The Humanities Center has announced its first round of grant recipients this week, supporting scholarly projects in history, culture and the arts in multiple disciplines. Funded by a WVU endowment from the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, grants were awarded in two categories: interdisciplinary team grants and summer grants to support scholarly activity.
While several of the grants went to support traditional projects in history, literature, musicology, and other humanities fields, applicants were given preference for projects that speak to the Center’s commitment to interdisciplinarity and public humanities.
“The quality and variety of scholarly projects being pursued on campus is truly inspiring,” said Ryan Claycomb, the Humanities Center’s interim director. “Research is being done on subjects from across history and around the globe, but taken together they show the richness of human experience in ways that we can experience every day.”
The Center awarded two interdisciplinary team grants. A team of researchers including Catherine Gouge, Department of English; Kristina Hash, School of Social Work; Tamba M’Bayo, Department of History; Christine Rittenour, Department of Communication Studies; and Lori Hostuttler, University Libraries will be collecting oral history narratives to link to some of the more than 50,000 photographs from the West Virginia and Regional History Center.
The second research team grant was awarded to researchers Renee Nicholson, Multidisciplinary Studies Program; Stacey Culp, Department of Statistics; and Alison Lastinger, School of Medicine, to develop and implement an expressive writing protocol to both study and enhance quality of life for HIV patients in the state.
“These projects are clear indicators of the ways that the arts and humanities contribute to preserving cultural memory for generations, as well as ways they can improve quality of life for our citizens right now,” said Claycomb.
Summer grants also spanned a wide range of topics and methodologies. Grant recipients in this category include:
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Katherine Aaslestad, history, for summer travel to research the aftermath of war in German Central Europe after the Napoleonic Conquest;
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Joshua Arthurs, history, for a residency at University of Cambridge, UK for collaborative research on the use of classical antiquity on fascist and contemporary far-right movements;
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Rose Casey, English, for work on a section of a book project on literary responses to the legal discourses of property in global postcolonial contexts;
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Cynthia Gorman, geography and women’s and gender studies, for a project that examines the community impacts of immigration and border control in West Virginia;
- Catherine Gouge, English, for research on rhetorical practices in mental health and homeopathic healthcare;
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Christine Hoffmann, English, to travel to museums and collections for early research on a project on cultural fascination with objects;
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Macabe Kelliher, history, for final revisions of a book project on Qing China;
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Adam Komisaruk, English, for a book project on public discourses of sexuality in 19th century British literature;
- Tamba M’Bayo, history, for travel to research the history of epidemics in Sierra Leone from the 18th century to the recent Ebola outbreak;
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Michele McArdle Stephens, history, on the historical roots of violence against women in modern Mexico;
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Timothy Sweet, English, for research on narratives about Neanderthals and how they reflect our sense of what makes us human;
- Michael Vercelli, School of Music, for a project archiving funeral music of the Birifor people of Ghana.
The Humanities Center was established in August 2017 with a mission to cultivate critical humanistic inquiry, fostering collaborative, interdisciplinary, and publicly accessible scholarship and teaching to benefit the common good of the university, the state, and the world.