Active awards, July 1, 2024\u2013June 30, 2025
* Indicates new in 2024\u20132025<\/p>\n\n\n
Kwame Dawes, George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of\u00a0Prairie Schooner<\/em>, is 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.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div> Under the leadership of Kwame Dawes, the African Poetry Book Fund is using a nearly $350,000 grant from the Poetry Foundation to study poetry book distribution in Africa. The project team\u2019s goal is to better understand the complexities of poetry and poetry publishing on the African continent. The researchers are examining bookseller networks, international trade, literary venues, programming and more to develop a more comprehensive picture of Africa\u2019s book distribution landscape. The project advances the African Poetry Book Fund\u2019s larger goal of making its titles available to a wider audience in Africa. The fund, which Dawes established in 2012, promotes and advances the development and publication of the poetic arts.<\/p>\n<\/div> Michael Hoff, professor of art history, leads a research excavation project at Antiochia ad Cragum, an ancient Roman city on Turkey\u2019s southern coast. With funding from the Merops Foundation, Hoff\u2019s team, which includes Husker students and local experts in Turkey, is uncovering evidence of how the city\u2019s people lived and the religious and social changes that shaped Antiochia ad Cragum. A major goal is unearthing archaeological evidence to explain why the city was ultimately abandoned. The project, which started in 2005, is the first systematic excavation and study of the site and has led to the discovery of large mosaics, a basilica, a council house, baths and coins. The project has included researchers, students and volunteers from around the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div> With a grant from the Mellon Foundation\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s history.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div> With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Jacobs and Elizabeth Lorang, dean of University Libraries, are compiling, digitizing and making accessible records and other materials from the Genoa Indian Industrial School in Nebraska, one of more than 150 boarding schools designed to assimilate Indigenous American people into Euro-American culture near the end of the 19th century. The university\u2019s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities hosts the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project. In order to move the project forward with sensitivity and respect, Jacobs and Lorang are working with an advisory council that includes representatives from the Ponca, Pawnee, Omaha and Winnebago nations and UNITE, the university\u2019s Native American student group.<\/p>\n<\/div> With a grant from the National Science Foundation, historian Katrina Jagodinsky is exploring how various marginalized groups \u2013 immigrants, women, and indigenous and enslaved people, for example \u2013 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.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div> 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\u2019s 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\u2019s writing. The digital library will integrate with the thousands of items that constitute the university\u2019s Willa Cather Archive. The project is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div> Kenneth Price, Hillegass University Professor of American Literature, leads efforts to edit and make freely available key late-life writings of Walt Whitman, including \u201cNovember Boughs,\u201d a collection of poems and essays; \u201cGood-Bye My Fancy!\u201d, a poem reflecting on aging and death; and their associated manuscripts. Price\u2019s 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\u2019s aim is to advance Whitman studies, literary scholarship more broadly, textual studies, and age and disability studies. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div> 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 \u2014 the first of its kind at the university \u2014 and an open educational repository of digital and legal research tools, developed in collaboration with the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div> Laura Weakly, metadata encoding specialist with University Libraries, is guiding the university\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div> 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.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div> Active awards, July 1, 2024\u2013June 30, 2025* Indicates new in 2024\u20132025<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-18248","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/majorawards\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/majorawards\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/majorawards\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/majorawards\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/majorawards\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18248"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/majorawards\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69488,"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/majorawards\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18248\/revisions\/69488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/majorawards\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Hoff, Michael<\/h2>
Jacobs, Margaret<\/h2>
Jagodinsky, Katrina<\/h2>
Jewell, Andrew<\/h2>
Price, Kenneth<\/h2>
Thomas, William<\/h2>
Weakly, Laura<\/h2>
Wisnicki, Adrian<\/h2>