A one-year planning grant to develop a new interdisciplinary bioethics minor. 

Clarkson University proposes an NEH Humanities Connections Planning Grant to develop a new interdisciplinary Bioethics minor. Social trends have led to increased emphasis on STEM and profession-oriented education and a devaluation of the humanities. Despite this, the country is poised for a renewed appreciation of the humanities’ relevance. The COVID-19 pandemic has raised urgent issues of human value in scientific research and health care: ensuring integrity in research; distributing scarce resources now (ventilators) and in the future (vaccines); maintaining trust in public institutions to affect public health; striking a balance between economic and health need. There is an acute need to integrate ethics training into STEM and Pre-health professions majors. A Bioethics minor would respond to this need and prepare students to reason about the intricate connections between human values and science, which have been brought to the fore by the COVID-19 health crisis.

A sequence of three courses focused on the past, present, and future of water in Central Asia for students in the social sciences, business, engineering, and the humanities.

The University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Russian and East European Studies (REES) and Asian Studies Center (ASC) propose a project to strengthen interdisciplinary connections among Pitt faculty and students across the humanities, social sciences, and pre-professional programs in business and engineering. Led by Dr. Nancy Condee (REES Director/Slavic Languages and Literatures) and Dr. Ruth Mostern (World History Center Director/ASC affiliate), the project faculty team will develop three new undergraduate courses on the theme of “Water in Central Asia.” This course sequence will incorporate high-impact experiential learning activities, including mentored research projects and virtual peer-to-peer exchanges with students at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. The courses will be taught in spring 2019 through spring 2020 and then incorporated into Pitt’s regular curriculum and into two existing student credential programs, as well as a planned new Central Asian Studies Certificate.

A three-year interdisciplinary curricular implementation grant focused on the life, works, and legacy of writer Paul Laurence Dunbar.

The University of Dayton and partners seek support from NEH to develop new curriculum and place-based experiential learning opportunities for undergraduate students from all backgrounds around the theme of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Dayton native and preeminent African American writer. We will develop of a set of linked courses that can explore the breadth of Dunbar’s life, context, works, and influence. These include courses from multiple fields that will incorporate significant humanities subject material, pedagogy, and habits of inquiry, as well as humanities courses that will integrate other disciplines. UD will introduce digital humanities tools and methods of inquiry to students and educators as a means of broadening engagement with the humanities. The project will also develop new experiential learning opportunities that make use of extant, but hard-to-discover Dunbar sources and artifacts, and create connections with the places associated with his life and works.

The implementation of an interdisciplinary major in health humanities for undergraduates.

D’Youville College (DYC) proposes to implement an interdisciplinary major in Health Humanities by creating six core courses with robust experiential-learning components. DYC created the major, which stems from a new general-education curriculum and a piloted series of topics courses, to strengthen the humanities by means of interdisciplinary programs. The major responds to the College’s belief that, to serve their communities most effectively, healthcare providers must have a firm understanding of how and why different belief systems, cultural biases, ethnic origins, family structures, and other culturally determined factors influence how people experience illness. It also responds to DYC’s mission and its position as an important provider of healthcare professionals in a highly diverse city with a focus on healthcare. As part of implementing the new major, DYU will launch a speaker series and faculty workshops and significantly enhance its collaboration with community organizations.

A three-year project to implement a general education pathway introducing underserved students to digital community engagement.

The Community-Oriented Digital Engagement Scholars (CODES) program will provide a general education track for underserved students at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) and Lewis and Clark Community College (L&C). Blending community engagement, digital methods, collaborative research, and transdisciplinary pedagogy, CODES enables students to bring their experiences and creativity to bear upon critical issues facing their communities. Designed for underserved students, including those who are first-generation, African American, Latinx, and/or Pell-eligible, CODES help students at the earliest stages of their college career understand the integral role of the humanities in transdisciplinary problem solving. While there are several models of community-engaged teaching at the general education level, few meaningfully incorporate digital methods and ethics into pedagogical design to address the need for an informed twenty-first century citizenry and workforce.

The development of an interdisciplinary undergraduate curriculum on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

This proposal aims to foster a transdisciplinary environment where humanities and STEM students can think critically, engage, and interact with technical and social constructions of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and systems. This grant will support the design of an undergraduate certificate program entitled “Intelligent Media and Society” at the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University. This certificate will focus on humanistic and socio-cultural engagement with AI with a core set of classes with complementary domain knowledge including Minds and Machines; Science Fiction, Creativity and Responsibility; and Algorithmic Reading. Implementation of this certificate program includes curriculum building, development of online modules, and community/partnership development for experiential learning opportunities.

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

Community colleges have come to be regarded as workforce development institutions and only secondarily as what they really are: important components of the higher education landscape. At the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC), we believe the humanities are vital for teaching us how to be fully human within our era. Through the Contextualizing Humanities Education for All program, our team will infuse humanities ideas into non-humanities disciplines through faculty collaboration on cross-curriculum development, and workshops to introduce students to skills in written and oral communication, analytical thinking, collaboration, creative thinking, and problem-solving. Humanities and non-humanities faculty will collaborate to design a variety of paired courses, programs, and a Distinction in Humanities recognition to provide multiple touch points for exposing students to humanities concepts and helping them apply this mindset to the rest of their education and life.

Two one-week workshops for 72 K-12 educators on the interaction between Native Americans and European settlers in Santa Fe.

The University of New Mexico is seeking a grant award to provide teacher workshops during the summer of 2021. Santa Fe, a city boasting a 400+ year history as the recognized capital will be the site of this workshop. The extensive history of the continuously occupied historic sites offers a rich opportunity for teachers from around the U.S. to study the history and culture of the area by investigating the historic sites of Santa Fe and area Pueblos. The workshops will be structured around the concept of homelands and include the study of historic sites, artifacts and stories in Santa Fe, NM and surrounding communities. The Camino Real de Tierra Adentro and the Palace of the Governors will be interpreted, studied and contrasted with the Pueblo history of the region, including Taos Pueblo, to understand the complexity of historical homelands. Structures, museums, centers and libraries in Santa Fe housing artifact and document collections will be utilized to foster deeper understandings.

Two one-week workshops for 72 school teachers about history, music, food, and racial diversity in the Mississippi Delta.

“The Most Southern Place on Earth” is a seven-day workshop that will bring together K-12 teachers from around the country to learn about the important role that the Mississippi Delta has played in American History. Workshop participants will learn about the interconnectedness of culture, place, and history in the Delta, including the racial and ethnic diversity that influenced, and was influenced by, music, food, and labor. Using scholarship, films, oral history, and museum visits, “Most Southern Place” offers participants a rich and immersive experience that highlights interdisciplinary teaching and learning.

Two one-week workshops for 72 school teachers on the Chinese American experience in California.

The University of California, Davis seeks $189,883 to fund Building Community in California: The Chinese American Experience, a Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop for School Teachers to be held June 27 to July 2 and July 11 to 16, 2021.This program for K-12 teachers, hosted on the UC Davis campus, will highlight the significance of historic sites in Sacramento, Donner Summit, the town of Locke, and San Francisco, California. These spaces frame educators’ understanding of Chinese immigration and Chinese immigrants’ contributions from the Gold Rush era through the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which have a lasting impact. These two events in American history bookend our study. The Chinese American experience provides an important frame to understand the significance of immigration policy, and the contributions and experiences of those who came to and built community in Northern California.

Two one-week workshops for 72 school teachers about the history and culture of Asian Pacific American immigrants in the Pacific Northwest.

The Wing Luke Memorial Foundation (dba Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience) seeks funding to present our popular Landmark workshops, "From Immigrants to Citizens: Asian Pacific Americans in the Northwest". Building on the success of our 2014, 2016, and 2019 workshops, we propose 2 week-long sessions in summer 2021 led by our 2019 team of Education staff in partnership with preeminent scholars and veteran K-12 educators. The long history of Asian Pacific Americans (APAs) in the Northwest provides a wealth of landmark sites and historical materials on which to base K-12 professional development training about APA immigrant histories and the many cultures that shaped our nation. The need for training is clear based on the continued lack of published curriculum and persistent under-resourcing of materials and training for K-12 teachers on APA history. In 2021, we will build on our existing program to include newly available sites/materials.

Two one-week workshops for 72 K-12 educators on the history of slavery in the colonial north.

In recent years, public humanities practitioners have focused on re-evaluating how slavery in America is presented at historic sites, incorporating the point of view of enslaved individuals, and recognizing the longevity of slavery’s existence in America. Still, the narrative of slavery is rooted in the antebellum South, omitting its connection to the legal, economic, and political development of colonial America and the New Nation period. For over 20 years, Historic Hudson Valley has told the story of slavery in colonial America, on site at our historic site Philipsburg Manor and, in 2019, with the interactive documentary People Not Property: Stories of Slavery in the Colonial North. In 2017 and 2019, HHV hosted NEH summer Institutes to explore this topic with K-12 teachers. Now HHV seeks a Landmarks grant for summer 2021. The workshop would be grounded at Philipsburg Manor and extended to nearby historic sites to consider how these locations expand our knowledge of American slavery.

Two one-week workshops for 72 educators on the civil rights movement and desegregation in Atlanta. 

At the core of the workshop is the weighty issue of race reform in a contested southern past. Atlanta, destroyed in the Civil War, was rebuilt on the ashes of slavery as a “New South” city where memorials to the Old South became symbols of white supremacy that relegated African Americans to legal and economic second-class status. The struggle of resistance follows from W. E. B. Du Bois to Martin Luther King. Atlanta has an ideal nexus of historic sites where teachers can explore these struggles, from the legacy of slavery, the tragedy of war and defeat, the promise of emancipation, the betrayal of Reconstruction, the terror of redemption and race riot, the erection of the color line and resistance to segregation, the civil rights movement, desegregation, integration and resegregation, to a multicultural and pluralistic society. Participants will see how race relations figured into the landscape as Americans who once venerated the civil war dead now memorialize civil rights martyrs.

Two one-week workshops for 72 educators about migration and agricultural labor history in rural California.

From the exhausted hope of the Joads to the tenacity of Cesar Chavez; from the austere Garveyian self- reliance of Allensworth to the lyricism of the Bakersfield Sound, very few locales have captured the promise, struggles, artistry, and multi-ethnic tapestry of Rural America more than California’s San Joaquin Valley. This place-based workshop features four historical rural landmarks related to multiracial agricultural settlement since the late nineteenth century through the era of the farm worker movement in the 1960s. Participant field trips will include cultural heritage interpreters, visiting scholars, and companion digital archival material related to Allensworth State Park, Sunset Labor Camp, National Chavez Center, and various historical landmarks located in Delano, California. Hosted by CSU Bakersfield, participants will draw linkages to K-12 curriculum with a focus on teaching the rich and diverse history of migration and agricultural labor in the United States.

Two one-week workshops for 72 educators on the incarceration of Japanese Americans in Heart Mountain, Wyoming.

We will conduct two six-day workshops for 5-12 educators for the Landmarks of American History and Culture program to instruct them on the details of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II.

Two one-week workshops for 72 educators on the significance of Selma, Alabama, within the long civil rights movement.

This workshop will invite educators from across the country to an immersive, week-long exploration of one of the most important landscapes of the American civil rights movement. Using the events of the infamous “Bloody Sunday” protests in Selma, Alabama, workshop participants will spend a week exploring the understudied ordinary people and places of this freedom struggle. A range of experts will lead these educators in thinking about how we remember (and forget) civil rights struggles and the places they stemmed from. Through workshops and readings, teachers will be exposed to place based learning techniques and an unparalleled archive of images assembled for the workshop. Participants will leave the workshop better equipped to identify and educate about the intersections between race, place, and freedom struggles in their own classrooms and communities.

Completion of a comprehensive institutional climate action plan for all 38 of Historic New England’s properties as well as data-informed carbon neutrality plans for the Pierce House (1683) in Dorchester, Massachusetts and Casey Farm (1750) in Saunderstown, Rhode Island.

Building on more than a decade of capacity building in the area of climate resiliency, Historic New England will undertake an ambitious planning effort to define goals and strategies for advancing resiliency, mitigation, and climate justice goals across a collection of thirty-nine historic properties in five New England states. The project will produce an institutional Climate Action Plan and two actionable project plans for achieving carbon neutrality at high-profile public historic sites in Dorchester, Massachusetts and Saunderstown, Rhode Island.

Research and writing leading to a scholarly monograph about the modern history of transportation technology in Japan.

The Rickshaw and the Railroad examines the intellectual and social history of transportation in nineteenth through twenty-first century Japan. It argues that transportation is a keyword of modern history. It is a contested concept that historical actors and historians alike use to symbolize the past, define the modern and pre-modern eras, and critique the present and envision the future. Interweaving the histories of rickshaw pullers with human-car railway pushers, truck drivers, and parcel delivery workers, The Rickshaw and the Railroad shows that, (a) for over one hundred years, the promise that cheaper and faster transportation would benefit society at large has been used to override the concerns of those who sought to protect transport as a livelihood; and, (b) on a broad scale transport change has continually reproduced, rather than eliminated, the need for precarious human labor in transportation systems.

Research and writing leading to a scholarly monograph about the modern history of the use of natural gas in Iran. 

This project focuses on the history natural gas in 20th-century Iran, using the energy source—as both a varied material substance and an object of discourse—as a lens to study the country’s developmental programs, its charged politics of modernization, and their connection to the natural world. It follows the movement of gas from underground reservoirs through infrastructures of refining and distribution into everyday life, in the process exploring the roles of planners, oil firms, industrialists, consumers, mountain ranges, sedimentary rock, and natural gas itself. Drawing upon perspectives from Middle Eastern history, science and technology studies, and political ecology, it contributes to our knowledge of modern Iran, the creation of fossil fuel energy systems in the Global South, the role of anticolonial politics in the rise of hydrocarbon energy regimes and the climate crises they have spawned, and the theorization of precarity as an entrepot to studying human-nature interactions.

A four-week, residential institute for 25 higher education faculty to study womens roles in and contributions to Buddhism.

This 4-week, Level II residential institute program for college and university teachers is planned to take place June 6 to July 1, 2022. The Institute will be offered by the Asian Studies Development Program (ASDP), a national initiative of the East-West Center, and is designed to meet the needs of twenty-five educators in community colleges, liberal arts colleges and universities.

A four-week residential institute for 30 higher education faculty on José Martí (1853 - 1895) and the immigrant communities of Florida.

This 4-week Level II Institute will study the rise of the U.S. as a global hegemonic power as a consequence of its military intervention in Cuba’s War of Independence (1898) from the perspective of the Cuban émigré communities of Florida, who, from their late-19th century cigar-manufacturing enclaves in Key West, Ybor City, and West Tampa, played a critical role in the anti-colonial struggle against Spain. These communities constitute an extraordinary chrysalis in which to observe and understand the complex cultural and political evolution of the U.S. at the dawn of what is often referred to as “the American century.” The close study of this seminal period from the perspective of the working class immigrants who organized, financed, and in many cases fought and died for a patriotic ideal that they helped inspire and formulate by their example, will enrich any cross-cultural, multidisciplinary approach to the teaching of U.S. History.

A one-week institute for 35 K-12 teachers on the First Amendment to be held at the National Constitution Center.

One week intensive institute for k-12 teachers on the United States Constitution and the First Amendment, focusing on the delicate balance between the rights of individuals and the need to govern society and keep it safe. The institute will begin with an historical review and a conceptual discussion of the founding of the United States with an emphasis on important founding documents. The Institute will then move to a study of the issues raised by the incorporation of the First Amendment into the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause. And finally, it will examine specific issues that emerge out of the First Amendment as seen in major Supreme Court Decisions. The institute will not only explore substantive matters, but also promote the development of critical thinking and the disposition to question. Participants will then discuss how to apply the strong content in their own classrooms.

A three-week institute for 25 teachers on the diversity of religions in the U.S. by way of examining the lived experience of six religions in New York City.

This three week institute offers K-12 teachers an advanced introduction to the religious diversity of the United States, through a rigorous engagement with religious studies scholarship, and with the religious life of New York City. Participants will explore six major religious traditions. They will discuss the constitutional and pedagogic issues surrounding the study of religion in public and private schools. They will meet with diverse religious leaders, visit local houses of worship, participate in a walking tour exploring local religious history, and conduct field research to trace the meanings of “religion” in a diverse New York neighborhood. In addition to these community-based pedagogies, they will also explore classroom strategies for teaching about everyday religious life, including the use of literature and case-study texts. The institute will thus help participants teach their students about the everyday lives of their fellow Americans from diverse faith traditions.

A two-week institute for 25 teachers to examine the Gilded Age and Progressive Era through a comparative place-based study of New York City and the Adirondacks.

“Common Ground” is a two-week Level II NEH Summer Institute for twenty-five middle and high school educators that examines how Americans understood the meaning of place, including those defined as “urban” and “wild,” in the years between the end of the Civil War to World War I, a period historians commonly refer to as the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Our goal is to allow educators to develop teaching tools that are adaptable to their classroom while having them study Gilded Age and Progressive Era in ways not conveyed in traditional textbook accounts.

A two-week institute for 25 middle and high school teachers on the text and performance of Shakespeare’s plays.

Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) proposes a two-week Summer Institute entitled Teaching Shakespeare's Plays through Scholarship and Performance, to be held July 12-23, 2021 at TFANA's Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, New York. Offered to a national group of 25 middle and high school teachers, the Institute introduces a carefully integrated approach for exploring text-based scholarship, contextual and original source material, language, and performance in three Shakespeare plays. This year's participants will study MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, MEASURE FOR MEASURE and OTHELLO under the guidance of leading Shakespeare scholars Julie Crawford (Columbia University) and Mario DiGangi (Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York), and master teaching artists and theatre practitioners Krista Apple and Claudia Zelevansky.