Funded Projects Query Form
298 matches

Research and writing leading to a book that examines the urban resettlement and homemaking of Partition refugees in Delhi, India, from 1947 to the present.

Understanding peoples’ conceptions of housing contributes to better understandings of how people conceive of ideological homes and belonging. This project considers how Delhi’s Partition refugees have interacted with resettlement homes from 1947 through the present, dramatically altering and improving them to suit their unique goals and needs. Integrating oral historical, material, and archival evidence collected in the field, my book traces how such individual, household-level actions transformed the city at-scale. The result of this research will be an urban history of post-Partition Delhi told through constellations of diverse data—maps, individuals’ accounts, and images of home spaces. This portrait of Delhi’s built landscape history serves to challenge assumptions about the perpetual aid-dependency of refugee communities, the potential effectiveness of public housing, and the mutability of national belonging.

Archeological excavation investigating the English settlement of Bermuda by the Virginia Company in the 17th century. (24 months)  

Bermuda, Virginia's sister settlement, is Great Britain’s oldest colony yet its early history has never been investigated archaeologically. This multidisciplinary project will situate Bermuda within broader archaeological studies of early Anglo-Atlantic expansion by investigating three 1610s sites where processes of Americanization, ethnogenesis, and environmental adaptation began. It builds on field research started in 2010 that has identified 26 sites spanning 410 years. Our work investigates how Bermuda’s settlers largely succeeded where most comparative Anglo-Atlantic colonial sites struggled in England’s earliest pre-1635 phase of global expansion. By investigating fundamentally humanistic dynamics inherent to colonization across time and space, our project will generate new multi-scalar knowledge about interrelated processes involved in transforming England’s first settlers into a culturally distinctive new American people.

Research and writing of a digital publication on water infrastructures at Vulci, an ancient Etruscan site in Italy (10th c. BCE- 5th CE).

The aim of this proposal is to publish a digital study of water infrastructures in the ancient city of Vulci based on 3D archaeological data: artifacts, monuments, maps and landscape reconstructions. Vulci (Viterbo, Italy, fl. 10th C. BCE- 5th C CE) was one most important cities of ancient Etruria, where thermal and mineral waters were considered to have healing properties. The Duke University’s 7-year fieldwork program has yielded a uniquely extensive collection of 3D models and remote sensing data. The digital publication will examine and interpret changes in the water infrastructure and water culture as they developed from Etruscan to Roman times, and the publication will share in accessible format the 3D data pertinent to the narrative in an integrated, multimodal format providing a holistic view unique in archaeology. It will expand knowledge of the Etruscan and Roman world and serve as a model for other publications with potential for broad impact in the humanities and beyond.

16 months of stipend support (2–4 fellowships) per year for two years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

The CAORC-NEH FPIRI Research Fellowship Program supports in-country research only at American ORCs that do not already administer their own FPIRI grant program, which allows American scholars to engage in long-term scholarly inquiry in understudied regions of the world that are quickly growing in political, strategic, and economic importance, including Latin America, North and West Africa, Central and Southeast Asia, and the South Caucasus.

Research and writing leading to a book on the southern Pacific coast of Mexico between 1000 CE and 1700 CE.

The NEH Summer Stipend will support archival research in the Indigenous Chontal town of San Pedro Huamelula, Mexico. This will contribute to two chapters of my in-progress monograph, A World of Strangers: A Historical Archaeology of the Mexican Pacific Coast. Building on a critical reconfiguration of historical archaeology and a transhistorical perspective, the book focuses on the deep roots of long-term colonialism and incipient globalization on the Mexican Pacific coast. I argue that in order to fully understand these regional and global processes as a continuum, we must first reconstruct the Indigenous geopolitics in the region starting from the 11th through the 16th centuries, and which later laid the groundwork for European incursions and colonization. The book will highlight the Indigenous peoples’ impact on the transpacific world, and contribute to contemporary debates on Decoloniality and the Postcolonial critique, Indigenous agency, and re-writing alternative histories.

12 months of stipend support (2 - 3 fellowships) per year for one year and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

The ARIT NEH fellowship program aims to support scholars who conduct long-term interdisciplinary research in the humanities in Turkey. Their fields of study include art, archaeology, literature, linguistics, musicology, religion, and all aspects of cultural, social, and political history. ARIT long term fellows interact with Turkish, U.S, and other scholars at the ARIT research centers in Istanbul and Ankara, where their intellectual exchange promotes a broad-based understanding of the ancient and modern Middle East. This scholarly interaction has enabled former ARIT-NEH fellows to produce groundbreaking publications that have been shared with the public through their teaching and community outreach programs. ARIT center directors in Istanbul and Ankara facilitate access to research resources and colleagues in the country. For its NEH FPIRI program, ARIT requests 12 months total fellowship funding per year. Research tenures may cover 4 to 12 months, supporting 1 to 3 fellows annually.

Research and writing two articles on the use and treatment of animals in Late Bronze Age Mycenae in Greece.

Animals played vital roles as symbols, resources and individuals in Late Bronze Age societies. My research uses a context-based approach to elucidate human-animal interactions at Mycenae, Greece in the Late Bronze Age. I employ zooarchaeology to study how ceramic artisans lived with and used animals at the height of the palatial period at Mycenae (LHIIIA2, 14th c. BCE). I focus on faunal remains recovered from a well in the craft-producing household of Petsas House. The well remains are a significant source of evidence about animal lives, as texts and household evidence of animals are rare at Mycenae. With NEH support, I will write two articles to clarify how animal and human lives were intertwined in a Mycenaean household. I will use a life history approach to study household management of animals and domestic faunal refuse. This will challenge current views of human-animal boundaries at Mycenae and reveal how animals were a part of the household in life and death.

Investigation of the settlement pattern in Pohnpei and Kosrae in Micronesia using modern technology (drones), and by comparing the findings with oral tales collected from the community.

We propose to connect archaeological data in Pohnpei and Kosrae in Micronesia with village ethnography and active participation of villagers in the archaeological survey of their own communities. We propose to use drone-mounted lidar that can produce very highly detailed images and that can eliminate vegetation and modern construction from the view. These will help to visualize homescapes and coastal terrain in new ways of viewing the landscape. Villagers will meet in ethnographic sessions to apply their cultural knowledge of their island’s settlement and migration throughout the region. Archaeological knowledge will complement community knowledge. The project will contribute to current scholarship on indigenous knowledge in the face of western and colonial interpretation, and will provide a forum for islanders and western scholars to compare and contrast archaeological and ethnographic data as a space within which to co-produce knowledge of their migration history in the region.

Research and writing leading to a book on how two Jordanian non-profits are developing cultural heritage management capacity among local archaeological laborers.

My ethnographic research project examines a current and significant movement in the practice of Jordanian archaeology, toward building local capacity and increased local representation in cultural heritage management in Jordan. In 2016, two startup nonprofit corporations emerged in Jordan with the aim of building local capacity to document, conserve, protect, and make decisions about the future of archaeological sites in Jordan. These corporations, if successful, will transform entrenched archaeological labor management strategies with more than 200 years of history. I am following these companies for five years in order to advance current discussion across the fields of archaeology, critical cultural heritage, science studies, and sustainable development. This fellowship will support five months of ethnographic fieldwork and seven months to complete a book manuscript.

Research and writing leading to a book on Native American agricultural practices in the Midwest from precontact to the present. 

Two hundred years ago, Native American agriculturalists around the Great Lakes and along the Missouri River fed the fur trade with their diverse vegetable products, but those innovative Native agricultural systems have suffered from rapid decline over the 20th century. This book, "Three Sisters Gardening in Midwestern Native American Nations: An Ethnohistory of Indigenous Agricultural Survivance," will recuperate the historical diversity of Native agricultural knowledge in the Midwest, including the impacts of Native agricultural production on both Native and Euro-American livelihoods during the periods of early contact, the fur trade, and settler encroachment, as well as factors that led to historical loss of Native agricultural knowledge suffered during the removal, reservation, and assimilationist periods. This book will shed new light on the processes of settler colonialism and Native efforts to assert their own sovereignty through their traditional agriculture.

Research and preparation of a book on the representation of Africans in ancient Roman art.

This book project investigates how artists and their social patrons conceptualized racial difference in the Roman empire (c. 100 BCE-200 CE). In particular, it seeks to understand how the social roles and status of Aethiopians and their perception by Romans were communicated through visual representations in "art" (e.g., statues, reliefs, mosaics) and material culture (e.g., amulets, earrings, perfume jars). The aim is to study the character, incidence, and contexts of these representations in cultural historical perspective: their formal qualities; their original viewing contexts and geographical distribution; their kinship with and differences from representations of “Others” (non-Romans) generally (e.g., Gauls); and the larger cultural understandings that underwrite them (e.g., "lightness" vs. "darkness"). This project is therefore interdisciplinary in its aims and methodology, as it sits at the intersection of African studies, Classical Studies, archaeology, and art history.

Research and writing leading to a biography of the influential American Egyptologist George A. Reisner (1867-1942).

Most archaeological biography projects do not reflect the broad brushstrokes of international relations and global change. But the individual currently under study—George A. Reisner (1867–1942, Harvard AB 1889)—is exceptional in several ways. Not only did Reisner pioneer crucial aspects of modern archaeological method as we understand them today, but he did so on an international stage, as an American expatriate working primarily in Arab countries (Egypt, Sudan) dominated by British political control and a French antiquities service. His story covers nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, the birth of scientific archaeology, the history of Harvard and of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the discovery of ancient art masterpieces and their ultimate museum destinations (under the partage system), and the issues of repatriation and cultural patrimony before they became the “hot topics” they are today. It is time that Reisner’s story, and his impact on the archaeological world, was told.

Development of an interactive digital map combining environmental and archaeological data from around the Delaware Bay.

Climate driven sea level rise (SLR) threatens cultural heritage resources in coastal areas. The Delaware Estuary is the second largest on the U.S. Atlantic coast and is experiencing some of the gravest effects from SLR along the eastern seaboard. Archaeological and historical evidence reveal the area’s rich heritage, including thousands of years of Native American occupations; 17th century Swedish and Dutch settlements; a colonial maritime tradition; early18th century resort towns; and, extant World War II defensive installations. The shoreline is fringed by salt marshes, which are being assaulted by storm surge, and converted into mudflats or open water at an alarming rate. The Delaware Bay Climate and Archaeology project has yielded decadal level, site specific projections of SLR threats until the year 2100. This project will use maps, photographs and digital reconstructions to translate science-driven research into a humanities-oriented visual narrative of compelling case studies.

Research and writing for a book on the archaeological history of Early Christianity.

This project explains how archaeological approaches, practices, and evidence shape historical interpretations of the early Christian world. Scholars have often viewed archaeology as a tool for generating extraordinary discoveries to authenticate, challenge, or illustrate the histories and theologies of the early church. This work considers how the more common but less spectacular findings of archaeological field research, including ceramic assemblages, stratified deposits, and surface remains, are gradually changing our picture of the social and economic life of Christian communities of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East between the first and seventh centuries CE. In its emphasis on processes and practices, the book fills a gap in Anglophone scholarship for a critical explanation of the archaeology of this world religion and an accessible introduction to a subject often sensationalized in popular media.

A small grants program for humanistic archaeological research and writing that supports survey, excavation, and publication.

The Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) is requesting a grant of $500,000 (plus administrative costs) for two years to establish a program that provides small grants to individuals conducting archaeological research around the world. The grants will focus on providing support for a larger number of fieldwork projects that might be thought of as “lean and mean” – i.e., not requiring vast funding outlays to return important results. Just as significantly, these grants will also support post-fieldwork research and publication efforts that are currently underfunded, yet critical to providing a more complete understanding of the communities being studied. The current lack of funding for post-fieldwork efforts often results in long gaps of time between the completion of the project and the dissemination of final reports and publications.

10 months of stipend support (1-2 fellowships) per year for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

ACOR, founded a half century ago, facilitates research concerning Jordan and the broader Middle East. Its thriving fellowship program supports scholars at all stages of their careers. This funding is requested in order to better meet the research needs of postdoctoral scholars, both those new to MENA and those who may know it well. Long-term fellowships would help them complete critical fieldwork, such as interviews and site visits, and provide concentrated research and writing time in ACOR’s exceptional library. This would also allow for more chances for in-depth scholarly exchanges, which are inherent in an ACOR residential fellowship as the center is a natural place to connect with other residents as well as Jordanian academics and international scholars due to its programs. [edited by staff]

Collections research and preparation of book on the archaeological finds at the site of Jebel Tomat in southern Sudan.

In the early third century BCE the Meroitic kingdom emerged as the most significant and influential state in sub-Saharan Africa. The site of Jebel Tomat (Sudan) sits at the southern margin of the Meroitic world, where little archaeological research has taken place. The site was excavated by the late archaeologist J. Desmond Clark during the early 1970s but much of the recovered material remains unstudied. This project will examine the pottery from the site to understand how it was used by the ancient residents of Jebel Tomat and to investigate potential interaction with other communities, including people living to the south. The project will also generate a detailed chronology of Jebel Tomat by radiocarbon dating unanalyzed charcoal samples that Clark collected during his excavations. The project will result in a chapter of book that examines Jebel Tomat and other sites excavated in the Sudan by Clark in the broader context of African archaeology and the Meroitic kingdom.

Research and writing of a history of Native Americans in the Northern Plains and Rockies in the first half of the nineteenth century, structured around the life of Sacagawea, guide for the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Sacagawea’s World uses the signal events and contested dimensions of one Native American woman’s life to convey a new, accessible narrative of the Northern Plains, Northern Rockies, and Pacific Northwest to 1850. Sacagawea provided essential guidance to Lewis and Clark on their 1804–1806 trans-continental journey. But her life also illuminates a world in upheaval as Indigenous peoples engaged with global commerce, new modes of warfare, altered hunting patterns, environmental change, and ever-shifting power dynamics. How puzzling it is that despite Sacagawea’s renown, we know so little about the ways she and those around her experienced and engaged the world. I use a wide array of source material, including archaeology, rock art, landscape, oral accounts, legends, ethnographies, manuscripts, and a plethora of existing scholarship to bring this new narrative to life.

Preparation of a digital publication on the architectural history and development of the Doric style at the Temple of Hera at Olympia (ca. 600 BCE).

I have recently completed a high-resolution 3D recording of the oldest well-preserved Greek temple in the Doric style, the Heraion at Olympia. The project has revealed significant new insights into the architectural history of the monument. I am now facing a common challenge for researchers working with 3D scans of cultural heritage: how to publish the wealth of digital data. I plan to develop a project website to disseminate the models, reconstructions, and linked texts and images. A lightweight environment built on existing mapping technologies will enable users to navigate visualizations of the remains interactively. The dissemination of the complex 3D models from Olympia through pre-rendered orthographic views will represent a model that might be adapted for many other ancient monuments. The site will allow flexible exploration, but it will also guide visitors through a new argument concerning the architectural history of the temple’s peristyle.

A book-length study on the history of French archaeology from 1890 to 1940.

My project probes the intertwined histories of archaeology and French culture in the early twentieth century. It focuses on two controversies, over excavations at Carthage in the French Protectorate of Tunisia and about the authenticity of a supposed Neolithic site discovered in central France, as constitutive of a field suspended between scientific ambitions and media attention. Bringing together two sub-fields normally treated separately, classical archaeology and prehistory, the study offers a new ground-level view of the formation of archaeology as at once discipline and spectacle. I ask basic questions about the constitution of the archive and disciplines’ understandings of their own past that allow for reflection across history, my field of study, and archaeology, my object of study. The visual representation and display of archaeology, archaeological finds, and archaeologists receive particular emphasis as a connecting thread between discipline-formation and spectacle.

30 months of stipend support (3-5 fellowships) per year for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

The National Humanities Center, an independent center exclusively devoted to advanced humanities research, seeks five nine-month fellowships for the next three-year cycle (grant period Jan. 1, 2019-June 30, 2022). Since 1978, NEH has generously supported five NHC fellowships during each granting cycle, excepting the last cycle when it supported three. Designated “NEH Fellows,” recipients of these awards are chosen through a rigorous vetting process and join a vibrant intellectual community of 35-40 total Fellows. Each works on a major research project throughout the academic year with significant support from our library staff and fellowship office. End-of-year evaluations from the roughly 1,400 Fellows who have been in residence generally describe their year at the NHC as the most inspiring and productive of their careers. The NHC focuses attention to diversity in all of its dimensions so that Fellows represent a broad range of disciplines, institutions, backgrounds and perspectives.

Research and writing of a scholarly article about the role of eugenics in American classical scholarship prior to World War II.

In this project, I propose to carry out a critical study of the role of eugenic theories in early twentieth-century American classical scholarship. Building on research I conducted for an earlier project, my hypothesis is that the reliance on eugenics was widespread in classical scholarship during the first half of the twentieth century, and I would like to use the NEH Summer Stipend to document and evaluate classicists’ employment of such theories in their interpretations of ancient history, while also weighing the legacy such scholarship continues to have in the field of classics today. The penchant for using Greek and Roman history as a mirror for American life is as old as America itself, and I believe interrogation of the intersections of classical scholarship and eugenics can also provide insight into some of the ways contemporary American debates about race and eugenics were, in turn, bolstered by these interpretations of the ancient world.

Excavation and analysis at Notion, an urban site from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, located in western Turkey. (36 months)

Archaeological excavation at Notion will examine how a community living in a port town in western Anatolia responded to developments in Greek urbanism and the expansion of Roman power. Notion lies in ancient Ionia, 15 km north of Ephesus. We focus on the tumultuous era of the 3rd century BCE to 1st century CE, when many cities were radically transformed through local initiative and external coercion. During this period Notion was relocated to a new site, but then abandoned after only a few centuries. Building on the results of archaeological survey, we will examine the historical and social processes enacted in the ultimately unsuccessful reinvention of the city through investigation of its residential areas. Research at Notion on urban development and devolution at the household scale offers a new approach to the study of western Anatolian cities, and contributes to comparative urban studies, household archaeology, landscape biography, and Ionian history.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the "Sacred Band," a special infantry unit of the city of Thebes from 379-338 BCE, in the context of ancient Greek history, politics, and philosophy.

The Sacred Band, a Theban infantry unit made up of paired male lovers fighting side by side, is depicted by Greek sources as the pivotal factor in the 4th-century rise of Thebes and overthrow of Sparta. Yet no historical study has looked in depth at the legend of this elite corps. My book will trace the Band through the four decades in which it fought, from its creation in 379 BCE by a cadre of Theban patriots, to its annihilation by Alexander the Great at the Chaeronea in 338 BCE, a battle that brought an end to Greek political autonomy. I will examine the Band's role in Theban victories over Sparta during the 370's, and show that Plato's Symposium, a dialogue that alludes to the Sacred Band in discussing the power of eros, was likely inspired by it. Love's Warriors thus stands at the intersection of Platonic philosophy, military history and the study of Greek sexuality, with a nod to archaeology in its concluding exploration of the Sacred Band's mass grave on the field of Chaeronea.

The completion of a book-length survey of the archaeology of the prehistoric Iberian peninsula.

For my NEH project I will complete a book entitled Archaeology of the Iberian Peninsula: From the Paleolithic through the Bronze Age (currently under contract with Cambridge University Press, scheduled for completion in July 2018). The book will document the rich and diverse histories of the peoples who lived on the Peninsula between 1,000,000 and 3000 years ago (the Bronze Age), through their art, burials, tools, and monuments. Despite recent dramatic discoveries at archaeological sites in Portugal and Spain, which have revolutionized our thinking about human history, the rich archaeological heritage of prehistoric Iberia remains largely unknown outside the Peninsula. My book will be the only up-to-date synthesis of Iberian archaeology, in English, accessible to students, scholars, and the interested public.