Arts and Humanities Awards $250,000 or More

With a nearly $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Matt Cohen, professor of English, and Kenneth Price, Hillegass University Professor of American Literature, are rebuilding the Walt Whitman Archive website, implementing a modern framework and repackaging site content for easier reuse. The long-term goal is to enhance the archive’s accessibility and sustainability by making it easier for users to search and organize materials on the site, which, at nearly 25 years old, is the leading resource for Walt Whitman scholars. The team is improving the website’s digital architecture by changing the programming framework; developing a machine-readable interface for the website’s code, images and metadata; revising files to improve the metadata; and strengthening existing metadata through a new search engine. The archive is published by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.

Kwame Dawes, George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner, and Lorna Dawes, associate professor of University Libraries, are leading an international team in expanding the African Poetry Digital Portal. This online tool documents the work of African poets and provides digital access to related creative and intellectual artifacts, materials and research. The team is using a $750,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to launch the portal into its next phase, which will expand research and scholarship related to African poetry. They also are collaborating with other institutions to create a digital collections hub that provides access to materials held by institutions worldwide. The initiative is aimed at bringing to light the rich and sophisticated poetic practices and traditions that have long existed in African societies but are not always well understood.

With a grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project, Margaret Jacobs and Christina Faw Faw Goodson are leading a multifaceted project aimed at reconnecting members of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe with their ancestral homeland in southeast Nebraska and educating Nebraskans about the area’s Indigenous history. Jacobs, Charles J. Mach Professor of History and director of the Center for Great Plains Studies, and Goodson, an Otoe-Missouria educator, historian and cultural linguist, are connecting people around the area’s shared history, with plans to create land-based commemorations, build relationships, facilitate reconciliation and document the process to share with other communities. The $1.58 million Mellon grant is the largest arts and humanities research grant in the university’s history.   

With a grant from the National Science Foundation, historian Katrina Jagodinsky is exploring how various marginalized groups – immigrants, women, and indigenous and enslaved people, for example – used habeas corpus, a longstanding legal principle enabling prisoners to challenge the legality of their detentions, to claim freedom and establish their rights between 1812 and 1924. In collaboration with the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, Jagodinsky, the Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of History, is developing a first-of-its-kind digital database archiving roughly 6,000 previously unpublished habeas petitions, which will be searchable by demographic.

Andrew Jewell, professor of University Libraries and co-director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, is leading the creation of a digital library of American novelist Willa Cather’s literary manuscripts. The library will include high-resolution images of each document, extensive metadata about each item and expert-authored analyses of the manuscripts. These resources will advance scholarship on Cather because her literary manuscripts currently are distributed across a range of repositories and are largely ignored by scholars and students of Cather’s writing. The digital library will integrate with the thousands of items that constitute the university’s Willa Cather Archive. The project is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Kenneth Price, Hillegass University Professor of American Literature, leads efforts to edit and make freely available key late-life writings of Walt Whitman, including “November Boughs,” a collection of poems and essays; “Good-Bye My Fancy!”, a poem reflecting on aging and death; and their associated manuscripts. Price’s team is making these works and other manuscripts available on The Walt Whitman Archive, a collection published by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, which Price co-directs. The team’s aim is to advance Whitman studies, literary scholarship more broadly, textual studies, and age and disability studies.   

With a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, historians William Thomas, Katrina Jagodinsky and Jeannette Eileen Jones, working with scholars from the College of Law, are launching a teaching, research and collaboration hub that will position Nebraska as a national leader in education and scholarship focused on the relationship between U.S. law and race in American history. The project will help students and the public understand how marginalized groups in American history used the law to contest and advance their rights. The project features an entry-level, team-taught course — the first of its kind at the university — and an open educational repository of digital and legal research tools, developed in collaboration with the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.

Laura Weakly, metadata encoding specialist with University Libraries, is guiding the university’s long-term commitment to lead the United States Newspaper Program and the National Digital Newspaper Program for the state of Nebraska. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the university’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities will select, digitize and send to the Library of Congress approximately 100,000 pages of Nebraska newspapers published between 1854 and 1963. They will be included in Chronicling America, a website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages.

Adrian Wisnicki, professor of English, is advancing work on the Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education, or COVE, project, an open access platform that serves as a low-cost, scholar-led alternative to commercial publishing platforms. The platform, which includes texts from the Renaissance until the early 20th century, allows educators to create customized anthologies of materials for students. With National Endowment for the Humanities funding, the team will add metadata to COVE, optimize the platform for mobile devices and accessibility, and add additional texts.