Congratulations to the thirty-one MLA members who are among the winners of the National Endowment for the Humanities grants announced in January 2023. Their projects include a digital recovery hub focused on surfacing the work of American women writers; the creation of a humanities and health justice pathways program; a book examining American high school English curriculum as a touchstone of American literary history and culture; and much more.
On 6 March eight additional NEH grant winners were added to this list:
Timothy Arner, Grinnell College
Project Title: The Virtual Viking Longship Project: A Study in the Future of Liberal Arts Teaching and Research
Project Description: The development of a virtual reality model of a Viking Age longship with a team of undergraduate researchers. The project team will document the workflow and learning outcomes to share with other undergraduate institutions
Rebecca Kumar, Spelman College
Project Title: Brown Looks: Theories of Brown Queer Filmmaking since 9/11
Project Description: Research and writing for two essays examining the self-representation of new categories of ethnic identification in US media in the last twenty years.
Mary McAlpin, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Project Title: Rationalizing Rape: The New Logic of Sexual Violence in Enlightenment France
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on the scientific, literary, and philosophical discourse on sexual violence during the French Enlightenment.
Wendy Roberts, SUNY Research Foundation, Albany, State University of New York
Project Title: Phillis Wheatley Peters’s Poetic Worlds
Project Description: Transcription of archival documents and writing a book on Phillis Wheatley Peters’s (c. 1753–84) poetry production in the context of transatlantic manuscript culture.
Christine Ruotolo, University of Virginia
Project Title: Project Title: Literature in Context: An Open Anthology of Literature, 1400–1925
Project Description: The continuing development of the open educational resource, Literature in Context, an open-access, curated, and classroom-sourced digital anthology of British and American literature in English in partnership with scholars and students from Marymount University.
Jennifer Stoever, SUNY Research Foundation, Binghamton, State University of New York
Project Title: Living Room Revolutions: Black and Brown Women Collecting Records, Selecting Sounds, and Making New Worlds in the 1970s Bronx
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book about hip-hop history, showing how the record collections and home-DJ practices of Black women and Latinas in the 1970s Bronx shaped the artform’s birth, sound, and development.
Aviva Taubenfeld, Albany Research Foundation for the State University of New York
Project Title: Building Community and Belonging for Hispanic Students through the Humanities
Project Description: The creation of an advanced course, a community-wide speaker series, and digital humanities resources for the study and teaching of Spanish language and culture for heritage speakers.
Melanie Walsh, Cornell University
Project Title: BERT for Humanists
Project Description: The development of case studies about and professional development workshops on the use of BERT (bidirectional encoder representations from transformers) for humanities scholars and students interested in large-scale text analysis.
Maikel Alendy, Florida International University
Project Title: Science, Fiction, and Science Fiction: Building a Digital Library of Teaching Resources for Interdisciplinary Curricula
Project Description: A three-year project for development and curricular integration of a digital library of interdisciplinary teaching materials exploring connections between science and fiction.
Kyoko Amano, University of Houston, Victoria
Project Title: Interdisciplinary Humanities for a Diverse Campus: Building Minors in Race, Gender, and Disability Studies
Project Description: The creation of interdisciplinary minors in three areas: race and ethnic studies, women and gender studies, and disability studies.
Marissa Ambio, Hamilton College
Project Title: Curatorial Studies: Expanding the Impact of the Humanities through Interdisciplinary and Experiential Partnerships
Project Description: A two-and-a-half-year project to develop an interdisciplinary program and minor in curatorial studies.
Maria Letizia Bellocchio, University of Arizona, Tucson
Project Title: Italian Language and Culture Curriculum Redesign
Project Description: A three-year project to develop curriculum and open educational resources for interdisciplinary courses in Italian language and culture.
Jeffrey Berglund, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff
Project Title: A Journey of Striving: Literary and Creative Expressions of Diné (Navajo) Becoming
Project Description: Research and writing of a book on how Diné (Navajo) principles of homeland, kinship, beauty, harmony, and shared memories are reflected in their literature, music, and film.
Russ Castronovo, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Project Title: American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability
Project Description: Research and writing for a book examining how early American conceptions of national security are expressed in its literature and other media.
Jessica DeSpain, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville
Project Title: Recovery Hub for American Women Writers
Project Description: The continued development and implementation of a digital recovery hub focused on surfacing the work of American women writers and promoting scholarship on their literary contributions.
Elizabeth Drumm, Reed Institute
Project Title: Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s La media noche: Visión estelar de un momento de guerra
Project Description: Preparation of an English-language translation and critical edition of Spanish author Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s chronicle of World War I, La media Noche: Visión estelar de un momento de guerra (Midnight: Astral Vision of a Moment of War) (1917).
Stefani Engelstein, Duke University
Project Title: The Emergence of the Concept of Opposite Sexes around 1800 in German Literature, Science, and Nature Philosophy
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on the scientific concept of “Opposite Sexes” in nineteenth-century German scientific and scholarly discourse.
George Hoffmann, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Project Title: The Price of Peace of French Pacification Policy, 1560–98
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on religious toleration policies in early modern France (1560–98).
Tonya Howe, University of Virginia
Project Title: Literature in Context: An Open Anthology of Literature, 1400–1925
Project Description: The continuing development of the open educational resource Literature in Context, an open-access, curated, and classroom-sourced digital anthology of British and American literature in English in partnership with scholars and students from Marymount University.
Harris Kornstein, University of Arizona, Tucson
Project Title: Enchanting Technology: Obfuscation, Play, and Other Queer Strategies for Countering Surveillance Capitalism
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book about how queer and trans people expand traditional approaches to privacy and counter surveillance by creatively exploiting the features of mainstream technology.
Tracy Leavelle, Creighton University
Project Title: Humanities and Health Justice Pathways: Forming First-Generation Professionals
Project Description: A three-year, cross-institutional project between Creighton University and Arizona State University to create a humanities and health justice pathways program.
Andrew Leiter, Lycoming College
Project Title: Enhancing the Digital Humanities as Experiential Undergraduate Research
Project Description: A two-year project to build the college’s digital humanities capacity through undergraduate research about campus history.
Laura McGrath, Temple University, Philadelphia
Project Title: Literary Agents and American Literature
Project Description: Research and writing for a book examining the role of the literary agent in shaping the marketplace and the literary attitudes of readers.
Andrew Newman, Stony Brook University, State University of New York
Project Title: The High School Canon: The History of a Civic Tradition
Project Description: Research and writing for a book examining American high school English curriculum as a touchstone of American literary history and culture.
John O’Brien, University of Virginia
Project Title: Literature in Context: An Open Anthology of Literature, 1400–1925
Project Description: The continuing development of the open educational resource, Literature in Context, an open-access, curated, and classroom-sourced digital anthology of British and American literature in English in partnership with scholars and students from Marymount University.
Mariana Past, Dickinson College
Project Title: Unbroken Nostalgia: An Annotated Translation of the Haitian-Cuban Poetry by Hilario Batista
Project Description: Preparation of a trilingual (English, Spanish, Kreyol) translation and critical edition of Unbroken Nostalgia: Haitian Kreyol Poetry in Cuba by Hilario Batista Félix (1955– ), an important Haitian-Cuban writer.
Lisa Rhody, CUNY Research Foundation; Graduate Center, City University of New York
Project Title: Digital Humanities Resource Infrastructure for Teaching Technology
Project Description: The continued development of the Digital Humanities Resource Infrastructure for Teaching Technology (DHRIFT) platform to provide technical training in digital humanities methodologies with a particular focus on faculty and staff members for historically under-resourced institutions.
Victoria Troianowski Saramago, University of Chicago
Project Title: Against the Current: Electricity and Cultural Production in Brazil’s Anthropocene
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on the cultural legacy of electrification in Brazil from the 1930s to the present.
Jesse Schwartz, CUNY Research Foundation; LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York
Project Title: America’s Russia: The Bolshevik Revolution, Eurasianism, and the Race of Radicalism
Project Description: Research and writing for a book examining the origins and shifts of American political perceptions of Russia as captured in print culture from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Lisa Siraganian, Johns Hopkins University, MD
Project Title: The Personhood Problem, from Corporations to Trees: Synthesizing Political and Philosophical Debates on Persons
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on legal and philosophical concepts on personhood—from humans to corporations, algorithms, animals, and the environment.
Rhona Trauvitch, Florida International University
Project Title: Science, Fiction, and Science Fiction: Building a Digital Library of Teaching Resources for Interdisciplinary Curricula
Project Description: A three-year project for development and curricular integration of a digital library of interdisciplinary teaching materials exploring connections between science and fiction.
