Texas Projects Receive More than $600,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities

by Brandon Zech December 22, 2018

National Endowment for the Humanities grantee projects

The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced the winners of its most recent round of grants. Spread across 44 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, the 253 funded projects address myriad issues in field of humanities — everything from the preservation and study of scrolls from the city of Pompeii, to the multimedia recreation of a 1960 speech by civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

The NEH’s chairman, Jon Parrish Peede, commented on the importance of the grantees’ projects:

“From cutting-edge digital projects to the painstaking practice of traditional scholarly research, these new NEH grants represent the humanities at its most vital and creative. These projects will shed new light on age-old questions, safeguard our cultural heritage, and expand educational opportunities in classrooms nationwide.”

Of the $14.8 million in grants given out across the U.S., $624,991 went to the 14 Texas-based projects. One Houston awardee, art historian and University of Houston associate professor Sandra Zalman, told Glasstire about how the $60,000 grant will help her work and research:

“I’m absolutely thrilled to receive this award from the NEH. It will afford me a sabbatical to finish writing my next book, Monumental Modernism: Museums and the Contest for Cultural Space. My book will analyze how the mid-century museum building boom was part of a new understanding of the expanded role of the museum as a site that has the potential to transform – or concretize – cultural agendas. The legacy of this mid-century investment in ‘starchitecture’ resonates today, as museums and other venues continue to employ spectacular buildings to attract audiences.”

See below for a full list of Texas awardees. For a full list of all 253 projects, please go here.

Carthage
$1,000 NEH on the Road Grant
M. P. Baker Library/Panola College
Project Description: To support the cost of public humanities programming while the library hosts the traveling exhibition Jacob A. Riis.

College Station
$60,000 Fellowship Grant
Evan Haefeli Outright, Texas A & M University, College Station
Project Title: Tolerant Expansion: When England Established American Religious Diversity, 1660–1688
Project Description: Writing to complete a book about the development of American religious pluralism and colonial British policy and practice of toleration from 1660 to 1688.

Dallas
$12,000 Common Heritage Grant
Buildingcommunity WORKSHOP
Project Title: Southern Dallas Neighborhood Stories: Preserving the Undertold Histories of Communities of Color
Project Description: Three digitization days to collect family memorabilia and oral histories that explore how urban renewal and school desegregation impacted Dallas’s communities of color in specific neighborhoods, including historically African-American communities in former Freedmen’s Towns—Short North Dallas (now Uptown and Deep Ellum), Joppa, Elm Thicket (North Park), Little Egypt, Queen City, and Tenth Street, as well as historically Mexican-American communities like La Bajada, Los Altos, La Loma, and the former Little Mexico.

Edinburg
$99,991 Humanities Initiatives: HSIs Grant
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Project Title: Promoting Humanities Learning in Elementary Schools
Project Description: Collaboration with local school districts to design a social studies curriculum for kindergarten through fifth grade that focuses on the history and culture of the Rio Grande Valley community.

El Paso
$60,000 Fellowship Grant
Michelle Armstrong-Partida, University of Texas, El Paso
Project Title: Concubinage and Illegitimacy in the Late Medieval Mediterranean
Project Description: Research for a book-length study on the widespread practice of concubinage (living together without being married) in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century southern Europe.

$60,000 Award for Faculty Grant
Sandra Deutsch, University of Texas, El Paso
Project Title: Engendering Antifascism: The Argentine Victory Board, 1930–1946 Project Description: A book-length study about the Victory Board, a pro-democracy women’s organization in Argentina during World War II.

Fort Worth
$6,000 Preservation Assistance Grant
Fort Worth Museum of Science and History
Project Title: Fort Worth Museum of Science and History Collections and Archives Preservation Assessment
Project Description: A preservation assessment of history, archival, and science collections related to Texas and the Southwest. The collections comprise more than 180,000 items, with emphasis on pre-Columbian, Native American, and ranch and agricultural life in Texas and the southwestern United States, as well as Fort Worth history.

$6,000 Preservation Assistance Grant
Texas Christian University
Project Title: Mary Couts Burnett Library Special Collections General Preservation Assessment and Emergency Preparedness Project
Project Description: A preservation assessment of nearly 26,000 volumes housed at the Mary Couts Burnett Library’s Special Collections, with materials ranging from a first edition of Imitatio Christi (ca. 1473) by Thomas à Kempis to twenty-first-century artists’ books.

Houston
$30,000 Fellowship Grant
Jeffrey Church, University of Houston
Project Title: The Secular Spirit: Using Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) to Understand Politics and the Meaning of Life
Project Description: Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the meaning of life in the work of German philosophers Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831).

$60,000 Award for Faculty Grant
Sandra Zalman, University of Houston
Project Title: Monuments to Modernism: Museums of Modern Art and the Contest for Cultural Space
Project Description: Preparation for publication of a book about the relationship between four museums in New York City—the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Gallery of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art—that shaped debates about modernism from 1959 to 1966.

San Antonio
$60,000 Award for Faculty Grant
Shelley Roff, University of Texas, San Antonio
Project Title: Treasure of the City: The Public Sphere and Civic Urbanism in Late Medieval Barcelona
Project Description: A book-length study of architecture, urban development, and the emerging public sphere in Barcelona between 1350 and 1450 CE.

$100,000 Humanities Initiatives: HSIs Grant
University of Texas, San Antonio
Project Title: An Oral History Project Dedicated to Women and War
Project Description: The creation of a digital archive of oral histories of women in the military to be used in the classroom and the training of faculty and students in the professional practice of oral history.

San Marcos
$60,000 Award for Faculty Grant
Katie Kapurch, Texas State University – San Marcos
Project Title: A Cultural History of African-American Musical Conversations with the Beatles
Project Description: Research and writing leading to publication of a book about African American reception of the Beatles, from the late 1960s to the present.

Victoria
$10,000 Preservation Assistance Grant
Victoria County Junior College District
Project Title: Preparation through Preservation at Victoria College’s Museum of the Coastal Bend
Project Description: Purchase of archival and preservation equipment for improved future implementation of the collections management policy and emergency plan. The collections span 13,000 years of history in this area of Texas, including stone artifacts from early coastal peoples, Native American pottery sherds, and seven French cannons of significance to the colonial history of the area.

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