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.
