The retention of three jobs and the creation of one job to improve virtual access to the Daytona State College’s photography museum.

The Southeast Museum of Photography's Expanding the Virtual Museum Experience (EVME) project will focus on completing the process of cataloging and digitizing the collection and making it available through a fully searchable database as well as creating new online content to allow a robust and interactive experience for all virtual museum visitors.

Endowment for the museum's interpretation staff and the development of humanities-based interpretive materials for refreshed gallery interpretation.

The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) seeks a $500,000 endowment challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to be matched 3:1 with an additional $1.5 million raised from other sources. The combined $2 million dollar fund will be used to endow the museum's interpretation program, which provides CMA's visitors a range of humanities-based interpretive tools to access and understand the works of art on view in the permanent collection and special exhibition galleries. The endowment will support the museum's dedicated interpretation staff and the development of humanities-based interpretive materials that will make possible the refreshed gallery interpretation, program modification, and technology updates that today's visitors expect.

Endowment for programming in a new Westchester County Humanities Institute that explores humanities themes through the lens of the immigrant experience.

The Westchester Community College (WCC) Humanities Institute proposes to be a campus-wide initiative that supports the research and scholarship of faculty, students, and members of the community by developing and supporting events (including conferences, speaker series, reading series, exhibits, films, and community partnerships) that explore and celebrate the humanities from the perspective of the immigrant experience in a globalized world. The WCC Humanities Institute will shift and expand the study of the humanities from a traditional, western perspective to a multi-cultural lens in order to promote global understanding. The mission of the WCC Humanities Institute is to advance pluralistic and international approaches to humanities education by illuminating the differences and similarities within the disciplines of literature, language, history, philosophy, cultural studies, and communication.

A four-week national institute for 30 college and university teachers convened at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to examine recently recovered women's writing in their historical contexts.

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An online publication on the history of Jesuit slave ownership beginning in 1717 and culminating in the sale of 272 slaves in 1838, the proceeds of which assisted the financing of Georgetown University.

On June 19, 1838, Thomas Mulledy, S.J. signed his name to an agreement with Jesse Batey and Henry Johnson to seal the fate of 272 enslaved persons who resided on Jesuit-owned estates in Southern Maryland, selling them south to Louisiana. With an eye to the events and relationships that formed the warp and woof of the daily lives of this enslaved community between 1717 and 1838, I will work to identify each individual enslaved person present in the documentary evidence and to situate them within their families and larger community. Focusing on the enslaved community itself makes this project ideal for a digital publication. Rather than writing a single linear narrative treatment that could only include a number of individual vignettes standing in for the whole, I will employ linked open data and social network analysis to visualize the entire community of enslaved people and their relationships to one another across space and time.

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MUSIC IN THE AIR: THE LIFE OF SISTER ROSETTA THARPE will be the first biography of one of the great underappreciated American popular musicians of the twentieth century. Raised in the Holiness church, Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973), a singer-guitarist from Cotton Plant, Arkansas, was one of gospel music’s earliest recording artists, its first national star, and the major crossover figure of its Golden Age. Using extensive archival research and oral histories, MUSIC IN THE AIR shows how Tharpe transformed the music of the African American church into sounds that heralded rhythm & blues and rock. Her dramatic story illuminates questions of cultural memory and the importance of African American women and gospel blues to American popular culture.

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My project contributes to understanding the United States’ diverse Latino population by focusing on Hispanic women’s stories of food and family in the Upper Rio Grande region in southern Colorado. It uses transcriptions of food-centered life history interviews gathered over eight summers from fifteen women to write a book grounded in the insights of ethnography, Latina feminism, and ecology. Women’s descriptions of foodways reveal their work, their family roles, their connections to the land, and their subjective reflections on their lives. Their stories point toward a sustainable future for the people and the land.

No project description available

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on 16th- and 17th-century Italian epic poems about the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

“Inventing America in Baroque Italy” examines the ways in which, at a time when most of the Italian peninsula was a colony of Spain, seventeenth-century Italian poets represent Italy’s role in the exploration and conquest of the Americas. Taking as its corpus eleven epic poems written in the Italian vernacular between 1596 and 1650, my book considers the relationship between baroque epic poetry and local politics; between Italian poems about the Americas and Spanish colonialism; and between literary production and emerging notions of Italian identity. A principal argument of this study is that the heated debates about representing Columbus and Vespucci as epic heroes inevitably point to concerns about Europe’s global expansion and Italy’s role in that expansion. This project sheds light on texts that have not received adequate attention in studies of early modern European colonialism and in scholarship on the reception of the Americas in seventeenth-century Italy.

No project description available

Summer research and writing on Gender Studies, Legal and Women's History.

I seek an NEH summer stipend to complete the final chapter of my book manuscript. In the book I explore transnational forces that shaped increases in the age of sexual consent for girls in the twentieth century, such as new scientific ideas about adolescence, UN legal conventions, and population control. I explain how diverse cultural notions about girls' sexual maturation were negotiated. The book contributes to understanding how the meaning and age span of modern girlhood expanded. In my final chapter I will examine the popularization of the term "girl child" in international advocacy circles. The chapter will trace the term's broad arc from the 1990 South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation Year of the Girl Child to the 2012 UN International Year of the Girl Child. I will show how the term traveled outside South Asia to frame 1990s UN activities and corporate campaigns in the 2000s and 2010s. The chapter will help contextualize the current popularity of framing formerly "women's issues" as now "girls' issues."

No project description available

Writing an account of enslaved people sold by Maryland Jesuits in 1838 to support their college, now known as Georgetown University.

In 1838, the nation’s most prominent Jesuit priests sold 272 enslaved men, women and children in a desperate bid to raise money to ensure the survival of the only Catholic institution of higher learning of the time, the college we now know as Georgetown University. The priests were successful. The profits from the sale helped to save the college from financial ruin, allowing it to flourish and to develop into one of the nation’s elite universities. But that success came at a terrible cost. My book, which will be published by Random House in 2023, will tell the story of the people who were sold, and their descendants, and examine how slavery helped to fuel the growth of the university and the Catholic Church in the United States.

Implementation of a two-year community conversation and in-school programming series connecting local residents in the Pittsfield area to the literary and urban history of the Berkshires.

The Mastheads is a public humanities project in Pittsfield, Massachusetts that seeks to connect local residents to the literary and urban history of the Berkshire region. We are applying for a Community Conversations grant over a two-year period to support an annual humanities lecture series in Pittsfield, a publishing venture in support of this series, and auxiliary literacy pedagogy in Pittsfield’s public schools.

The continued development of computerized techniques to recover writings from the Herculaneum library, the entire collections of which were destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 BCE.

Using authentic materials from national libraries in Italy and France, this project will apply proven computerized techniques and innovate new approaches to reveal the hidden writing in the most iconic collection of damaged humanities manuscripts--the scrolls from Herculaneum. During this phase of the project, key goals are to develop and analyze a new method for recovering and enhancing ink signals from within scrolls and manuscripts, and to develop new machine-learning (AI) techniques to render those signals into visible text.

The enhancement of the Berkeley Prosopography Services platform and toolkit to extend its capabilities for social network analysis and improve its user interface for scholars.

The project is designed to extend the functionality of Berkeley Prosopography Services (BPS), an interactive tool-kit for analyzing and visualizing datasets, and to expand its accessibility and utility to researchers working with data across diverse disciplines. BPS streamlines prosopography and social network analysis (SNA) by offering an integrated and customizable out-of-the-box digital analysis tool-kit and work environment that facilitate the dynamic recovery and exploration of the connections between individuals and activities in all areas and ages of human endeavor. The tool-kit includes: (1) a corpus input and management tool, (2) a probabilistic disambiguator, (3) support for assertions, (4) an SNA engine, (5) a visualization module, and (6) workspace support. The implementation phase of BPS will build on its existing software base, its sound conceptual and architectural structure and will focus on these areas of technical development and increased user functionality.

A preservation assessment and draft preservation plan for the digital archives of the Chicago Dance History Project, a collection of over 20,000 digitized items including oral histories, photographs, ephemera, and audiovisual materials documenting the history of dance in Chicago from the twentieth century to the present. Highlights include interviews with dancers who worked with nationally recognized artists such as Katherine Dunham and Bob Fosse, archival documents related to Sammy Dyer School of the Theater director Shirley Hall Bass, and photographs documenting the independent, experimental dance scenes of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. The archive is available online through the organization’s website and has been used by documentary filmmakers, the news media, and students and researchers writing dissertations and books. The project would also include basic training in digital archival practices for staff.

This grant will enable Chicago Dance History Project (CDHP) to engage an archival consultant to conduct a preservation assessment, draft a future plan for our digital archives, and provide support staff with basic training. This project is the first step in our long-term goal to properly catalog and preserve the materials that are currently under our care; create policy, standards and workflows to manage future donations/acquisitions of materials; and create a fully searchable database to make them easily accessible to the public.