Tramoya: Hispanic Plays in Conversation
Principal Investigator
Laura Bass
Associate Professor, Hispanic Studies & Art and Architecture
Brown University
Co-Principal Investigator
Sara Buitrago
Graduate Student, Hispanic Studies
Brown University
Community Partner
Fernando Then
Production manager
Repertorio Español
“Tramoya” (“stage machinery”) is a collaborative initiative between the Department of Hispanic Studies at Brown University and Repertorio Español, the historic Off-Broadway theater in New York City, dedicated to making early modern Hispanic theater accessible to contemporary audiences and building a lasting infrastructure for humanities programming at the intersection of performance and scholarship. First piloted in 2025 through a series of lectures, reading groups, and study materials, the project attracted enthusiastic engagement from audiences, artists, and scholars alike. This collaboration will be expanded in connection with Repertorio’s Summer 2027 productions of two early modern plays, presented as part of the theater’s Van Lier Fellowship for emerging Hispanic directors. Hispanic theater of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries constitutes one of the most expansive and influential dramatic traditions of the premodern world, yet it remains underrepresented on contemporary American stages and largely inaccessible to non-specialist audiences. Works by Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and others engage questions of power, faith, gender, and class that retain their urgency today, while also offering extraordinary opportunities for performance-based interpretation and crosscultural dialogue. Tramoya is designed to open scholarship on this theatrical tradition—and the plays themselves—to artists, students, and publics beyond the university. The 2027 iteration of Tramoya pursues two primary goals: to deepen the integration of scholarship into theatrical production and public reception, and to develop a sustainable digital and archival infrastructure that will preserve the project’s materials and extend its reach well beyond the live event. Both goals reflect a commitment to the NEHC’s core priorities—public humanities, collaborative research, and digital preservation.
Youth Led Documentary: Beyond Creative @ NU
Principal Investigator
Francesca Inglese
Assistant Professor, Music
Northeastern University
Community Partner
Letia Larok
Executive Director
Transformative Culture Project
In 2020, Transformative Culture Project launched a university-community partnership to address longstanding inequities in music and media arts education across Boston. TCP is a youth creative education nonprofit dedicated to ensuring that artists are celebrated and compensated while advancing the arts as essential to community development and wellbeing. TCP serves youth ages 14–18 from predominantly BIPOC neighborhoods including Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan, as well as diverse communities in Jamaica Plain and Roslindale. Teaching artists with deep roots in Boston lead all programming, and alumni participants ages 19–24 return as paid youth leaders, creating an intergenerational pipeline of creative and civic leadership.
The grant will support the 2026 summer's Beyond Creative @ NU cohort in the production of a youth-led documentary exploring transformative stories from individuals across their communities. Participants — working 25 hours per week over seven weeks — will conduct original interviews, lead field production, and collaborate on post-production to create a documentary that reflects the diversity, resilience, and strength of the people who make up their neighborhoods. 2 Story themes will be selected collectively by the youth participants themselves, ensuring that the project reflects their own lived experiences and priorities. Past cohorts have centered themes such as mental health awareness, self-love, community building, and systemic injustice. This asset-based, youth-driven approach is central to TCP's educational philosophy: young people are not passive subjects of their stories, but the architects and authors of them. Training will span the full arc of documentary production, including video production, interviewing techniques, documentary storytelling, photography, and editing. Participants will also engage with songwriting, beat making, and podcasting as complementary creative disciplines that deepen their capacity for multimodal storytelling. Northeastern student researchers and teaching assistants will support the program, creating reciprocal learning opportunities across the university-community partnership.
Preserving and Promoting Lesbian Herstory through Community-Based Archiving
Principal Investigator
Kathleen M. McIntyre,
Associate Professor, Gender and Women’s Studies
University of Rhode Island
Community Partner
Mev Miller
Director
Wanderground Lesbian Archive/Library
Founded by Mev Miller in 2022, the organization’s mission states: “Wanderground Lesbian Archive/Library collects and provides access to a broad selection of New England-based publications, artifacts, and personal memorabilia from the period 1950-2000. We offer community gathering spaces in order to preserve the vibrant past of local Lesbians, encourage present-day learning and discovery, and cultivate a future of thriving Lesbian communities.” The library also houses an impressive collection of books, periodicals, and music recordings. Wanderground is a non-profit organization completely dependent on volunteer labor and outside funding. By partnering with this organization, URI faculty will strengthen course curriculum offerings and enhance student high impact learning. Wanderground’s archival resources offer URI students and faculty a broad interpretation of New England Lesbian Feminist Movements. The archive includes personal items such as letters, postcards, cards; news clippings; diaries; journals; datebooks; home videos; photographs; brochures; flyers; and many other genres. The archive also includes artwork; clothing; Lesbian-made handicrafts; buttons; movie posters; bumper stickers; comic books, etc. all related to Lesbian herstory.
Students and faculty will have the opportunity to conduct primary source research particularly related to Rhode Island history. By the end of the collaboration an online exhibit on New England Lesbian Feminist Movements will be created. The exhibit will be designed as a slide show embedded on URI’s Carothers Library Special Collections website and on Wanderground’s website.