Native Cultures of Western Alaska and the Pacific Northwest Coast

Recipient: Scheper, George L (Baltimore, MD 21217 USA) in affiliation with Community College Humanities Association (Newark, NJ 07102 USA)

Goal: A four-week college and university teacher institute for twenty-four participants on the native cultures of the Pacific Northwest, to be held in Alaska and British Columbia.

Description: CCHA requests funding for a NEH Summer Institute for 24 faculty from community and four-year colleges and universities on the topic, "Native Cultures of Western Alaska and the Pacific Northwest Coast," on-site in Alaska and British Columbia June 13- July 12, 2010. The indigenous peoples of this region developed complex societies with rich histories that were recorded in oral traditions, and they are noted for producing a great world artistic tradition. These cultures were intensively studied in the 19th and 20th centuries, yet in many ways only now are beginning to be understood. Our Institute will present the latest perspectives on the most recent scholarship on Northwest Coast history and culture, as presented by eleven visiting scholars and local artists. Northwest Coast peoples have been in the vanguard of a cultural renaissance. The study of the Northwest Coast cultures, from prehistoric to contemporary times, is an opportunity to expand the reach of America Studies.

Grant: 197411 / EH-50189-09,   Category: Interdisciplinary,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Mapping and Art in the Americas: An NEH Summer Institute for College Faculty

Recipient: Akerman, James R (Chicago, IL 60610 USA) in affiliation with Newberry Library

Goal: A five-week college and university teacher institute for twenty-five participants to explore the relationship between art and mapping in the Americas.

Description: The Newberry Library's Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography seeks NEH support for a 5-week summer institute for college faculty that will scrutinize the interplay between American art and mapping from the Transatlantic Encounter into the 21st century. The institute, led by James Akerman (Dir. of Smith Center) and Diane Dillon (Asst. Dir. of Research & Education) will feature a guest faculty of 14 specialists in art, cartography, geography, philosophy, American history, map librarianship, and literary studies. The institute's program of lectures, seminars, workshops, and research will encourage 25 participants to cross disciplinary boundaries and move beyond regional and chronological specialties to address the complex history of the relationship between art and mapping in and of the Americas. Participants will also pursue their own projects and explore unfamiliar primary materials, including the Newberry's rich holdings in the humanities.

Grant: 197422 / EH-50200-09,   Category: American History,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Cultural Hybridities: Christians, Muslims and Jews and the Medieval Mediterranean

Recipient: Catlos, Brian A (Santa Cruz, CA 95064 USA) in affiliation with University of California, Santa Cruz

Goal: A four-week college and university faculty institute in Barcelona for twenty-five participants to examine the role that Mediterranean-based interactions of Christians, Jews, and Muslims played in the emergence of the pre-modern West.

Description: The University of California, Santa Cruz proposes a 4-week inter-disciplinary Summer Institute for 24 college and university faculty to examine the medieval Mediterranean (c. 1100--1500) and its role in the emergence of the modern West. This is a sequel to our 2008 NEH Institute. Building on the infrastructure and collaborative relationships we established, we have revised our program in view of feedback from our 2008 participants. The Institute will focus on the Mediterranean as a zone where Christians, Muslims, and Jews came into contact, in peace as well as in war. This interaction made the Mediterranean region a forum for intellectual and cultural innovation and exchange, the dissemination of which was key in the emergence of the modern West. Our goal is once again to bring together a diverse group of scholars whose research and teaching would, as in 2008, benefit from and contribute to a reformulated understanding of the Mediterrean's role in the development of modernity.

Grant: 197425 / EH-50203-09,   Category: History,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Representations of the "Other": Jews in Medieval Christendom

Recipient: Resnick, Irven M (Chattanooga, TN 37403 USA) in affiliation with University of Tennessee, Chattanooga (Chattanooga, TN 37402 USA)

Goal: A five-week institute to be held at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (UK) for twenty-five college and university teachers to examine the evolution of medieval European conceptions of alterity.

Description: This proposal seeks funding to hold a five-week summer institute to be held July 2, 2010 - August 11, 2010. The summer institute will allow participants to gain a better understanding of changes in the legal status, economic conditions, cultural stereotypes and depictions of Jews as the most visible and problematic minority group in medieval Christendom.

Grant: 197410 / EH-50188-09,   Category: Medieval Studies,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

The Silk Roads: Early Globalization and Chinese Cultural Identity

Recipient: Hershock, Peter D (Honolulu, HI 96848 USA) in affiliation with East-West Center

Goal: A five-week college and university faculty institute for twenty-five participants to explore the rich history of the Silk Road.

Description: Funding is sought for a 5-week summer institute on "The Silk Roads: Early Globalization and Chinese Cultural Identities." This program will be hosted by the Asian Studies Development Program, a Federal/State collaborative project of the East-West Center and the University of Hawaii. Through the proposed institute, 25 non-specialist, undergraduate educators will be introduced to the rich history and imaginaire of the Silk Roads to examine how global interconnectedness shapes and is shaped by culture, focusing on the complex relationships through which Chinese cultures came to be among the world's most resilient and diverse.

Grant: 197417 / EH-50195-09,   Category: Asian Studies,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Ritual and Ceremony from Late-Medieval Europe to Early America

Recipient: Sponsler, Claire (Iowa City, IA 52242-1492 USA) in affiliation with Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington, DC 20003 USA)

Goal: A five-week college and university teacher institute for twenty participants, offering a comparative study of ritual and ceremony in local, national, and transatlantic contexts from 1300 to 1700.

Description: This five-week institute for college faculty offers a comparative study of ritual and ceremony across the related cultures of Europe and America from 1300 to 1700. It builds on anthropological theories of the ubiquitous role of ritual and ceremony and the impact of that work in performance studies. Testing assumptions about influence and exchange among national traditions and local contexts, it seeks a new understanding of the processes and effects of cultural hybridity and assimilation. Its distinguished international faculty represents the fields of literature, history, art history, and music in national traditions and periods of study. Each will introduce case studies drawn from the Folger collections and their own research, illuminated by current scholarship, and opening up larger interpretative issues. Participants will examine lines of continuity and change. They will collaborate on a web project and discuss ways to revise courses.

Grant: 197420 / EH-50198-09,   Category: Renaissance Studies,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

From Metacom to Tecumseh: Alliances, Conflicts, and Resistance in Native North America

Recipient: Stevens, Scott Manning (Chicago, IL 60610 USA) in affiliation with Newberry Library

Goal: A four-week college and university faculty member institute for twenty-five participants on the relationships between Native Americans and European colonists from 1675 to 1815.

Description: The Newberry Library's D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History seeks NEH support for a summer institute for college and university faculty that will examine the complex and shifting alliances between the various American Indian nations of North America and European colonists competing for land and political ascendancy in the regions east of the Mississippi between the years 1675 and 1815. The institute, led by the Newberry's Scott Stevens (Dir. of McNickle Center), will feature 4 guest lecturers in American Indian studies, American history, art history, and literature, as well as Newberry staff expert in cartography and American Indian materials in the Ayer Collection. The institute will comprise of lectures, discussions, museum visits, and opportunities for primary research in the library's rich humanities archive. The 25 participants will be drawn from across academic disciplines and institutions and encouraged to share their expertise and approaches to pedagogy.

Grant: 197427 / EH-50205-09,   Category: Native American Studies,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

The American Maritime People

Recipient: Roorda, Eric P (Louisville, KY 40205-0671 USA) in affiliation with Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT 06355 USA)

Goal: A six-week college and university teacher institute for twenty participants on American maritime history from the colonial era to the present.

Description: The Munson Institute of American Maritime Studies at Mystic Seaport requests $166,094 to underwrite a six-week institute for college/university teachers, "The American Maritime People," in summer 2010. The Institute builds on the Museum's successful record of two previous NEH institutes. The American people, as a population descended largely from ocean-going immigrants, have strong historical connections to the sea; the U.S. citizenry continues to be deeply dependent on these maritime activities. Through seminars led by ten visiting scholars and co-directors, Roorda and Gordinier, "The American Maritime People" will employ interdisciplinary perspectives on American maritime studies, with an emphasis on recent social, cultural and ecological approaches and current research. Participants will enhance their course offerings through studies, dialog and reflection on the influence of maritime activities on U.S. history and culture.

Grant: 197433 / EH-50211-09,   Category: American History,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Teaching the History of Political Economy

Recipient: Caldwell, Bruce (Durham, NC 27708 USA) in affiliation with Duke University

Goal: A three-week college and university teacher institute for twenty-five participants to explore the history of economic thought.

Description: The proposed three week Institute will trace the development of economic thought from the middle ages to the middle of the last century. The larger purpose of the Institute is to renew professional interest among economists in the intellectual history of their discipline, and thereby to reintroduce the subject into the undergraduate curriculum. The intended audience is economics faculty who may desire to teach the subject but who do not have the background to do so. The goal of the Summer Institute, then, is to develop undergraduate teachers of the history of economic thought.

Grant: 197426 / EH-50204-09,   Category: Economics,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Slaves, Soldiers, Rebels: Currents of Black Resistance in the Tropical Atlantic, 1760-1888

Recipient: Vinson, Ben (Baltimore, MD 21218 USA) in affiliation with Johns Hopkins University

Goal: A five-week summer institute for twenty-five college and university teachers to study issues of slavery and rebellion in the Atlantic world during the age of revolution.

Description: The Africana Studies Center of The Johns Hopkins University requests funding to support an NEH Summer Institute for twenty-five faculty from four-year colleges and universities on the topic "Slaves, Soldiers, Rebels: Currents of Black Resistance in the Tropical Atlantic, 1760-1888." Ten visiting scholars from the United States and Britain, all of whom are engaged in cutting-edge research in the history of the Americas in the era of colonialism, slavery, and revolution, will conduct seminars and lead visits to relevant historical sites, museums, and libraries.

Grant: 191976 / EH-50178-08,   Category: History,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2008

Nature and History at the Nation's Edge: A Field Institute in Environmental and Borderlands History

Recipient: Morrissey, Katherine G (Tucson, AZ 85721 USA) in affiliation with University of Arizona

Goal: A four-week institute for twenty-five college and university faculty on the cultural and environmental history of Arizona, New Mexico, and Sonora, Mexico.

Description: Nature and History at the Nation's Edge is a NEH 2009 Summer Institute that will bring 25 humanities faculty to the University of Arizona. This month-long institute will enable participants to develop a deeper understanding of the interdisciplinary fields of environmental and borderlands history through a distinctive, hands-on seminar that will include travel through the arid lands and historical landscapes of Arizona, New Mexico, and Sonora, Mexico. Both in the classroom and in the field, leading scholars will offer participants insights and methods for reading the historical landscape in a variety of rural, urban, and industrial settings, and for thinking about both cultural and environmental history in a broader binational context. The institute will benefit faculty who teach undergraduate courses in fields such as U.S. History, Geography, Latin American Studies, Anthropology, American Studies, and Mexican American Studies and contribute to the advancement of humanities teaching.

Grant: 191962 / EH-50164-08,   Category: American History,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2008

Experimental Philosophy

Recipient: Mallon, Ronald Jerry (Salt Lake City, UT 84112 USA) in affiliation with University of Utah

Goal: A four-week institute for twenty-four college and university teachers designed to open up new lines of inquiry by bringing empirical work to bear on traditional philosophical concerns.

Description: In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in bringing a new set of tools to bear on traditional philosophical concerns. "Experimental philosophy" explores philosophical judgments by conducting experiments on people's intuitions about philosophically important concepts. Research in experimental philosophy already spans a wide range of areas of philosophy, including ethics, semantics, metaphysics, the philosophy of language and of science, and this work has also attracted the attention of a much broader network of philosophers. We propose an NEH Summer Institute on the topic. Experimental philosophy has grown rapidly over the last several years, but evaluating, conducting, and teaching work in experimental philosophy requires skills that are not currently part of normal professional training for philosophers. The proposed Institute is designed to enable participants to engage experimental philosophy as teachers, practitioners, and critics.

Grant: 191956 / EH-50158-08,   Category: Philosophy,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2008

American Immigration Revisited

Recipient: Nutting, Maureen (Seattle, WA 98199 USA) in affiliation with National History Center (Washington, DC 20003 USA)

Goal: A four-week summer institute for twenty-five college and university teachers to examine American immigration from the 1880s to the 1980s.

Description: Since the 1960s, changes in immigration and immigration law have influenced Americans and American domestic and foreign policy and have affected the daily lives of natives and newcomers profoundly. Immigrant groups and immigration patterns have changed along with the challenges immigrant groups face; and immigration laws and policies are part of our daily debates and media reports. The institute would bring together teachers and experts for four weeks at the Library of Congress and will explore four basic areas: American immigration part of a global phenomenon; migrations between cultures; changes in immigration law, policy, and practice; and approaches and resources for teaching immigration history. Those who complete the institute will take what they learn back to their communities, enrich their U.S. history courses and other courses that deal with immigration, and improve teaching and learning

Grant: 192044 / EH-50185-08,   Category: American History,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2008

A Fierce Green Fire at 100: Aldo Leopold and the Roots of Environmental Ethics

Recipient: Shilling, Dan (Tempe, AZ 85287-6505 USA) in affiliation with Arizona State University (Tempe, AZ 85287 USA)

Goal: A four-week institute for twenty-five college and university faculty on the environmental ethics of Aldo Leopold.

Description: 2009 marks the 100th anniversary of Aldo Leopold's arrival in the Southwest. Leopold died a year before A SAND COUNTY ALMANAC was published in 1949. He might be surprised to learn that the book helped create the discipline of environmental ethics and is now taught in humanities courses, including literature, history, and philosophy. This institute builds on the centennial year and the book's multidisciplinary structure. "A Fierce Green Fire at 100," held in Prescott AZ, brings together five of the nation's most respected Leopold scholars, guest faculty, and field trips to sites with thematic significance. Participants will explore the historical and philosophical sources of Leopold's ideas, generate new research that places Leopold's work in intellectual history, and develop projects that enhance their own research and teaching. To do so, the book's place within the larger field of environmental ethics will be considered from a variety of perspectives.

Grant: 191970 / EH-50172-08,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2008

The Rule of Law: Legal Studies and the Liberal Arts

Recipient: Frank, Cathrine O (Biddeford, ME 04005 USA) in affiliation with University of New England

Goal: A five-week summer institute for twenty-five college and university faculty in American jurisprudence from a humanities perspective.

Description: The institute we are proposing will explore the meaning and consequences of the attachment to the rule of law. We will ask: What does it mean to live under the rule of law? What are the cultural conditions necessary for its possibility? And what are the distinguishing characteristics of the rule of law in the United States? The institute will engage with these questions and investigate the rule of law from the perspective of the humanities, emphasizing questions of interpretation, meaning, and value in a society, which, as Thomas Paine puts it, "law is king." At a time when scholars both in law schools and the liberal arts are turning to questions about relations between law, culture, and the humanities, this institute will also contribute to advancing the study of law as a discipline of the liberal arts.

Grant: 191966 / EH-50168-08,   Category: Law and Jurisprudence,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2008

Buddhist Traditions of Tibet and the Himalayas

Recipient: Lewis, Todd (Worcester, MA 01610 USA) in affiliation with College of the Holy Cross

Goal: A three-week interdisciplinary institute for twenty-five college and university teachers on Buddhist texts and practices in Tibet and Nepal.

Description: The Himalayan and Tibetan regions were at times central to the spread and development of Mahayana Buddhism in Asia, just as myriad texts from monastic libraries in Nepal and Tibet were indispensable to modern Buddhist studies. This Institute will highlight Nepal's important historical legacy and distill many insights about Tibetan Buddhist traditions from recent scholarship. The Institute will build upon the region's canonical and vernacular texts, as well as examine rituals, meditation, healing traditions, and the role of art; the curriculum will also consider Buddhism's relations with shamanic and Hindu traditions. Exposure to the Institute's interdisciplinary approach to Buddhism in Tibet and Nepal will provide cogent case studies for teaching of Buddhism in an interdisciplinary manner. Participating scholars will also be empowered to build on student awareness of the Himalayan region to turn superficial interest into a more in-depth understanding of Buddhism.

Grant: 191980 / EH-50182-08,   Category: Nonwestern Religion,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2008

America Engages Russia, Circa 1880-1930: Case Studies in Cultural Interaction

Recipient: Kasinec, Edward (New York, NY 10018 USA) in affiliation with New York Public Library

Goal: A three-week summer institute for college and university teachers to examine cultural interactions between the United States and Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Description: The New York Public Library (NYPL) seeks a grant of $145,796 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for an 18-month grant to develop and present a Summer Institute entitled "America Engages Russia, Circa 1880-1930: Case Studies in Cultural Interaction." The proposed three-week Summer Institute will include 25 university teaching faculty, research librarians, and museum educators, and will facilitate the consideration and investigation of, and reflection upon, the implications of the various forms of cultural engagement that occurred between the United States and the Russian Empire/Soviet Union in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The proposed Institute will feature leading specialists addressing four major themes, and enable the investigation of the cross-cultural dynamics that impacted political, diplomatic, commercial/scientific, artistic, and religious developments and identities that existed in the United States and Russia/Soviet Union during this era.

Grant: 191974 / EH-50176-08,   Category: Russian History,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2008

African American Civil Rights Struggles in the Twentieth Century

Recipient: Gates, Henry Louis (Cambridge, MA 02138 USA) in affiliation with Harvard University

Goal: A four-week institute for twenty-five college and university teachers on the Civil Rights Movement in the twentieth-century United States.

Description: ?African American Struggles for Civil Rights in the Twentieth Century? aims to introduce college teachers to new and recent scholarship on the origins, development, and consequences of the civil rights movement, and to facilitate the development of curriculum and teaching strategies for incorporating this history into American history curriculum and related areas of instruction. The proposed 2008 NEH Institute will include leading scholars, teachers, and writers working in the field of African American history, literature, and music. The program is part of an ongoing effort to identify and review monographs and primary source materials that deepen our understanding of the struggles of African Americans for full citizenship and civil rights, and situate those efforts within the broader context of American history.

Grant: 187137 / EH-50134-07,   Category: Afro-American Studies,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2007

Venice, the Jews, and Italian Culture: Historical Eras and Cultural Representations

Recipient: Baumgarten, Murray (Santa Cruz, CA 95064 USA) in affiliation with University of California, Santa Cruz

Goal: A five-week institute for twenty-four college and university teachers in Venice on Jewish experience in the Venetian Ghetto, and its cultural, intellectual, and historical contexts.

Description: This interdisciplinary institute explores the cultural, intellectual, and historic experience of Venetian Jewry. Our focus is the Ghetto of Venice, which gave its name to all such subsequent ethnic enclosures. We will explore, discuss and analyze the history of the Ghetto of Venice as built environment, cultural text and symbolic site. Our inquiry encompasses the literary, artistic and dramatic representations of Italian and Venetian Jews. The Institute will begin with the Renaissance, while emphasizing the modern experience of Venetian Jewry, a paradigmatic Italian Jewish community. The beneficiaries are college and university teachers in European culture, literature, art, and history, Holocaust studies, Italian studies and Jewish studies.

Grant: 187150 / EH-50147-07,   Category: Jewish Studies,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2007

Holy Land and Holy City in Classical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Recipient: Resnick, Irven M (Chattanooga, TN 37403 USA) in affiliation with University of Tennessee, Chattanooga (Chattanooga, TN 37402 USA)

Goal: A five-week summer institute for twenty-five college and university teachers on the significance of the Holy Land and Jerusalem in classical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, to be held at Oxford University.

Description: Our summer institute will investigate the significance of the Holy Land (and the holiest of its cities, Jerusalem, in particular) in classical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. While adopting a broad perspective that will include theological, geographical, and anthropological aspects of that significance, we shall focus above all on the conjunction of physical space, ideas, and cultural praxis that gave expression to the holiness of the land, as it was perceived by adherents of the three religions.

Grant: 187123 / EH-50120-07,   Category: Comparative Religion,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2007