The College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS) is proud to announce that three faculty from the Department of History and Art History and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) have been awarded funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The National Endowment for the Humanities supports research, scholarship and public engagement in the humanities by funding meritorious, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation.
Dr. Deepthi Murali, Assistant Professor of Art History and Affiliate Faculty of Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) and Dr. Jason Heppler, senior developer at RRCHNM, received an award of $138,256 from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (DHAG) in support of the ongoing global textile history project Connecting Threads: Digitally Connecting Collections, Expanding Public Engagement. This DHAG grant will allow the project team to complete building the digital infrastructure and processing of collected data, setting up the project for Phase 2 development, which will further expand the research into the history of production of the Madras handkerchiefs textiles in southern India as well as begin research on the use of Indian cotton checkered textiles in Southeast Asia.
Dr. Amanda Madden, Assistant Professor of History and Affiliate Faculty at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) was awarded a second major grant as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Scholarly Editions and Translations program for the continuation on the work of the La Sfera Project, an open-access multimedia edition of Goro Dati’s fifteenth-century poem La sfera (The Globe). The NEH award of $99,599 was matched with an award of $18,000 from the Mellon Foundation for public outreach for work connected to the Sfera Project. The project aims to provide a clear idea of complex dynamics of readership and transmission of the La sfera text across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and serves as a useful case study for scholars and students on the relations between text and image in the premodern world. Dr. Madden also received a collaborative 4VA Grant with Virginia Tech earlier this year on the project “Historical Mapathons: Team-Based GIS Training and Transformation of Seventeenth-Century Maps”.