Arts and Humanities Awards $250,000 or More

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Associate Professor of History, is developing a first-of-its-kind digital database archiving roughly 6,000 previously unpublished habeas petitions, which will be searchable by demographic.

McMullen, research associate professor of English, will lead efforts to create an annotated digital edition of Walt Whitman’s journalistic writings between 1846 and 1848, when he worked as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Before becoming one of the most influential poets and writers in America, Whitman was a reporter and editor at several New York newspapers. Because most articles in that era did not include bylines, researchers have developed methods, including a “stylometric algorithm,” to determine which articles were written by Whitman. These works will be included in the new compilation of Whitman’s journalistic writings, which is expected to shed light on Whitman’s work as a poet and his personality. The documents will be added to UNL’s Walt Whitman Archive, which is considered the primary global resource for studying the poet’s life, writings and literary legacy.