Kirkpatrick, Park receive National Endowment for the Humanities grants

by Anne Reynolds

Kirkpatrick, Park receive National Endowment for the Humanities grants
The National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.

On Thursday, March 29, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced funding for 208 projects, totaling $21.7 million. The College of Humanities and Social Sciences is proud to announce that two of these very diverse grants were awarded to projects involving our faculty members.

NEH continued its funding for Coming Home: Dialogues on the Moral, Psychological, and Spiritual Impacts of War, a project co-sponsored by Jesse Kirkpatrick, faculty member in the Department of Philosophy and Assistant Director, Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, and Edward Barrett, Volgenau Director of Strategy and Research, Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership, U.S. Naval Academy. The project coordinates dialogues between veterans, using sources in philosophy, history, poetry, and literature to spur discussion on the moral, psychological, and spiritual impacts of war upon warriors returning home.

Kirkpatrick is pleased to be able to continue the work of the program, noting that he was gratified by the enthusiasm he found among all of the participants – facilitators as well as those who took part in the discussions. He looks forward to expanding the diversity of voices, academic disciplines, and geographic reach of the conversations within the coming year.

The Endowment also funded a Summer Stipend for Department of History and Art History faculty member Sun-Young Park for her project, The Architecture of Disability: Designing for the Other in France, 1750-1975. She explains that the project, her second book, “will explore how architectural and urban developments in France of the modern era accommodated, and at times failed to accommodate, disabled subjects, beginning with the first pedagogical establishments for the blind and deaf founded during the Enlightenment, and leading up to twentieth-century accessible design standards.” Over the summer, Park will conduct research on the Royal Institute for Blind Youth and National Institute for Deaf-Mutes at the French National Archives, Departmental Archives of Paris, and collections of the blind and deaf institutes in Paris.

Michele Schwietz, the college’s associate dean for research, notes that the competition for NEH grants is quite fierce, with only eight percent of 800 summer stipend proposals funded. “These two most recent NEH awards demonstrate the rigor of the scholarly work conducted by college faculty throughout the year,” she adds. “It is truly a pleasure to celebrate these faculty members’ success.”