Congratulations to the eleven MLA members among the winners of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships announced in April 2022. Many of this year’s fellows’ projects directly respond to issues like climate change, pandemics, Russia, feminism, identity, and racism. Noting the impact of these annual grants, Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation, said, “The work supported by the Foundation will aid in our collective effort to better understand the new world we’re in, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going.”

Fellowships

Bénédicte Boisseron, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Field of study: Literary Criticism

Heather Clark, University of Huddersfield

Field of study: American Literature

Charlene M. Eska, Virginia Tech

Field of study: Medieval and Renaissance History

Stathis Gourgouris, Columbia University

Field of study: Literary Criticism

Daniel Hack, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Field of study: Literary Criticism

Yona Harvey, University of Pittsburgh

Field of study: Poetry

Jeffrey Masten, Northwestern University

Field of study: English Literature

Matt Reeck
Field of study: Translation

Paul Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania

Field of study: Literary Criticism

Esther Schor, Princeton University

Field of study: Intellectual and Cultural History

John Zilcosky, University of Toronto

Field of study: Literary Criticism

Congratulations to the twenty-one MLA members who are among the winners of the National Endowment for the Humanities grants announced in April 2022. Their projects include a curriculum integrating humanities and data science through experiential learning; research and writing leading to a book about the literary and cultural legacy of Bartolina Sisa, an Indigenous revolutionary woman in colonial Bolivia; a three-year project incorporating humanities content into preprofessional courses; and much more.

Elizabeth Alsop, City University of New York

Project Title: The Cinema of American Director Elaine May

Project Description: Writing leading to a book about film director Elaine May (1932–) and her four feature films, A New Leaf (1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Mikey and Nicky (1976), and Ishtar (1987).

Sari Altschuler, Northeastern University

Project Title: Humanities and the Digital Future of Health and Healthcare

Project Description: A three-year project to implement a half major in digital health humanities.

Brooke Conti, Cleveland State University

Project Title: Religious Nostalgia from Shakespeare to Milton

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on religious nostalgia in English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Tara Daly, Marquette University

Project Title: Back to the Future: Bartolina Sisa (d. 1782) and Living Indigenous Archives in Modern Day Bolivia

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book about the literary and cultural legacy of Bartolina Sisa, an Indigenous revolutionary woman in colonial Bolivia.

Shannon Draucker, Siena College

Project Title: How Musical Science Shaped Representations of Gender and Sexuality in British Literature, 1850–1914

Project Description: Research and writing towards a book on Victorian authors’ understanding of music and musical science, 1850–1914.

Matylda Figlerowicz, Harvard University

Project Title: Becoming Lady Light: The Revolutions of Nahua Intellectual and Model Luz Jiménez

Project Description: Research leading to an intellectual biography of Luz Jiménez (1897–1965), an Indigenous model to artists and informant to anthropologists working in post-Revolutionary Mexico.

Jane Garrity, University of Colorado, Boulder

Project Title: Integrating Humanities and Data Science

Project Description: The development of eight new courses integrating humanities and data science through experiential learning.

Amanda Golden, New York Institute of Technology

Project Title: Editing the Poems of Sylvia Plath

Project Description: Research and writing an expanded, annotated edition of the collected poems of American author Sylvia Plath (1932–1963).

Lisa Hager, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee 

Project Title: Transgender Victorians: Reconceptualizing Gender Identities in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book theorizing Victorian gender identities through literature and authorial biography.

Molly Hiro, University of Portland 

Project Title: Core Humanities: Integration through Curriculum, Campus, and Community

Project Description: Planning for the creation of new interdisciplinary Core courses and for a humanities hub to serve as the home of the new curriculum.

Ashton Lazarus, University of Utah

Project Title: Sensation and Renunciation in The Tale of Genji

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on the Japanese literary classic The Tale of Genji (c. 1011), focusing on the tension between the allure of sensory experience and Buddhist distrust of the senses.

Joseph Mansky, University of Oklahoma

Project Title: Plays, Libels, and the Public Sphere in Shakespeare’s England

Project Description: Research and writing towards a book on the use of libels on the English stage in the 1590s.

Shaun Myers, University of Pittsburgh

Project Title: Black Anaesthetics: African American Narrative beyond Man

Project Description: Research and writing of one chapter of a book on Black women writers and the techniques they used to obscure blackness in the 1970s and 1980s.

Sarah Noonan, Saint Mary’s College, IN

Project Title: Launching a Digital and Public Humanities Minor

Project Description: The development of an interdisciplinary minor in digital and public humanities.

Jessica Richard, Wake Forest University

Project Title: Maria Edgeworth Letters

Project Description: Planning for the creation of a fully searchable corpus of Maria Edgeworth’s letters through crowdsourced transcription, expert annotation, and TEI encoding. Her letters are held at twenty-six libraries across the United States and United Kingdom, and this would be the first effort to unite them digitally.

Andrew Rusnak, Community College of Baltimore County, Essex

Project Title: Contextualizing Humanities Education for All 

Project Description: A three-year project incorporating humanities content into preprofessional courses.

Emily Rutter, Ball State University

Project Title: White Allyship in Contemporary Black Media 

Project Description: Research and writing of a book about the ways in which directors and screenwriters centralize complex Black protagonists while also training the gaze on would-be white allies.

Alexandra Valint, University of Southern Mississippi

Project Title: Wheelchairs, Crutches, and Disability in Victorian Literature 

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on prosthetics and mobility aids in Victorian literature.

Leslie Werden, Sioux City Morningside University

Project Title: Rooted: Integrated Humanities and Agriculture 

Project Description: A three-year project to implement an agricultural humanities minor.

Ashley Williard, University of South Carolina, Columbia

Project Title: Disruptive Minds: Madness in the Early French Atlantic

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book exploring seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conceptions of madness in France and its Atlantic colonies.

Adrian Wisnicki, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Project Title: COVE: Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education

Project Description: Development of the Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education (COVE) with three areas of focus: implementation of more robust data standards for long-term use; expansion of content with over eighty titles concentrating especially on noncanonical and global literatures; and enhancements of the COVE website to facilitate pedagogically focused digital humanities work with literary texts.

Among this year’s National Humanities Center Fellows are three members of the Modern Language Association. Each fellow will work on individual research and will have the opportunity to share ideas in seminars, lectures, and conferences at the center. The MLA commends them for their contribution to humanistic scholarship.

• Irving Goh (Languages and Literature, National University of Singapore): Living on after Failure (Luce East Asia Fellowship)
• Patricia A. Matthew (Languages and Literature, Montclair State University): Gender, Sugar, and the Afterlives of Abolition (Anthony E. Kaye Fellowship)
• Cedric R. Tolliver (Languages and Literature, University of Houston): Spook(ed): African American Literature, National Security, and the Fictions of Statecraft (M. H. Abrams Fellowship)

Congratulations to the four MLA members who have been awarded 2022 American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellowships, which support early-career scholars whose voices, perspectives, and broad visions will strengthen institutions of higher education and humanistic disciplines in the years to come. This year the program will award more than $3.7 million to support 60 scholars, many of whom are facing significant disruption to their research and career ambitions due to the widespread social and economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fellowships

Maria Beliaeva Solomon, University of Maryland, College Park

Eleanor Paynter, Cornell University

Matthew Reeck, Saint John’s University, NY

Brandy E. Underwood, California State University, Northridge

The volume Teaching Science Writing, edited by Lisa Ottum, is now in development in the MLA Options for Teaching series. To learn more about the volume and how to propose an essay, please visit the MLA website. Please send abstracts and CVs to the editor by 15 June 2022.

Congratulations to the thirty-five MLA members who are among the winners of the National Endowment for the Humanities grants announced in January 2022. Their projects include a Fort Lewis College Native American language institute; a book on serialized literature and storytelling in Mexico; a digital archive of Cherokee-language manuscripts and lexical resources; a three-year project to create a health humanities minor; and much more.

Patricia Akhimie, Rutgers University, Newark

Project Title: Editing Shakespeare’s Othello

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a new edition of Shakespeare’s Othello to be published as part of the Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series.

Phillip Barrish, University of Texas, Austin

Project Title: Health Care, Social Justice, and United States Literature since 1900

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book examining US literary works that engage health care at a systemic level.

Bartholomew Brinkman, Framingham State University

Project Title: Investigating Race through Digital Humanities Approaches

Project Description: Workshops for faculty members and other educators on integrating the study of race in the United States with resources for digital humanities research and pedagogy.

Matthew Brown, University of Iowa

Project Title: Global Book Cultures and the Student Laboratory: Undergraduate Education at the University of Iowa Center for the Book

Project Description: A three-year project to develop an undergraduate laboratory space and related curriculum that would engage students in the study of global print and manuscript cultures.

Johannes Burgers, Southeast Missouri State University

Project Title: Teaching and Learning William Faulkner in the Digital Age

Project Description: The creation of digital resources for teaching William Faulkner’s fiction, followed by their integration into pilot courses for undergraduate and high school students.

Christopher Bush, Northwestern University

Project Title: The Floating World: History, Haiku, Global Modernism

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on the reception and the adaptation of the haiku genre in France, Mexico, and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century.

Angela Calcaterra, University of North Texas

Project Title: Indigenous People and Stories of Gun Violence in Early America and Today

Project Description: Writing a book that traces the record of Native American perception of human-weapons relations through material and literary culture.

Arif Camoglu

Project Title: Spectral Empire: Anglo-Ottoman Poetics of Sovereignty

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a comparative study of Ottoman and British literature, introducing Ottoman literary sources to debates about the nature and meaning of empire and imperialism.

Geremy Carnes, Lindenwood College

Project Title: Expanding Access to the Digital Humanities in St. Louis

Project Description: Developing a workshop and building a network for supporting and disseminating methods in digital humanities pedagogy for secondary and postsecondary institutions in the St. Louis, Missouri, region.

Manu Chander, Rutgers University, Newark

Project Title: The Complete Works of Egbert Martin

Project Description: Writing and revision for an edition of the collected works of Guyanese belletrist Egbert Martin (c. 1861–90).

Tarryn Chun, University of Notre Dame

Project Title: Spectacle and Excess in Global Chinese Performance

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book about spectacle, excess, and Chinese performance in the twenty-first century, including the recent use of digital technologies for aesthetics, state ideology, and global dissemination.

Ellen Cushman, Northeastern University

Project Title: Cherokee Lifeways: Hidden Literacies of Collective Action

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a history of the everyday life and philosophy of Cherokee people using a corpus of newly translated Cherokee-language materials.

Project Title: Translating Cherokee Manuscripts

Project Description: The further development of user interfaces for collective translation of the collections in the Digital Archive for American Indian Languages Preservation and Perseverance (DAILP), a digital archive of Cherokee-language manuscripts and lexical resources.

Riya Das, Prairie View A & M University

Project Title: Women at Odds: Indifference, Antagonism, and Progress in Late Victorian Literature

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book reassessing female solidarity in the Victorian novel.

Kenya Dworkin, Carnegie Mellon University

Project Title: Cuban Theater, American Stage: Performance, Politics, and Race in Tampa, Florida, 1886–1960

Project Description: Research and writing of a book about theater and the Cuban community in Tampa, Florida, from 1886 to the 1960s.

Benjamin Fagan, Auburn University

Project Title: The World of Frederick Douglass’s Newspapers

Project Description: Writing resulting in a book on Frederick Douglass’s work as a newspaper editor and its impact on multiple communities.

Janine Fitzgerald, Fort Lewis College

Project Title: Fort Lewis College Native Language Revitalization Institute

Project Description: Design and implementation of a Fort Lewis College summer Native American language institute.

Julia Flanders, Northeastern University

Project Title: Translating Cherokee Manuscripts

Project Description: The further development of user interfaces for collective translation of the collections in the Digital Archive for American Indian Languages Preservation and Perseverance (DAILP), a digital archive of Cherokee-language manuscripts and lexical resources.

Kaiama L. Glover, Barnard College

Project Title: For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of the Cold War

Project Description: Research and writing leading to publication of an intellectual biography of Haitian poet René Depestre (1926–) and his uniquely Caribbean and Afro-Atlantic perspectives on the Cold War.

Tao Goffe, Cornell University

Project Title: Towards an Integrated Colonial Archive: Humanities, Law and British Indentureship

Project Description: The creation of an interactive website that brings together collections in the United States and United Kingdom to facilitate scholarship on colonialism and indentureship. The UK partner is Birkbeck College.

Melissa Gregory, University of Toledo

Project Title: Health Humanities Minor

Project Description: A three-year project to create a health humanities minor.

Letitia Guran, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Project Title: Walking on a Tightrope of Words: Langston Hughes’s Re-writings on Race in the Soviet Union and the US

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a digital monograph on the writing, publishing history, and reception of Langston Hughes’s A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia (1934).

Diane Jakacki, Bucknell University

Project Title: Evolving Hands: Building Workflows and Scalable Practices for Handwriting

Project Description: The development and publication of training materials and documentation for the automatic transcription of historical manuscripts, based on three case studies from the Gertrude Bell Archive, the Records of Early English Drama, and archival collections held at Bucknell University. The UK partner is Newcastle University.

Shirin Khanmohamadi, San Francisco State University

Project Title: Translating Empires of the Saracens in European Epic Project

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book that will reconsider Christian-Muslim relationships and the concept of translatio studii et imperii in medieval epic by analyzing examples of object exchange in selected texts.

Caroline Kita, Washington University in St. Louis

Project Title: Border Territories: The Emancipatory Soundscapes of Postwar German Radio Drama

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on the importance of radio dramas to the German public in the aftermath of World War II.

Christina Lee, Princeton University

Project Title: The Library of The Convent of San Pablo (Manila, 1762)

Project Description: A project to digitize a collection of more than 1,500 rare manuscripts, maps, and early printed materials that were taken in the eighteenth century from the Convent of San Pablo in Manila, Philippines, and dispersed throughout the Philippines, United States, and United Kingdom. The UK partner is SOAS University of London.

Gema Ortega, Dominican University

Project Title: Culturally Relevant Voices: First-Year Writing and Speaking across the Curriculum

Project Description: Faculty development to optimize the implementation of a required first-year critical reading, writing, and speaking (CRWS) course sequence with a stronger grounding in culturally relevant pedagogy.

Matthew Potolsky, University of Utah

Project Title: Decadence, Literary Form, and Uneven Development, 1852–1905

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on the influence on global literature of English and French authors associated with the late nineteenth-century Decadence movement.

Maria Rey-Lopez, Metropolitan State University of Denver

Project Title: Geographies of Belonging: Spanish Place-Names in Colorado

Project Description: Research leading to the revision of an intensive Spanish grammar review course for heritage speakers.

Katey Roden, Gonzaga University

Project Title: Finding Our Way: Fostering a Sense of Place for Underrepresented Communities

Project Description: Development of a digital platform exploring histories of people who have lived along the Children of the Sun Trail in Spokane, Washington.

Na’ama Rokem, University of Chicago

Project Title: Studying Oak Woods: A Curriculum Development and Collaborative Teaching Proposal

Project Description: The development of a curricular project focused on the Oak Woods Cemetery, located on Chicago’s South Side.

Benjamin Saltzman, University of Chicago

Project Title: Gestures of Aversion

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on representations of aversion in European literature and art from antiquity to the early modern period.

Whitney Sperrazza, Rochester Institute of Technology

Project Title: Poetry, Anatomy, and Women’s Scientific Work in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on women’s poetry and scientific work in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.

John Walsh, Indiana University, Bloomington

Project Title: Tools for Open Research and Computation with HathiTrust: Leveraging Intelligent Text Extraction (TORCHLITE)

Project Description: The development of web-based tools and documentation to allow both novice and expert users to interact with data from the HathiTrust Digital Library.

Christopher Warren, Carnegie Mellon University

Project Title: Secret Printing: Freedom and the Press before Freedom of the Press

Project Description: The scaling-up of tools and methods to allow scholars to identify and decipher illicit printing in documents predating and associated with the First Amendment.

Dana Williams, Howard University

Project Title: Developing an Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities

Project Description: A two-year project to create a digital humanities graduate certificate.

Amy Wright, Saint Louis University

Project Title: Serial Storytelling in Mexico from Nationhood to Now, 1821–2021

Project Description: Completion of a book on serialized literature and storytelling in Mexico from the nineteenth century to the present.

The MLA International Bibliography is accepting applications for three-year field-bibliography fellowships. MLA field bibliographers examine scholarly materials and submit bibliographic and indexing information for citations in the bibliography. Open to all MLA members, including graduate students, the 2022 fellowships will run from 1 July 2022 to 30 June 2025.

Field bibliographers perform a valuable service for the profession and receive institutional recognition while deepening their knowledge of the field as well as their research skills. The MLA provides materials and training and waives registration fees for fellows attending training sessions at the MLA convention. On completion of the fellowship, fellows receive a $500 stipend and a certificate at the convention awards ceremony.

For more information and to submit an application, visit the MLA Bibliography Fellowships page. Applications are due 15 March 2022.