The NEHC is pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 Request for Proposals. These are competitive seed grants for research initiatives in the humanities that seek to capitalize on the collaborative network of the Consortium.
Archives and Transitional Justice: China, Taiwan, the United States
Principal Investigator
Rebecca A Nedostup
Associate Professor, History
Brown University
Co-Principal Investigator
Yi Lu
Assistant Professor, History
Dartmouth University
Both China and Taiwan are grappling with the legacies of official secrecy, state violence, historical trauma. Yet there has been limited scholarly exploration of newly accessible political archives and their intertwined histories. To address this gap, our NEHC project aims to foster interdisciplinary research and public engagement through a 12-month initiative that includes a three-part speaker series featuring scholars from China, Taiwan, and comparative transitional justice studies. Combined with various public programs (such as film screenings and teaching resources), our project will explore the shared history of political archives as tools for historical memory and political power.
A Mid-career Medievalist Working Group
Kathleen Tonroy
Co-Principal Investigator
Kathleen Tonroy
Associate Professor, English
University of Connecticut
This grant will support the creation of a biannual working group of mid-career medievalists at NEHC member institutions. By providing an opportunity for mid- career literary scholars focusing on the Middle Ages to share scholarly work in progress with one another and receive robust, informed feedback from their professional peers, we will strengthen community and facilitate intellectual exchange and collaboration among medievalists in New England. Our hope is that the relationships built through this group will, in turn, produce initiatives that further additional NEHC goals around public outreach and student programming.
NEWLAMP: Northeast Workshop to Learn About Multicultural Philosophy
Candice Delmas
Principal Investigator
Candice Delmas
Associate Professor, Philosophy and Political Science
Northeastern University
The Northeast Workshop to Learn About Multicultural Philosophy (NEWLAMP) aims to expand and diversify philosophical offerings to students throughout North America by broadening the knowledge and competence of philosophy instructors. Each year, the workshop focuses on work in social and political philosophy from traditions that are underrepresented in North American philosophy courses and which tend to be difficult to approach for philosophers trained here, given their lack of prior exposure and the time and effort it would take to master the existing literature solo.
The Lydia Sigourney Digital Archive: Recovering America’s Founding Poet
Elizabeth A Petrino
Co-Principal Investigator
Elizabeth A Petrino
Professor, English
Fairfield University
It took till the late 20th-century for the career of the most famous woman poet of America’s Early Republic and antebellum eras to begin to be recovered and for her consequence — to American literary history, to environmentalism and to disability studies — to begin to be recognized. Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791-1865) published thousands of articles and poems, along with 65 original volumes of poetry, memoir, and fiction. She was known to many as the “Sweet Singer of Hartford” but her impact was national. Recent scholarship traces her significant contributions to America’s embrace of Romantic aesthetic values and to her role shaping the literary marketplace. As famous in her own time as Emily Dickinson is in ours, Sigourney’s career was rooted in New England culture and was inspired by its regional antebellum life. Grounded in the specificity of New England’s history, Sigourney’s writings on America’s Indigenous people, women’s education, the environment, and disability as well as her interactions with readers and other writers complicates many of the critical commonplaces about 19th-century American culture. At the same time, her writings shed new light on contemporary debates and expand the range of New England women poets included in the literary canon. Our vision for the sustainable Lydia Sigourney Digital Archive intersects with and supports the mission of the NEHC by making visible the central role the Humanities plays in research and contemporary life.