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.
