, and gardens of Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta. (12 months) 

Our collaborative project focuses on the Indian legacy of the Victoria Memorial Hall (VMH), an imperial museum and memorial to Queen Victoria set amidst 64 acres of gardens in Calcutta (Kolkata). While a handful of scholars have discussed the VMH as an imperial museum, the histories of Indian contributions to its imperial legacy remain largely overlooked. Remarkably, these contributions were entangled with British imperial art, architecture, and gardens, as well as with American collections of European art. As such, the VMH represents the confluence of Indian, British, and American networks of art, architecture, and garden-design. Our project investigates how the VMH’s Indian legacy was shaped by these transnational networks, and how that legacy might be analyzed within the broader context of decolonizing imperial histories. This project involves scholars from the United States, the UK, and India, who will participate, first, in an exploratory workshop at the VMH and, next, in a virtual symposium.

Planning of an international collaboration on the topic of bringing humanities perspectives to the creation of Artificial Intelligence. (12 months)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an emergent set of technologies. Though touted as a fourth industrial revolution, AI is subject to hype and misinformation. Despite increasing talk about making AI “ethical” and “human-centered,” humanists seldom shape these discussions. “Unboxing AI” is a new international collaboration: at Rutgers, Lauren Goodlad, is leading an interdisciplinary working group in “Critical AI.” At Australian National University, Katherine Bode works with faculty in three AI-related institutes. “Unboxing AI” will organize and publicize two exploratory workshops that put humanistic thinking at the core of research questions that move beyond the technical issue of AI’s “Black Box.” Our written plan will lay out steps for a peer-reviewed special issue and may also project 1) a jointly-hosted international conference, 2) jointly-developed and/or team-taught curricula for ANU/RU students, and 3) a white paper for international circulation.

Preparation of a print manuscript detailing the American-Honduran excavations at the ancient Maya site of Copan (1989-2010). (36 months)

The comprehensive volume entitled, The Str. 10L-16 Sequence: The Architectural Development of the Core of the Early Copan Acropolis, details the evolution of a Classic Maya capital that dominated the SE Maya area for 400 years (426-822 CE). This two-part volume presents the Structure 10L-16 architectural sequence in its entirety, with Part A focusing on the earliest levels excavated by the University of Pennsylvania Museum and Part B concentrating on the later levels excavated by the Asociación Copán. The proposed project will support the intensive collaboration needed to produce a cohesive study of the architecture, iconography, and hieroglyphic inscriptions that formed a narrative of royal power and legitimacy throughout Copan’s history. The manuscript, to be delivered in 2024, presents an intensively researched case study of the development, maintenance, and eventual dissolution of an ancient political capital that will inform analyses of archaic states in the Maya area and beyond.

Preparation of an open-access digital history of Alaska. (35 months)

The Anchorage Museum is requesting support for the development of a collaborative, open-source digital textbook for the history of Alaska. The project will create a comprehensive resource that tells Alaska’s history with inclusive, multi-layered narratives and perspectives, broadening an understanding of Alaska’s place in regional, national, and international contexts. Through multimedia links with primary and secondary sources, new research and historic material, the publication will bring together curated content that fosters a robust understanding of Alaska as a place of extremes, as well as a place of constant change and resilience. It will build a foundation that can scale from broad chronological overviews, to the personal story, to archival images and art. It will honor the authentic voices of the state’s history, deepening an understanding of Alaska in the context of place, identity, and adaptation, with scholarship reaching across history, the humanities, and the social sciences.

Preparation of a print monograph and digital archive detailing the origins of writing in Mesoamerica (1500-300 BCE). (36 months)

This book project charts the origins and development of writing in Mesoamerica to explore the critical time in the Early and Middle Formative Periods (ca. 1500–300 BCE) when Mesoamerican peoples developed a number of writing systems from sophisticated iconography. Further, it examines the continuous dialogue between these ancestral artistic systems and later scripts, such as those of the Maya and Zapotec cultures, as well as how writing influenced visual culture. Building on a range of theoretical models, new discoveries, and recent field research, this book project elucidates the transition from a shared foundational iconography to phonetic writing. The aim is to craft a robust understanding of the emergence of writing and contextualize it in the rich visual culture of Mesoamerica, thereby contributing to a better theoretical conception of the origins and role of writing in early civilizations.

Planning and holding a conference on Chinese food and food culture in the modern world, from the 19th century to the present. (12 months)

We are applying for an NEH Collaborative Research grant to host a major international conference on modern Chinese food and foodways. This conference will serve as the first step in organizing and writing a critical volume of essays that will frame and define the field of modern Chinese food studies. We will be bringing together scholars working in and between fields such as history, anthropology, food studies, rural sociology, ethnic studies, film and literature, and media and communication studies to discuss issues surrounding the central themes of modern Chinese foodways, including politicization, industrialization of food production and consumption, scientific rationalization, migration and global circulation, and identity formation.