Congratulations to the twenty-seven MLA members who were awarded National Endowment for the Humanities grants in April 2024! Their projects include a book on the rise of public libraries during the US Reconstruction, the development of an undergraduate major in climate communication, a traveling exhibition about the maritime practices of the African diaspora in the Pacific, the creation of AI-related humanities curricula, and more.
Rebecca Babcock, University of Texas, Permian Basin
Project Title: Mending Mental Gaps: Negotiating Combat Trauma via Visual/Textual Humanities
Project Description: A two-year project for sixty veterans that utilizes visual arts and multiple text formats to discuss healing after military trauma.
Sheila Bauer-Gatsos, Dominican University
Project Title: Humanities Contexts for Connecting Social Justice and Sustainability
Project Description: A two-year series of faculty development workshops focused on social justice and sustainability.
Emily Bernate, St. Edward’s University
Project Title: Oral History and Identity: Developing an Oral History Curriculum for First-Generation College Students
Project Description: A two-year curricular project to develop a two-course sequence in oral history.
Jamie Bronstein, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces
Project Title: The “Insanity” of Colonialism: Mental Health in New Mexico, 1889–1930
Project Description: Research and writing for a book examining the history of the development of mental health services in what became the state of New Mexico.
Caroline Collins, Maritime Museum Association of San Diego
Project Title: Take Me to the Water: Histories of the Black Pacific
Project Description: Implementation of an interactive temporary exhibition and traveling banner exhibition exploring maritime practices of the African diaspora in the Pacific.
Lindsey Eckert, Florida State University
Project Title: Romanticism Bound: British Bookbinding and the Forms of Literature
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a monograph on the history of commercial bookbinding in eighteenth-century Britain and its effects on literature.
Brent Edwards, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Project Title: Long-term Research Fellowships at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem
Project Description: Eighteen months of stipend support (3 fellowships per year) for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.
Norrell Edwards, Le Moyne College
Project Title: Publishing Today: Reconnecting the Humanities Ecosystem and Uplifting Contemporary Stories and Literature from Marginalized Communities
Project Description: A two-year project to develop a new course for English majors focused on twenty-first-century literature, media, and criticism.
Tarez Graban, Florida State University
Project Title: Rhetoric, Feminism and the Transnational Archive
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on how archival memory shapes African feminist legacies in South and West Africa.
Christopher Hager, Trinity College, CT
Project Title: The Public Library and the Unfinished Civil War
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on how the ascendancy of US public libraries during the Reconstruction Era (1863–77) has shaped their subsequent history.
Michael Hall, Virginia Commonwealth University
Project Title: Between Leisure and Servitude: Postcards and the Early Cultural History of African American Travel, 1850–1945
Project Description: Research and writing for a book on visual images of African Americans in leisure contexts from slavery through the Jim Crow era.
Matthew Kilbane, University of Notre Dame
Project Title: The Ends of Poetry: Community Writing and the Unreadable Archive
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book exploring the social meaning and function of “lay writing,” or practices of writing that exist beyond institutions and universities, through an examination of late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century community writing workshops.
Johanna Kramer, Curators of the University of Missouri
Project Title: Proverbs in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on Geoffrey Chaucer’s use of proverbs in The Canterbury Tales.
Maria Anna Mariani, University of Chicago
Project Title: As I Write Dying: Memoirs of the End
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on how contemporary authors such as Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011), Jenny Diski (1947–2016), and Ruth Picardie (1964–97) have chronicled their deaths in public writing for a mass audience.
Rituparna Mitra, Emerson College
Project Title: Developing a New Climate and Sustainability Communication Major
Project Description: A one-year project to develop a new interdisciplinary undergraduate major in climate and sustainability communication.
Sarah Moody, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
Project Title: Remembering Enslavement, Shaping Freedom: The Afrocubana Authors of Minerva
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a journal article about Minerva, a magazine that was written and produced by free women of color in Cuba during the 1880s.
Eleanor Paynter, Brown University
Project Title: Migration, Farmworker Movements, Contested Belonging, and “Up/Rootedness” in Italy’s Changing Landscapes, 1861–Present
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on the role migrant farmworkers have played in shaping Italian conceptions of race, citizenship, and belonging from Italian unification to the present.
Lisa Ann Robertson, University of South Dakota
Project Title: Religious Dissent and British Romantic Science, 1730–1830
Project Description: Archival research leading to a book on how Protestant educational institutions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain facilitated and shaped scientific inquiry, including granting opportunities for women and atheists to contribute to scientific discourse.
Sidonia Serafini, Georgia College and State University
Project Title: Cultivating Citizenship: Racial and Environmental Justice and African American Writing at Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, 1890–1925
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on conceptions of citizenship in African American agricultural and nature writings produced at two HBCUs: Hampton Institute (Virginia) and Tuskegee Institute (Alabama).
Erika Stevens, Walters State Community College, TN
Project Title: Spanish for the Professions
Project Description: A two-year project to develop Spanish courses related to students’ professional goals.
Emily Todd, Eastern Connecticut State University, and Miriam Wallace (co–project director), University of Illinois, Springfield
Project Title: Developing a Public Liberal Arts Humanities Curriculum: Empowering Students to Navigate an AI World
Project Description: A one-year grant to develop AI-related humanities curricula at five public liberal arts colleges.
Annette Vee, University of Pittsburgh
Project Title: Public-Facing Scholarship on Automating Writing
Project Description: Writing two essays on how writing processes have been distributed between people and technologies across history: from eighteenth-century Enlightenment era androids that automated human activities to large language models of today represented in platforms such as ChatGPT.
Sarah Wadsworth, Marquette University
Project Title: In Deepest Sympathy: An Anthology of Letters from the Nineteenth Century
Project Description: Research for an anthology of nineteenth-century letters relating to death and the social rituals and attitudes that attended it in the period.
Anna Wainwright, University of New Hampshire, Durham
Project Title: Race, Gender, and Women’s Writing in Renaissance Italy
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book exploring the role of women authors in shaping and reinforcing conceptions of race in early modern Italy.
Robyn Warhol, Ohio State University, Columbus
Project Title: The Part Issue Project: Making Nineteenth-Century Serial Temporality Discoverable and Accessible in HathiTrust
Project Description: Digitization of 194 serialized Victorian novels at the Harry Ransom Center, Princeton University Library, Ohio State University Library, and New York Public Library for inclusion in the HathiTrust with enhanced metadata and a virtual library of this “serialized fiction” collection as well as addition to the Reading Like a Victorian website.
Nan Wolverton, American Antiquarian Society
Project Title: Long-term fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society
Project Description: Twenty-five months of stipend support (6 fellowships per year) for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.