Funded Projects Query Form
154 matches

Research leading to a book about the history of social services for disabled actors in the United States since the late nineteenth century, with particular focus on The Actors’ Fund of America and allied organizations.

This book will offer a history of social services for disabled actors since the late nineteenth century. At the center of this history is The Actors’ Fund of America, an organization that has financed an impressive range of disability supports, including retirement homes, health clinics, addiction recovery programs, assistive technology grants, and supportive housing for people with HIV/AIDS. “Supporting Actors” is grounded in the archives of the Fund and allied organizations, including the Edwin Forrest Home for Retired Actors (1873-1986); the Katharine Cornell Foundation (1931-1962); the Negro Actors Guild of America (1938-1982); and Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS (1988-Present). Through a series of historical case studies, “Supporting Actors” demonstrates the centrality of disability to the US theatre industry and the centrality of theatrical welfare to broader national conversations about disability and care.

Preparation to edit and publish annotated translations in a digital format of two parlamentos (indigenous treaties) signed in Chile in 1774 and 1803. (24 months) 

The project proposed for the NEH Translation Planning grant is the translation of a of a portion of the Chilean Mapuche Parlamentos peace treaties to plan for further translations and a full scale digital edition.

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.

Two one-week workshops for 72 school teachers on the Homestead Steel Strike.

The Homestead Steel Strike and the Growth of America as an Industrial Power is a one week workshop (offered twice) that will provide teachers with a full accounting of the circumstances that led to the Battle of Homestead and what its lasting impact has been in the United States. This program will provide a framework for participants to immerse themselves in the battle from both sides by examining primary sources, listening to lectures by leading historians and scholars, and visiting historic sites including the Original Homestead Works Pump House, the Bost Building, which served as headquarters for the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, and The Carrie Furnace, which produced iron for the Homestead Works from 1907 to 1978.

The redesign of the doctoral program in the School of Arts and Sciences to optimize preparation for diverse careers.

Humanities Careers will engage graduate faculty and students across fourteen Humanities programs at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as administrators, alumni, and other stakeholders, in a planning process to rethink humanities doctoral education so as to optimize every student’s preparation for diverse careers. Embracing multiple definitions of student and program success, we will focus on student and alumni data; curricular change; partnerships across and beyond campus, including alumni relations; and experiential learning. We will thus foster a cultural transformation in how faculty, students, and the University envisage the broader importance of Humanities PhDs and the societal impacts of humanistic training. Studying current culture and resources across programs, and investigating best practices nationally, we will create an initial suite of new resources and make actionable recommendations to the University, School of Arts and Sciences, and doctoral programs.

A sequence of three courses focused on the past, present, and future of water in Central Asia for students in the social sciences, business, engineering, and the humanities.

The University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Russian and East European Studies (REES) and Asian Studies Center (ASC) propose a project to strengthen interdisciplinary connections among Pitt faculty and students across the humanities, social sciences, and pre-professional programs in business and engineering. Led by Dr. Nancy Condee (REES Director/Slavic Languages and Literatures) and Dr. Ruth Mostern (World History Center Director/ASC affiliate), the project faculty team will develop three new undergraduate courses on the theme of “Water in Central Asia.” This course sequence will incorporate high-impact experiential learning activities, including mentored research projects and virtual peer-to-peer exchanges with students at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. The courses will be taught in spring 2019 through spring 2020 and then incorporated into Pitt’s regular curriculum and into two existing student credential programs, as well as a planned new Central Asian Studies Certificate.

This is a project to create content, standards and digital infrastructure for a World-Historical Gazetteer (WHG): a spatially and temporally comprehensive index of significant world historical place names (a Spine), and a system for collaborative digital and data-driven historical scholarship at the global scale (an Ecosystem).  It focuses significantly but not exclusively on the centuries since 1500, so as to dovetail with synergistic efforts devoted to the ancient and medieval world.

A case study investigating the sustainability of digital humanities projects by conducting user surveys and oral histories related to the developmental history of an online image collection created in the mid-1990s of medieval architecture and artifacts known as MedArt.  The research will lead to the publication of a Web-based “Socio-Technical Digital Preservation Roadmap” that documents and guides digital humanists and preservation professionals through the preservation planning process.

Questions of sustainability are becoming increasingly central to the work of digital humanists as early digital projects age and as new projects proliferate across disciplines—many of which involve scholars and practitioners who lack a shared knowledge base when it comes to addressing digital preservation needs. Sustaining the work of the digital humanities is clearly a critical task, but there is a lack of meaningful empirical data about the long-term effects of technological and staffing decisions made during project creation processes and over the course of project lifespans. This research, organized as a case study into a landmark and pioneering digital humanities initiative, will provide insight into the ways in which a digital project's sustainability can hinge on accreted decisions over time as well as on complex interactions between human, technological and administrative infrastructures.

A partnership between the Community College of Beaver County and the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Russian and East European Studies to conduct a multi-year Bridging Cultures faculty and curriculum development project on change and adaptation in East European culture and its impact on western Pennsylvania history.

The University of Pittsburgh's Center for Russian and East European Studies (REES) works with up to twenty regular and adjunct faculty members of the Community College of Beaver County (CCBC) on a project to incorporate East European history and literature into the community college curriculum. Two REES-affiliated scholars organize all aspects of the program: Joel Brady (history and religious studies), whose expertise is in the northern tier of countries including Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine; and Ljiljana Duraskovic (Slavic languages and literatures), an expert on the Balkans region, including Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. These two scholars also team-teach with two CCBC faculty members a new Eastern Europe-focused section of CCBC's existing world literature survey course in Fall 2015, to be taught solely by CCBC instructors the following year. Eight workshops meet January through April in 2015 to explore texts in three areas: 1) general readings such as Tony Judt's The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe; 2) works that narrate histories of East European immigrant communities in the United States and especially in western Pennsylvania; and 3) country- or region-specific readings (list to be finalized). The latter could include Death in Danzig, a Polish novel by Stefan Chwin about forced population movements at the end of World War II); Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Catherine Wanner); and The Krajina Chronicle: A History of Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia (Srdja Trifkovic). From September 2015 to April 2016, the project cohort would attend monthly Saturday morning events involving presentations by Pittsburgh-area scholars and discussions with leaders of East European ethnic communities in the region. Saturday programs would be supported by the videoconferencing of U.S. State Department-sponsored "American Corners" events from East European nations. The products of two years of activities-the new literature course and the participants' course modules-would be presented by participating faculty at the annual professional development summit of the Western Pennsylvania Community College Resource Consortium in October 2016.

A five-week institute for twenty-five school teachers linking American popular songs to significant periods and events in American history.

"Voices Across Time: Teaching American History Through Song" is a five-week summer institute for 25 school teachers to explore topics in American history through the lens of iconic songs. Participants will utilize popular songs as primary source documents to enrich discussions of American history, while field trips and authentic performances will offer a uniquely engaging evocation of an historical context. Aided by the perspectives of historians, musicologists, and teaching performers, participants will develop innovative strategies to integrate music into their teaching of American social studies and language arts. This proposal is for a sixth Institute; previous Institutes were held in 2004, 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2013.

"The Bullet in the Book" will compare (via a book for scholars, students, and general readers) how, during the Civil War, Americans across four intersecting axes of social difference used print media: 1) North/South; 2) Black/White; 3) man/woman; and 4) middleclass/workingclass. To what degree did reading newspapers, books, and magazines bridge the period's fractious cultures? For evidence I summon personal accounts in mostly manuscript letters and diaries penned by about 1,000 representative "informants" who give insight into their own media-use practices and those of family and neighbors around them. To analyze this testimony, I build upon and extend the ethnographic methods I used in my co-authored, NEH-funded 2006 book, Everyday Ideas, on antebellum practices. Hoping to contribute this unique perspective on the Civil War in time for its 150th anniversary, I aim to devote myself, away from teaching, to completing the book manuscript by the end of the proposed fellowship period.

This project investigates the contradictory ways that neoliberalism shapes the revitalization of Gaelic, a minority language in Scotland. Neoliberalism facilitates the formation of a new ethnolinguistically self-identified Gaelic-speaking middle class, but it impedes the sociolinguistic goal of transmitting Gaelic to future generations. Gaelic has been undergoing language shift in Scotland since 1200 CE: it is gradually being replaced by English in its former locations and contexts of use. This endangered language is now spoken by about 50,000 people. In the 1980s-90s native Gaelic-English bilinguals and supporters with experience in English-speaking industry and business coalesced around the agenda of economically developing Gaelic in Thatcher's Britain. They successfully garnered public funding that created new middle-class jobs requiring Gaelic, but declining numbers of speakers show that labor and commerce alone cannot produce the new speakers and attitudes needed to save Gaelic.

A five-week institute for twenty-five school teachers on ways to explore American history through popular songs.

"Voices Across Time: Teaching American History Through Song" is a five-week summer institute for 25 secondary school teachers to explore topics in American history through the lens of music. Participants will utilize popular songs as primary source documents to enrich discussions of American history, while field trips and authentic performances will offer a uniquely engaging evocation of an historical context. Aided by the perspectives of historians, musicologists, and teaching performers, participants will develop innovative strategies to integrate music into their teaching of American social studies and language arts. This proposal is for a fourth Institute; previous Institutes were held in 2004, 2006, and 2008.

A five-week institute for twenty-five school teachers that would explore topics in American history, including American values and attitudes, through the lens of music.

"Voices Across Time: Teaching American History Through Song" is a five-week summer institute for 25 secondary school teachers to explore topics in American history through the lens of music. Participants will utilize popular songs as primary source documents to enrich discussions of American history, while field trips and authentic performances will offer a uniquely engaging evocation of an historical context. Aided by the perspectives of historians, musicologists, and teaching performers, participants will both strengthen their skills as historians and develop innovative strategies to integrate music into their teaching of American history. This proposal is for a third Institute; previous Institutes were held in 2004 and 2006.

A five-week institute for twenty-five school teachers that would explore topics in American history, including American values and attitudes, through the lens of music.

I propose to conduct research for a book focused on Audre Lorde's public speeches (1977-92). In my published essays about Lorde's oratory, I was limited to publicly available materials, because her estate had reserved her papers exclusively for use by Alexis De Veaux, who is the authorized biographer. In 2002, Lorde's daughter, Elizabeth Rollins, after reading my published essays, made arrangements so that I was given permission to access Lorde's papers at Spelman College in Atlanta. I am literally the second and only other scholar to be entrusted with these primary materials which remain closed otherwise. A book concerning Lorde's public speeches would engage scholars' attention across the humanities.

I propose to complete a book-length manuscript during the fellowship tenure. The book will present a social history of artisans during Early Imperial China (221 BC-Ad 220). As in the Roman world, an artisan in China was defined as anyone or made or decorated things with their hands. In China, this label included painters, sculptors, founders, masons, woodcarvers, and many other occupations. Because artisans toiled with their hands, they were denigrated by Chinese intellectuals and men in power. Thus, few historical texts record their activities or describe their living and working conditions. In fact, no monograph in English has ever attempted to detail the social and economic circumstances of this group. I intend to use a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to reconstruct the lives and careers of men and women in this vital social group in Early China. I will utilize the scattered references to artisans in received texts, and bolster them with analyses of excavated workshop sites, pictorial depictions of artisans at work, recently excavated contemporary texts, and inscriptions carved on objects by the artisans themselves. I will break down this social history contextually, separately addressing "Artisans in Society," "Artisans in the Workshop," "Artisans in the Marketplace," "The Illustrative Artisan," and "The Un-free Artisan." The last chapter mentioned will provide and up-to-date treatment of slavery and convict labor in Early China, a field of vital interest to comparative labor historians.

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A five-week institute for 30 college and university teachers on the place of values in scientific judgment and discourse.

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