2021 Humanities Centers Initiative Public Humanities |
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Grant Zoom information session/workshop: Monday, May 3, 2020 from 1:00-2:00pm for SBU graduate students who want to apply to this Humanities NY grant. Students who participate should have a rough draft or outline of their application proposal. Zoom registration required. Registration deadline May 2. Please click here to register.
The Humanities Institute at Stony Brook (HISB) and Humanities New York announce the call for applicants for the 2021 Humanities Centers Initiative Public Humanities Grant.
Humanities New York and its nine partner universities, comprising the Humanities Centers Initiative, invite grant proposals from advanced graduate students in support of public programming and projects.
Grant proposals for projects that are underway or already in development are highly encouraged. Projects may be collaborations between two or more students; however, the application should designate one as the project director. Preference will be given to applicants who have not previously been awarded the Humanities New York Public Humanities Fellowship.
All projects must be public-facing in some way: intended for public audiences, engaging members of the public as collaborators, or partnering with community groups. Projects of any format or type will be considered; however, projects that engage with issues of social justice and equity are particularly welcome.
Grantees will also have the opportunity to take part in workshops and networking events held by the HCI partners, designed to introduce them to different skillsets and to experts of the public humanities, in order to enrich their practice.
TO APPLY: All proposals must be submitted through Humanities New York’s online portal: https://humanitiesny.fluxx.io. Applicants must create an account in advance of applying.
Applicants are asked to submit the following materials:
- An abstract of the project (100 word limit)
- A description of the project (500 word limit)
- A brief biographical list of project partners and collaborators (250 word limit)
- A short project plan with projected dates (250 word limit)
- A project budget, using the template provided in the application
- The CV of the project director and their collaborators, if applicable.
ELIGIBILITY: Applicants must be enrolled as a graduate student at one of these nine universities at the time of application: CUNY Graduate Center, Columbia University, Cornell University, New York University, University at Buffalo, Stony Brook University, Binghamton University, the University of Rochester, or Syracuse University.
GRANT AWARD AND REQUIREMENTS: The grant award will be up to $4,000, paid in two installments: one of $3500, and a second of $500. The grant period begins on July 1, 2021, and grantees will have up to one year to expend grant funds. Grantees will be required to submit a final report after the completion of the grant.
Grant funds may be spent on travel expenses, consultant fees, wages for labor, participant honoraria, marketing, venue space, project materials, and media costs, among other things. If you have a question about what costs the grant will cover, please contact HNY.
All proposals must be submitted by May 10, 2021. Applicants will be informed of decisions by June 7, 2021.
CONTACT: Humanities New York Senior Program Office Adam Capitanio (212-233-1131/acapitanio@humanitiesny.org)
ABOUT: The mission of Humanities New York is to strengthen civil society and the bonds of community, using the humanities to foster engaged inquiry and dialogue around social and cultural concerns. Founded in 1975, Humanities New York is the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is the sole statewide proponent of public access to the humanities. HNY is a private 501(c)3 that receives Federal, State, and private funding.
The Humanities Centers Initiative is an innovative statewide partnership between Humanities New York and a network of humanities centers based at nine New York State universities. Launched in 2012 and supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Whiting Foundation, the HCI supports humanities institutes, faculty, and graduate students in their commitment to public engagement.
To download pdf of guidelines from Humanities NY, click here.
The 2019-2020 HISB Public Humanities Fellows:
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Meghan Buckley is a PhD candidate in English and American literature at Stony Brook University. Her research interests include 20th and 21st century American and Anglophone literature with a focus on veterans studies, trauma theory, and war literature. She is currently at work on her dissertation, which examines the function of landscape in contemporary literature of the Iraq War. Lecture: "Combat Silence: Narrating the Female Veteran Experience" Combat Silence is an initiative, in conjunction with the Herstory Writers Workshop of Long Island, that explores and gives voice to the female veteran experience through memoir. In the fall of 2019, students in EGL 320 “The Literature of War” embarked on an experiential learning process using the Herstory methodology to write about the experience of war side by side with female veterans. This talk will discuss the logistics of the workshop, its strengths and challenges, as well as plans for implementing this initiative into the English department in future semesters. |
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Andrew Rimby is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English department at SBU. His dissertation, “The Pool of Narcissus: Transatlantic Homoerotic Attachments (1837-1901), argues that Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and other 19th-century writers use ancient Greek allusions to express male homoerotic desire before the term “homosexuality” is invented. He is a 2019 Guiliano Global Fellow, a 2019-2020 Public Humanities Fellow, and a 2019 Stony Brook Graduate Fellow in the Arts, Humanities, and Lettered Social Sciences. Zoom Lecture: "Whitman’s Multitudes: From Interactive Module to Interactive Kiosk" This talk explores the two phases of the “Whitman’s Multitudes” project. The first phase involved creating Whitman poetry lesson plans for middle and high school students with the English Education program. The second phase involved sifting through the students’ final projects to see what material could be used for the Whitman Birthplace’s interactive kiosks which will premiere in Summer 2020. This project emphasizes why multiple institutions (Stony Brook University, local middle and high schools, and the Whitman Birthplace) need to be involved when creating an interactive museum exhibit. |
The 2018-2019 HISB Public Humanities Fellows:
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Rachel Corbman is a doctoral candidate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. She is currently a Mellon predoctoral fellow in women's history at the New-York Historical Society, and a public humanities fellow at Humanities New York. Her dissertation, "Conferencing on the Edge: A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation, 1969-89," is a history of the acrimonious feminist conflicts that shaped women's studies and gay and lesbian studies in the 1970s and 1980s. "Conferencing on the Edge" won the CLAGS fellowship award for a dissertation, first book, or second book in LGBTQ Studies, and portions of this project have been published (or are forthcoming) in Feminist Formations and GLQ. Lecture: "The Wide World of Lesbian Cats, 1970-today" This project traces the history of lesbian feminist print and digital cultures through visual representations of cats. This exhibit is based on archival research at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and will open at the LGBT Center in New York City in July 2019. |
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Stephen J. Pallas is a PhD candidate in English at Stony Brook University. He researches British Romanticism, aesthetics, ecocriticism, and rhetoric. He has presented and published papers that consider the intersections of poetry and poetics, environmental rights, and political activism. His dissertation considers British Romantic poetry and theories of empathy in the context of poverty, slavery, gender inequality, disabilities, and environmental degradation. He also runs a non-profit organization, Sound Off!. Lecture: "Sound Off!: Workshopping the d/Deaf Experience"1970-today" Sound Off! is a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising scholarship funds for d/Deaf students enrolled in or applying to arts and humanities programs. The first events the organization has sponsored is a series of workshops in painting, prose, and poetry. The events will culminate in a special issue of literature published by The Long Island Literary Journal. This talk explores some of the challenges that occurred in the development of this project, how these obstacles were overcome, and plans for the organization’s future. |
The 2017-2018 HISB Public Humanities Fellows:
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Javier Gaston-Greenberg is a doctoral candidate in Hispanic Languages and Literature. His dissertation will focus on the construction and crisis of hero mythologies in Cuba through comics. Her also leads professional development workshops for the Internationals Network for Public Schools and is a Clinical Supervisor at the Department of Curriculum & Teaching, Hunter College CUNY. Lecture: "Hero Gensis: The Secret Language of Comics for Immigrant Youth" The Public Humanities Fellowship has enabled Javier Gastón-Greenberg to develop and implement a project called "Hero Genesis" -- a high school curricula that employs comic book culture and its secret language to discover the hidden powers inhabiting immigrant youth in New York City. Its’ purpose is to channel youth expression through professional development workshops for educators and in-school responsive curricula that harnesses multimodal comic-themed medias to generate original hero stories. |
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Allyse Knox-Russell is a PhD candidate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook. Her dissertation
project explores the ways that gender, race, and indigeneity influence embodied experiences
of land and place. Her public humanities project aims to develop an environmental
health justice curriculum for schools and summer camps. Lecture: "Interdisciplinary Obstacles: Teaching Environmental Justice K-12" Students at all levels need the tools provided by both the humanities and sciences to imagine just solutions to ongoing ecological crises. Yet, interdisciplinarity remains a challenge for both university and K-12 educators. How can we help youth make the connections they require to work towards a more livable world? |
The 2016-2017 HISB Public Humanities Fellows:
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Eva Boodman is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Stony Brook University working on ethics, social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, decolonial philosophy, and the philosophy of race. Her dissertation, Structural Ignorance, confronts the issue of ethical and political responsibility for group forms of ignorance. She uses white ignorance as a paradigm case to discuss the ways that dominant, often oppressive norms can be reproduced in the very attempt to escape them. With her public humanities fellowship, she will develop and teach relevant, responsive curricula to be taught at the women's jail on Rikers Island, and will recruit and organize Stony Brook academics. Lecture: "Wrestling with Knowledge and Power on Rikers Island" Education is not politically neutral. There is an ongoing discussion in philosophy and social science about how implicit norms and racial biases operate in knowledge production, and how these are inseparable from power structures. This talk discusses how structural racism operates through the norms at work in educational institutions, and uses that framework to discuss the ethical and political complexities of teaching philosophy on Rikers Island. |
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Francisco Delgado is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Stony Brook University, where he is also a W. Burghardt Turner Fellow. His dissertation examines contemporary literature by Asian American authors and Native American authors who use the dystopian genre to address capitalist exploitation, environmental rights, and racial injustice. He holds a B.A. from SUNY New Paltz and an M.A. from Brooklyn College. An enrolled member of the Tonawanda Band of Seneca Indian tribe of upstate New York, he proposes a project that will construct an interactive website to teach and promote the Seneca language and culture. Lecture: "Nya:wëh sgë:nö’: Revitalizing the Seneca Indian Language" The Seneca language, like many Native languages, is nearing extinction. In this talk, Delgado explores the circumstances that led to this current state of the language before detailing efforts, including his own through the construction of a multimodal website, aimed at preserving the language and culture going forward. |
The 2015-2016 HISB Public Humanities Fellows:
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Allison Tyndall is a doctoral candidate in English literature at Stony Brook University. Her dissertation
examines the political role of the common people in 16th- and 17th-century history
plays. She holds a B.A. from the University of Toledo and an M.A. from DePaul University.
Allison returned to school to pursue her Ph.D. after working for six years in service-learning
programs in Chicago and Ohio, including a year of service with AmeriCorps VISTA.
As a Public Humanities Fellow, she will engage university students in developing ESL
resources to supplement Shakespearean plays for a high school in the Bronx.
Lecture: “The Human Experience and King Lear: Community within and without the Text”
Tuesday, April 5, 2016 at 4:00pm 1008 Humanities In Shakespeare's famous staging of human suffering, the way people connect to one another is fundamentally redefined after traditional systems of order break down. Tyndall discusses this reading of community in King Lear and her experiment using the text to connect her Introduction to Drama students to a high school for English Language Learners in the Bronx. |
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Alena Sauzade is a doctoral candidate at Stony Brook University specializing in public art and commemoration. Her research focuses on government and community sponsored monuments as well as intentional and unintentional memorials in order to interrogate the various ways that memory functions in the public sphere. Her dissertation, Witnesses to Terror: Nationhood and Trauma in Memorials to Victims of Terrorism, focuses on memorials to victims of the September 11th, 2001 attacks in the United States and worldwide. It considers September 11th as a cultural trauma, and explores how the artifacts of the attacks, including World Trade Center steel and Pentagon limestone, have become important symbolic components in the composition of official and vernacular memorials. Alena’s public humanities project will generate an archived community dialogue on 9/11 memorials. Lecture: "Beyond 'Reflecting Absence,' Long Island Communities and the Commemoration
of 9/11" In this talk, Sauzade will chronicle the history 9/11 memorials around Long Island, focusing on how their shared formal characteristics and reoccurring visual and symbolic elements present a collective memory of the attacks that challenges the representation of psychological trauma presented by New York City’s national memorial, “Reflecting Absence.” |
See the full list of the current Humanities New York Graduate Public Humanities Fellows here.