Dear Colleagues,

The application for the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipends  is due in a little over 2 weeks.

If you are interested in applying for this opportunity, you must provide a draft of your 3-page narrative and 2-page CV, as discussed in the program guidelines (website below) to OGRS at grantsoffice@shu.edu be close of business on September 2, 2016.

Program website:  http://www.neh.gov/grants/research/summer-stipends

Below are recent recipients and their project descriptions from the disciplines of American, British and Comparative literature

Allison Hobgood

Willamette University (Salem, OR 97301-3922)   FT-248806-16

Disability in English Renaissance Literature

Completion of a book-length study of disability in English Renaissance literature.

Project fields: British Literature; Literary Criticism; Renaissance Studies

Grant period: 6/1/2017 – 8/31/2017

Hilary Christine Havens

University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Knoxville, TN 37996-0001)    FT-248660-16

From Manuscript to Print: Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel

A book-length study of how 18th-century British novelists revised their works, using new digital software that recovers deleted text from manuscripts.

Project fields: British Literature

Grant period: 6/1/2016 – 7/31/2016

Kim Felicia Hall

Barnard College (New York, NY 10027-6909)        FT-248888-16

“Othello Was My Grandfather”: Shakespeare and Race in the African Diaspora

Research for a book on the relationship between William Shakespeare’s play Othello and African American culture, 19th century to the present.

This book project uses versions of Shakespeare’s Othello to connect Shakespeare and freedom dreams in the African Diaspora. It examines stage, print, transnational and digital “performances” of Othello from the 19th century until today to discuss several linked phenomena: the role of Shakespeare in constructions of blackness and race; discussions of race and genealogy in Afrodiasporic thought; the appropriation of Shakespeare by black communities; the policing of canonical literature along racial lines; and the race/gender politics of the American stage and popular media. Othello the play and its performance history become a space through which black writers explore issues of racial belonging, interracial relationships, gender, migration and power.

Project fields: African American Studies; British Literature; Theater History and Criticism

Grant period: 8/1/2016 – 9/30/2016

Christopher J. Lukasik

Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN 47907-2040)         FT-249063-16

The Image in the Text: Intermediality, Illustration, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

A book-length study of the relationship between illustration and text in American literature.

Project fields: American Literature; American Studies; Art History and Criticism

Grant period: 6/1/2016 – 8/31/2016

Jacob Michael Jewusiak

Valdosta State University (Valdosta, GA 31698-0100)       FT-249066-16

Aging and the Elderly in 19th- and 20th-Century British Novels

Completion of a book-length study on aging and the elderly in 19th and 20th-century British novels.

Project fields: British Literature; Interdisciplinary Studies, Other; Literary Criticism

Grant period: 6/1/2016 – 7/31/2016

Matthew Rebhorn

James Madison University (Harrisonburg, VA 22807-0001)            FT-249028-16

Mind-Body Relationship in Animate Body in Antebellum American Literature

A book-length study of the relationship between mind and body in antebellum American literature.

This project explores the interface between debates about the mind-body relationship in the antebellum period and the production of American letters. Building on early medical archives, this project explores the way artists imagined the animate body–that is, a body that seems to have a mind of its own–using it to achieve two interrelated ends. First, by wrestling with this conceptualization of the body, they changed how people read a novel, why people acted the way they did, and what constituted the rhythm of poetic expression. Second, by understanding the body in this way, these artists articulated a new kind of subjectivity for figures often linked to their bodies, such as chattel slaves, working-class laborers, and women. As I argue, some of the most aesthetically innovative as well as some of the most politically resistant modes of expression in the antebellum period were catalyzed by the way these various artists “minded the body.”

Project fields: American Literature; American Studies

Ben Preston Robertson

Troy State University Main Campus (Troy, AL 36082-0001)             FT-249036-16

The Plays of English Author and Critic Elizabeth Inchbald (1735-1821)

Preparation of the first complete scholarly edition of plays by English writer, Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821).

Project fields: British History; British Literature; Theater History and Criticism

Grant period: 6/1/2016 – 7/31/2016

Katy L. Chiles

University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Knoxville, TN 37996-0001)    FT-249099-16

The Idea of Authorship in Early African American and Native American Literatures

A book-length study of collaborative authorship in early African American and Native American literature.

Raced Collaboration tells the rich story of how-often against significant odds-early African Americans and Native Americans produced English language texts. Despite the fact that the majority of these works were produced through collaboration, Raced Collaboration is the first comprehensive study of the crucial role that collaboration played in early African American and Native American literatures. While much scholarship on antebellum American literature still has a propensity to focus on writers who we tend to think created their writings alone, this book investigates the remarkable–but heretofore unremarked upon–ways that these writers practiced many kinds of collaboration, in order to open up new understandings of the primary works and of the broader issue of authorship; to deepen our appreciation of what early African Americans and Native Americans have done with forms of communication; and to broaden our understanding of the literatures produced in antebellum America.

Project fields: African American Studies; American Literature; Native American Studies

Grant period: 6/1/2016 – 7/31/2016

James Lawrence Machor

Kansas State University (Manhattan, KS 66506-0100)       FT-249250-16

Mark Twain: Historical Reception and Iconic Authorship

A book-length study of the reception history of Mark Twain and his works.

I am requesting a Summer Stipend to write chapter 4 of my book on Mark Twain’s reception from the 1860s through the 20th century. Although scholars have extensively explored Twain’s life and writings, attention to the reception of his works has been limited, focusing largely on “Huck Finn.” Indeed, though book-length reception studies have been done on the careers and “afterlives” of other major nineteenth-century authors such as Dickens and Whitman, no such study exists for Twain. In providing a full narrative history of the changing responses to his oeuvre, my book will be the first to draw on over 7,000 letters to Twain in the Mark Twain Papers. Given his canonical status and his nearly uninterrupted popularity since the 1870s, my book will thus fill a significant gap in reception study and in nineteenth-century literary studies while offering an original contribution that provides new insights into Twain’s position in literary history and his place in America’s cultural landscape.

Project fields: American Literature

Grant period: 6/1/2016 – 7/31/2016

Michael Gerard Devine, PhD

SUNY Research Foundation, College at Plattsburgh (Plattsburgh, NY 12901-2637)               FT-249295-16

Poetry, Film, and the Battle for a National Art, 1895-1930

Research and writing leading to a book-length study of the connections between poetry and cinema in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

My book project offers a timely prehistory of writing in an age of new media. It tells the story of poetry’s crisis in the early twentieth century—a machine age not unlike our own—when many considered the humanities doomed to disappear. Poetry, instead, became startlingly visible through films like Vitagraph’s The Battle Hymn of the Republic (1911), which deeply influenced boosters of a modern and American art. Interdisciplinary in scope, my project shows the revitalizing interplay between poetry and film: both poetry’s transformation on the screen and page and the efforts of Walt Whitman’s disciples—poets, but also painters, photographers, and filmmakers—to shape film into a mode of national expression. An archival account of how the humanities reemerged in the cinematic public square a century ago, my project explores what the NEH calls The Common Good—a primer for understanding our current moment when new media technologies promise again to transform the arts.

Project fields: American Literature; American Studies; Film History and Criticism

Kelly Wisecup

University of North Texas (Denton, TX 76203-5017)          FT-228749-15

Objects of Encounter: Native Americans’ Lists, 1600-1848

Summer research and writing in American Literature and Native American Studies.

Objects of Encounter investigates how Native Americans appropriated the form of the list between 1600 and 1840. Natives compiled lists of words, numbers, plants, and trade goods, in order to circulate tribal histories, to repair social and spiritual relationships disrupted by colonialism, and to maintain sovereignty over their languages and epistemologies. While scholars have overlooked lists to focus on narratives, this book shows that lists were a key part of early American cross-cultural exchanges. Natives shaped colonists’ lists by controlling their access to objects; they composed their own lists in order to recirculate their peoples’ histories. The book offers a new literary history of pre-1900 Native writing, and my proposed research will intervene in the history of science and museum studies by showing that Natives not only worked as assistants for men of science but also appropriated collecting and its textual practices for their own ends.

Project fields: American Literature; Native American Studies

Grant period: 5/1/2015 – 6/30/2015

Gerry Canavan

Marquette University (Milwaukee, WI 53233-2225)         FT-228766-15

Science Fiction and the Philosophical Concept of Totality

Summer research and writing on American Literature, and History and Philosophy of Science.

My research focuses on one of the most globally influential genres of the contemporary United States: science fiction. Science fiction offers an increasingly mainstream vocabulary for negotiating the relationship between individuals and their social fabric, as well as for understanding the place of the human species within the larger cosmos. I consequently argue that science fiction is a tremendously useful archive for interdisciplinary work in the humanities in the 21st century academy, both within the space of the classroom and in scholars’ attempts to communicate our knowledge practices with the public more broadly. The 20th and 21st centuries have been a time in which, as J.G. Ballard said, “everything is becoming science fiction”; as a result, far from occupying some literary periphery, science fiction plays a pivotal role in contemporary debates over history, identity, empire, justice, and, in our moment of escalating ecological crisis, the prospects for “the future” as such.

Project fields: American Literature; History and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Medicine

Grant period: 5/1/2015 – 6/30/2015

Sonja Drimmer

University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Amherst, MA 01003)      FT-229294-15

Timeless Texts, Timely Illustrations: Origins and Illumination of the Middle English Literary Canon

Summer research and writing on Art History and Criticism, British Literature and Medieval Studies.

The formation of a native literary canon is one of the milestones in the establishment of a national identity. England’s moment came in the fifteenth century, against the background of two defining conflicts with lasting impact: the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) and the Wars of the Roses (1450-1485). At this time, royals and gentry alike commissioned manuscript copies of works by Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Hoccleve, who translated into English and radically revised stories central to Western culture. A seldom recognized fact is that many of these manuscripts contain images, and that these images express patrons’ ambitions to co-opt such narratives for their own individual and national designs. As a result, the role of the manuscript illuminator in this history has never been acknowledged. My book will offer the first in-depth study devoted to the emergence of England’s first literary canon as a visual as well as a linguistic event.

Project fields: Art History and Criticism; British Literature; Medieval Studies

Grant period: 6/1/2015 – 7/31/2015

Danielle Glassmeyer

Bradley University (Peoria, IL 61625-0001)            FT-229839-15

Introduction and Conclusion for monograph “The Stowe Effect: The Orientalization of Sentiment in America’s Cultural Cold War”

Summer research and writing on American Literature and Studies and U.S. History.

I will complete the introduction and conclusion for “The Stowe Effect: the Orientalization of Sentiment in America’s Cultural Cold War.” This book investigates how 1950s popular culture convinced an isolationist audience that intervention in Southeast Asia was desirable. I focus on three texts that use sentiment to make their cases: The King and I (1956); Tom Dooley’s memoirs about Medico, (1956-61); The Ugly American (1958). I examine the 1950s texts as recurrences of the “Stowe effect,” a persistent discursive thread of powerful tropes and methods that originate in Stowe’s call for abolition. I trace this effect as it develops in relation to manual education at the influential Hampton Institute, and as it further develops in Pearl Buck’s calls for Asia-focused social interventions. This genealogy reveals how sentiment in 1950s texts gains impact through a connection to Stowe that suggests it is part of a tradition fundamental to American identity.

Project fields: American Literature; American Studies; U.S. History

Grant period: 6/1/2015 – 7/31/2015

Valeria Sobol

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (Urbana, IL 61820-5711)              FT-61594-14

The Haunted Empire: The Russian Literary Gothic and the “Imperial Uncanny,” 1793-1844

John T. Lynch

Rutgers University, Newark (Newark, NJ 07104-3010)     FT-61862-14

The Shakespeare Phantom: The Lives of 18th-century Forger William Henry Ireland

Project fields: British Literature

Grant period: 6/1/2014 – 7/31/2014

Katarzyna Lecky

Arkansas State University, Main Campus (Jonesboro, AR 72403-0600)     FT-61909-14

Poet Laureate Poetics and the Aesthetics of Pocket Maps in Renaissance Britain

Project fields: British Literature; Renaissance History; Renaissance Studies

Donna Christine Woodford-Gormley

New Mexico Highlands University (Las Vegas, NM 87701)             FT-62093-14

Caliban’s Books: Adaptations of Shakespeare in Cuba

Project fields: British Literature; Latin American Literature

Grant period: 5/1/2014 – 6/30/2014

Jason Eliot Powell

St. Joseph’s University (Philadelphia, PA 19131-1308)      FT-62096-14

Volume 2 of the Complete Works of Thomas Wyatt the Elder (1504-42)

Project fields: British Literature

Grant period: 6/1/2014 – 7/31/2014

Lianne Adele Habinek

Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-9800)    FT-62149-14

Early Modern Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience

Project fields: British Literature; History of Science; Renaissance Studies

Program: Summer Stipends

Sarah Wagner-McCoy

Reed College (Portland, OR 97202-8199)                FT-62169-14

The Complete Short Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt, African American Fiction Writer

Project fields: African American Studies; American Literature; American Studies