JBHE: Latest News for 1/21/10

The National Endowment for the Humanities Funds Research on Race

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) recently announced 319 grants totaling more than $20 million. These grants provide support for the preservation of humanities collections at museums, colleges, and universities and educational programs to help libraries, museums, and archives to preserve and enhance access to their collections. Other grants provide funds for traveling exhibitions, research fellowships, and faculty research in the humanities.

Among the many projects in faculty research funded this year are several that touch on the issue of race:

• Judith Weisenfeld is a professor of religion at Princeton University. She received a $50,400 grant for her research entitled “Black Prophets, Gods, and Utopian Visions: Religion and Racial Identity in the Great Migration.”

• Jann Pasler, a professor of music at the University of California at San Diego, received a $50,400 grant for her research entitled “Music, Race, and Colonialism in France, 1880-1920.”

• A $50,400 grant was awarded to Christopher Hager, an assistant professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He will use the funds for his project, “A Colored Man’s Constitution: Emancipation and the Act of Writing.”

• Patrick Burke, an assistant professor of music at Washington University in St. Louis, will use his $33,600 grant for his research on race and rock music in the 1960s.

• Nancy Carnevale, an associate professor of history at Montclair State University in New Jersey, obtained a $50,400 grant to study the interaction of African Americans and Italian Americans in suburban New Jersey in the 1900-1960 period.

• African Americans and the Classics is the subject of the research of Margaret Malamud, a professor of history at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. Her research will be supported by a $50,400 grant.

• Joseph Inikori is conducting research on the slave trade and socioeconomic development in the Atlantic world. Dr. Inikori, a professor of history at the University of Rochester, received a $50,400 grant.

• The history of the African ceramic tradition is the focus of a study by Barbara Frank, an associate professor of art at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her research is supported by a $50,400 grant from the NEH.

• Michelle McKinley, an assistant professor of law at the University of Oregon, is conducting research on slavery, legal activism, and the ecclesiastical courts in Lima, Peru, prior to the year 1700. She received a $25,200 grant.

• A $37,800 grant was awarded to Jane Landers, an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University. She is heading a project with the title, “African Kingdoms, Black Republics, and Free Black Towns in Colonial Spanish America.”