Funded Projects Query Form
49 matches

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.

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 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.

Virtual planning activities and travel to conduct fieldwork in Naples leading to a book on Italian engagement with the literary, cultural, and intellectual discourses of the 18th century. (12 months)

This NEH Planning International Collaboration Grant will fund two working group meetings of eighteenth-century scholars of the Italian peninsula to plan an interpretive volume of studies in English on the rethinking of eighteenth-century Italian culture and its transnational connections. With its emphasis on transmissions and reciprocities across borders, the transnational perspective has been redefining the parameters of eighteenth-century studies for the past twenty-five years. It is the goal of our project to establish a strong foothold for Italy in the cultural panorama of the transnational eighteenth century, altering our erroneous sense of a field that appears to be British and French driven. A comprehensive assessment of the significant shift in our understanding of the role of Italy in the global eighteenth century is lacking. Our project seeks to rectify this gap.

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 multi-authored monograph on the history of Jewish life in the Middle East from 1800 to the present, for preparation of a special journal issue, and a website. (36 months)

We propose a large-scale collaborative project to rewrite the histories, narratives, and memories of and by Jews in the Middle East in the 19th-21st centuries. Drawing on original primary sources in numerous languages, diverse interdisciplinary approaches, and creative synthesis of the recent scholarship, we reframe Jews at the center of the modern Middle East and globe rather than on its margins. By analyzing, historicizing, and contextualizing the multifaceted processes of minoritization and sectarianization that took place in different contexts (imperial, colonial, national) beginning in the mid-19th century, we examine the overlapping ways that Jews were both incorporated into and excluded from Middle Eastern polities and societies. These varying trajectories across the region impacted the changing and ongoing political salience of remembering and erasing Jewish presence in the Middle East. We will publish a journal special issue, a multi-authored book, and a robust, dynamic website.

Preparation of an open-access website on the legislative, political, and social impact of the 1977 National Women’s Conference. (36 months)

“Democratizing Politics” is a multi-year, multi-state, multi-institutional effort led by the University of Houston to analyze the thousands of participants at and legacy of the 1977 National Women’s Conference (NWC). Our open-access digital humanities website launches in March, 2021, and our fully-featured website will be complete by 2027, NWC’s 50th anniversary. Congress created the NWC with bipartisan support, appropriating $5 million and mandating a diversity requirement for conference delegates. The NWC stands out in U.S. history as the most diverse and only federally funded convention of American women. In 1977, 2,000 delegates, elected by 150,000 participants at 56 lead-up state and territory meetings, convened in Houston to outline 26 policy action areas to present to President Jimmy Carter. One of the greatest experiments in civic engagement, the NWC modeled democracy in action. The participants offered an expansive agenda to make the nation more inclusive and the U.S. government more responsive.

Planning and convening of an international collaboration among scholars of Silk Road literature for two weeks at the National Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz Republic. (12 months)

This project will use a Planning International Collaboration Grant to convene six colleagues from the U.S. and Kyrgyzstan in the archives of the Kyrgyz National Academy of Sciences to plan fundamental research on premodern Central Asian Turkic manuscript narratives, and dissemination of our work in electronic and print venues. These narratives were created within networks of changing oral and written genres including history, genealogy, and epic poetry, and thus lie at the nexus of interpretive problems where historians, linguists, paleographers, philologists, and scholars of oral tradition require each other's insights and methods to do sustained work. Scholars and the public can benefit from the project to study ethnic, regional, and Islamic identities; the intertwining of oral and written modes of transmitting knowledge about the past; Central Asian Turkic linguistic fluidities; and Central Asian nomads' experience of the Russian Empire.

Preparation of two edited volumes and a series of public-facing essays focused on the archive of American author and intellectual Gloria Naylor (1950-2016). (12 months)

This project proposes to produce an edited collection of scholarly essays on archival materials relevant to Naylor’s published novels, a second manuscript of criticism focused on previously unpublished works found in the archives, and a series of public-facing essays that attend to the collected papers and unpublished material of Gloria Naylor, one of the most widely-read authors at the vanguard of contemporary letters. With Naylor’s substantial archives as our focus, we aim to create a robust model for activating black women’s literary archives through interinstitutional, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational collaboration aligned with black feminist practices. Through ground-breaking academic and public-facing scholarship this project communicates the value of archival research for opening up new avenues for understanding black women writers’ intellectual and literary history of the late-20th and early-21st centuries.

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.

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.

Preparation of a digital archive and print anthology on the history of the Mississippi Lunatic Asylum (1855-1935) and its role in public memory. (36 months)

An interdisciplinary group of scholars at the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) seeks support from the NEH for a collaborative humanities study of the former site of the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, its patients, and descendant community in historical and social context, and in memory. The study follows from the 2014 discovery of 7,000 burials of Asylum patients beneath the UMMC campus, and extensive public call for information about the institutions. We argue that the Asylum’s place in professional and lay understandings of mental illness, social exclusion and silences in family genealogies, theories and practices of early modern healthcare, populations of public psychiatric institutions, and post-emancipation racial understanding has been understudied or unknown. We are thus requesting NEH funding to support research time and the costs of collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and disseminating information about the Asylum.

Computational linguistic research to establish the unattributed journalism of American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892) at the Brooklyn Daily Times newspaper. (36 months)

Our proposed project will use a tested computational linguistic author attribution model to determine the beginning and end of Walt Whitman's editorial tenure at the Brooklyn Daily Times in the 1850s—a matter of longstanding debate in Whitman studies—as well as to determine which editorials he authored during that span. These editorials will then be transcribed, encoded, annotated, and made freely available on the Whitman Archive site. In addition to bringing clarity to a hazy portion of Whitman's biography and offering access to a new trove of understudied Whitman-authored documents, we hope that our method can bring a new tool to the study of authorship attribution and serve as a model for other scholars or projects confronted with similar cases of uncertain authorship, even when only a relatively small sample size of text is available.

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 co-authored book and supplementary website relating religious murals painted by Christianized Maya artists in Yucatán, Mexico, between 1550 and 1750. (36 months)

Our multidisciplinary project analyzes religious murals painted by Christianized Maya artists in Yucatán, Mexico, between 1550 and 1750. The first study of its kind, we examine the extant corpus of 22 mural cycles to illuminate the processes of intercultural reciprocation, ideological interchange, and economic exchange that defined the “Encounter” between Europe and the Americas. As art historians, we utilize humanistic methodologies in correlation with empirical methods to reconstruct the circulation of the material goods – print culture and painting pigments – necessary for the murals’ production. We center Maya artists in the vast networks of exchange that marked the Counter Reformation, querying how the visual adaptation of pre-Columbian artistic practices impacted the emergence of Maya Catholic identity. Our final products, a scholarly book and a supplementary interactive website, will allow the interested public and scholars access to our research findings.

Preparation of a conference and a publication on how immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America have influenced African American culture and society since the mid-20th century. (12 months)

Immigration and the Making of African America will explore the largely untold history of African diasporic immigrants to the United States and their relations with native-born African Americans over the last 150 years. Black immigrants developed distinctive strategies for assimilating, even while maintaining ties with their countries of origin. They have profoundly influenced the social, political, and cultural history of the United States. In exploring these themes and by connecting immigration and African American history and culture, this conference will bring together scholars across the humanities to rethink the standard narratives of both fields, demonstrate that scholars in each area must be in dialogue with one another, and illuminate in new ways the complexity of blackness in historical and contemporary America.

Field research to establish a chronology of Late Byzantine and Medieval churches and icons in Cyprus based on tree-ring analysis (dendrochronology). (36 months)

Our Collaborative Research Grant project employs dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) to establish dates for a key set of Byzantine-Medieval buildings and portable art (especially icons) in Cyprus central to the history and art-history of the East Mediterranean and Orthodox worlds. Via dendrochronology and research on the history and preservation of each building and artwork, this interdisciplinary project will provide for the first time an independent time-frame for one of the world's most important sets of Byzantine-Medieval buildings (ten on the UNESCO World Heritage List). Our project will greatly refine and likely rewrite current understanding of this period which at present lacks an independent time-frame. All data will be digitally recorded and archived permanently in conjunction with a scholarly and public publication and communication strategy to ensure that this unique cultural heritage is preserved for the future independent of the monuments and objects themselves.

Preparation of final monographs of salvage expeditions from sites flooded by the reservoir of the Merowe Dam along the Nile in present-day Sudan. (36 months)

The Oriental Institute Nubian Expedition Publication Project plans to publish results of salvage excavations (2007-2008) at sites flooded by the reservoir of the Merowe Dam at the Fourth Cataract of the Nile, an area previously almost unexplored by archaeologists. The major industrial gold processing center of Hosh el Geruf is earlier than 1550 BCE, although it was believed the Egyptians introduced the process later. The complete, ordered Middle Nubian cemetery of al-Widay (1850-1550 BCE) dates bodies of evidence and reveals interactions with areas both north and south. The excavations and survey on the island of Umm Gebir discovered tombs of local tradition dating to the New Kingdom, and unusual Napatan structures. Major bodies of new evidence will be available to the public and scholarly community, greatly enhancing the study of civilizations along the ancient Nile.

Two international conferences, a website, and digital resources on Jewish culture and “feuilleton,” a newspaper insert popular throughout Europe from the 19th to the early-20th centuries. (12 months)

This convening grant would fund two conferences to bring together international scholars working on the feuilleton, an important and immensely popular feature in newspapers that has been largely forgotten. Our project proposes the feuilleton as a new area for interdisciplinary and multilingual inquiry, seeing the feuilleton as a critical juncture in the production of modern cultures and the public sphere. It focuses on the unique place of the feuilleton in modern Jewish cultures, which were highly multilingual and transnational. By assembling scholars in literature, history, and communications from North America, Europe, and Israel, we will examine the development of the feuilleton as a new form of media and make key texts accessible online for scholars, students, and the public. We will explore and sharpen the topic of investigation, identify and discuss significant periodicals and feuilletons, and plan subsequent publication in print and digital forms.

A conference on the works of early modern women philosophers (1500 to 1850) in preparation for an edited volume of essays. (9 months)

The project will bring together, for a three-day conference, 49 scholars working on the philosophical output of early modern women philosophers, and it will result in a volume of cutting-edge, scholarly papers on this topic. Because of the wide range of genres and methods that women employed in their philosophical writing during these centuries, our project necessarily and meaningfully connects broadly across many humanities disciplines. We thus include humanities scholars beyond philosophers as participants in the conference and as contributors to the volume, a distinctive virtue of this project.

Field research on the overseer’s house at James Madison’s Montpelier leading to public programs and publications on the social, economic, and racial complexity of 19th-century plantations in the United States. (36 months)

This study will adopt the space/place model to examine the overseer at James Madison’s Montpelier, an early 19th century plantation in the Virginia Piedmont. It will examine the relationship of the overseer to the plantation elite and the enslaved community through an in depth study of the overseer’s space on the landscape, and how they defined that space through household activities. We will examine the space the overseer occupied on the landscape through a spatial analysis of the farm complex in which the overseer’s house was situated, and excavations of the overseer’s home and its surrounding yard space. Archaeologists will examine how the plantation owner situated the overseer in relationship to the rest of the community through building architecture and the spatial proxemics of the overseer's house. Then we will examine how the overseer and his household responded to this position through the organization of his household activities and consumer choices.