A two-year archival digitization, faculty-student research, and course development project on the work and legacy of Booker T. Washington, to take place at Tuskegee University.

This project seeks to strengthen humanities education and scholarship at Tuskegee University by re-examining Booker T. Washington's influence in education, politics and civil rights, business, and literature and the arts. Although considerable scholarship on Washington already exists, the extent of his regional, national, and global impact has not been fully explored. The project will include faculty-student research collaborations; enrichment of existing English and History courses; development of a new interdisciplinary, team-taught course; a public symposium; creation of a new section of the Tuskegee University Archives Web site to include previously unexplored archival materials on Washington's life and work; and initiation of an ongoing Humanities Institute.

A one-week institute for secondary school teachers on the Harlem Renaissance, public programs to accompany the exhibition "Key Ingredients," and a grant program on themes and events in American history and culture.

The Alabama Humanities Foundation proposes to use its We the People (WTP) allocation to: (1) boost its grants program for a special iniative on WTP; (2) conduct a one-week residential institute on the literature and art of the Harlem Renaissance for secondary school teachers; and (3) underwrite the presentation and related programs for the "Key Ingredients" Smithsonian exhibition in six small Alabama towns.

a one-week teacher institute on Alabama's Black Belt, the traveling exhibition, "Between Fences," "My United States" family reading program, speakers bureau presentations and a grant program for projects in American history and culture.

The Alabama Humanities Foundation (AHF) proposes to use its We The People (WTP) allocation to: underwrite presentations in our ongoing speakers bureau program that relate to American (including Alabama) history and culture; conduct a one-week teacher institute, “Prisms of Place: Alabama’s Black Belt;” support our Museum on Main Street “Between Fences” exhibition, “My United States” project, and boost our grants program with an initiative on WTP.

speakers bureau presentations, a teacher institute on the history and culture of Alabama's Gulf coast, the Museum on Main Street exhibition "New Harmonies," "We the People" grants, and the development of programming for "Picturing America."

The Alabama Humanities Foundation proposes to use its "We The People" (WTP) grant to: underwrite presentations in our Road Scholars speakers bureau program, which relate to American (including Alabama) history and culture; partially fund a one-week teacher institute, "History and Culture of Mobile and Alabama's Gulf Coast," partially assist our Museum on Main Street "New Harmonies" exhibition, promote our regrants program with emphasis on WTP, and develop programming for Picturing America.

To support three teacher institutes on "The Freedom Rights Movement in Alabama: From the 13th Amendment through the Voting Rights Act of 1965," "Humanities and Human Rights," and "The Last Great War: Teaching World War II through Art and Literature." Funding will also support the speakers bureau, the "Journey Stories" traveling exhibition, and grants.

The Alabama Humanities Foundation (AHF) proposes to use its We The People (WTP) grant to: (1) conduct three teacher institutes, (2) underwrite presentations in our speakers bureau program, which relate to American (including Alabama) history and culture; (3) partially assist our Museum on Main Street "Journey Stories" exhibition; and (4) promote our grants program with increased emphasis on WTP.

Four one-week workshops to study the historical evidence that documents the events leading to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Three one-week workshops for 150 school teachers to study the civil rights movement through historic sites in Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery, and Tuskegee, Alabama.

Two one-week Landmarks workshops for eighty school teachers on the history and legacy of the Civil Rights movement in Alabama.

The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute requests support for a Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop for Teachers titled " 'Stony the Road We Trod': Alabama's Role in the Modern Civil Rights Movement." The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI) will serve as the lead institution for a series of one-week scholarly presentations including experiential field studies at civil rights landmarks in Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery, and Tuskegee, Alabama. Teachers selected to take part in this interactive workshop experience will participate in lectures by scholars, meet and interact with iconic leaders and foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement, travel to important civil rights sites as well as sites dedicated to the preservation of civil rights history, review archival film footage and primary sources and use national history standards (or their own state standards) to develop curricular products.

Endowment for programs, preservation of documents, and faculty development workshops on the history of civil rights and African-American culture.

A professional and curriculum development for teachers from a high school in Holt, Alabama, concentrating on the history of the Civil Rights Movement and its impact on the state of Alabama and the nation.

A series of interdisciplinary faculty workshops on the "mythology" of the South and the role of Alabama writers in contributing to such a mythology.

Wallace Community College proposes a series of faculty workshops to study the influence and impact of Alabama myths and stories on the curricula at the College. The primary goal of the workshops is to enrich the participants’ understanding of the wisdom and power found in myths and stories so that they will draw from Alabama’s rich sources of lore to teach their students, to reinvent their classes relevant to the lives and times of their students, to reach out to their colleagues, and to remind themselves of their own unique stories.

My planned book explores how Americans rethought wrongdoing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as many traditional frameworks for explaining sin--such as blaming passions, self-interest, or natural depravity--came under attack. Difficulties explaining wrongdoing helped drive an intellectual wedge between evil and "ordinary" sin; moralists contrasted good people’s "mistakes" with evildoers' intentional villainy. Historians have charted changing ideas about particular vices, but they have been less interested in shifting views of what constitutes a moral failing, why human beings commit them, or how people could understand themselves as flawed but not evil. By historicizing concepts of sin, my research intersects with questions in philosophy and theology about human nature, sin, and the problem of evil; with literary studies on seduction novels and other narratives of wrongdoing; and with interdisciplinary work on the gendered construction of morality.

Summer research and writing on Art History and Criticism, History of Religion, and Medieval Studies.

The Last Judgment, the moment in Christian theology when Christ will separate the Blessed and Damned, was depicted in no less than 20 monumental sculptural programs in thirteenth-century France. Unlike the rare twelfth-century examples at Autun and Conques, these dramatic portals do not emphasize judgment, but rather the potential for salvation: Christ shows his wounds instead of pointing to Heaven or Hell. This book places the novel imagery of the Last Judgment in the context of the new, practical literature for pastoral care, which spread from the University of Paris through clerical networks and--it is argued--was made visible in sculptural programs at the cathedrals of Chartres, Paris, Reims, and Amiens. Perhaps of greatest significance, the book opens up a new way for thinking about sculpted program as works of visual exegesis. This methodology highlights the importance of intellectual history and manuscript studies for the understanding of portal sculpture--and vice versa.

No project description available

No project description available

I propose to examine changing conceptions of Australian national identity from the 19thC. to the present as articulated through cultural representations of the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. Since his execution in 1880, Kelly has been the subject of 12 stage plays, numerous ballads and poems, 30 books, a famous series of paintings, and 10 films. He was also represented at the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000. I wish to examine the significance and resurgence of the Kelly legend in various periods of Australian history, inquiring how Kelly becomes a template for prevailing national preoccupations, specifically the convict past, English/Irish relations, and the nation's ongoing debate about its ties to the British Crown.

Historians of illegitimacy have usually focused on infanticide trials, the New Poor Law of 1834, and child rescue work. This project will instead center on the legal and social consequences of growing up illegitimate in England and Wales between 1860 and 1939. An illegitimate child was literally parentless at law, and the first part of the book shows the difficulty of adjudicating for "fatherless" children in a patriarchal law system. The second part explores how families coped with illegitimacy, primarily by approximating the "regular" family, in blended and fictive forms. The continued legal and social discrimination led Parliament to pass the Legitimacy Act of 1926, a long overdue and highly limited act. Its passage and aftermath demonstrated the continued power of conservative forces in Britain until after World War II. Moreover, its application to the empire complicated meanings of citizenship, ethnicity, and nationality in an age of world upheaval and imperial decline.

The first chapter of my in-process second book, "Education as a Rite of Privilege" will investigate the process of pre-professionalization, and particularly the ample practice in ritual, provided to undergraduates at Victorian Oxbridge. In this chapter, I plan to analyze nineteenth-century materials from the Oxford University Archives, currently held in Duke Humphrey's Library, the oldest reading room in Oxford's Bodleian Library, for what they reveal about Victorian Oxford's ritual culture, and to use these Archival records to provide necessary historical context for readings of several mid-century novels, including John Henry Newman's "Loss and Gain" (1848), William Makepeace Thackeray's "Pendennis" (1848-50), Cuthbert Bede's "The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green" (1853-57), and Thomas Hughes's "Tom Brown at Oxford" (1861). Receipt of a NEH Summer Stipend would allow me fund a research trip to Oxford University in the summer of 2010.

I am applying for funding to support 2 months of summer research that will comprise an integral part of my larger year-long project to revise and expand my dissertation into a book-length manuscript for publication at a university press. For two months during summer 2012, I will work intensively to bring my study of Charles Taylor more fully up to date, following his most recent publications, A Secular Age (Harvard UP, 2007); and Dilemmas and Connections (Harvard UP, 2011). I will draft an entirely new final chapter titled, "Democracy, Diversity, and the Sources of Secularity," which will examine how Taylor’s responses to the challenge of postmodernism and multiculturalism shift from the 20th to the 21st C to include religion and secularity. This new chapter will extend my analysis to examine what continuities and shifts his latest treatment of modernity evidence in light of the history of his work.

This project stands at the intersection of legal, intellectual, and textual history. It examines a fourteenth-century black magic trial in an ecclesiastical court in Languedoc. Because all phases of the trial are preserved, it offers an early example of the developing legal procedures used to prosecute magic and witchcraft that culminates in the witch trials of the early modern period. In his testimony, the accused describes his book of magic, the Liber juratus Honorii, which he acquired in the Catalan city of Perpignan. The Liber juratus is a fusion of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian traditions and historians have noted the transmission of these influences from Iberia into Latin Europe during this period. The description of the book and how the accused acquired it provides an opportunity to trace the dissemination of non-Christian influences that often are difficult to document. The project will also produce a Latin edition of the trial from the fourteenth-century manuscript.

No project description available

No project description available

No project description available

No project description available

Moundville Archaeological Park, a unit of the University of Alabama, requests an NEH Planning Grant of $40,000 to develop new interpretive exhibits at this National Landmark site. Funding is requested to support a one year planning period during which staff from Moundville Archaeological Park will work closely with an advisory group to further develop exhibit themes, select artifacts, and pose key questions that the new exhibits will seek to answer, or in many cases, pose questions to be presented in the exhibits for contemplation by visitors. While a broad exhibit concept has been developed for the museum exhibits, this expanded planning process will flesh out themes and turn the broad concept into a fully developed exhibition plan.