Past Winners
The MLA launched the Humanities Innovation Grant program in 2018. Project abstracts and materials appear as they were received by the MLA and have not been edited to conform to MLA style.
2022–23
This course proposes to connect narratives of disability, and health-oriented literature with global issues of gender, race, and identity of Hispanic multicultural communities. Students in pre-health science majors with human serving prospects in mind will learn about diverse human circumstances that affect mental and body health in the Hispanic world, and how that is represented in literature, film, and graphic novels. This course will consider how indigenous groups, LGBTQ, women, humans with disabilities, and other minoritized and excluded individuals’ health are determined by several forms of social and cultural injustices. A crucial component of the course is to connect global issues to local communities. Students in this course will take an excursion to visit the local Latinx center and a hospital in Horry County (SC) to understand the efforts and work behind supporting Spanish speaking individuals in the community. This course will also welcome a guest speaker, Araceli Hernández-Laroche, founding director of South Carolina Centro Latino at USCUpstate. The course culminates with students’ participation at a local research symposium where they will each present a research poster.
CloseToo often, introductory linguistics courses unintentionally present languages as unitary and unchanging. For example, the data that students are asked to analyze often comes from a single “standard” variety; other varieties either remain unacknowledged or gain mention only in discussions of variation. Similarly, data from non-native speakers, Deaf language users, and neurodiverse populations are either not presented or are reserved for “variation” or “pathology” sections. Additionally, the voices of diverse language users rarely feature directly in introductory courses; while instructors may discuss language use within different groups, members of these groups themselves do not always speak directly to students. This unintended bias toward the speech of “ideal native speaker-hearers” results in students receiving an inaccurate picture of language in use. To combat this, we propose to significantly restructure the two introductory linguistics courses offered at the University of Western Australia. We will broaden our materials while incorporating diverse voices, thereby presenting students with a richer, more just introduction to language science.
CloseThis project’s goals are to (1) connect Nova Southeastern University’s diverse student population with the natural environments of their surrounding communities, (2) provide innovative experiential learning opportunities for students to study the impact writing has on environments, and (3) work with wildlife experts and community leaders on ways writing can solve environmental issues. Students in the proposed “Writing in the Wilderness” course will write in wilderness locations in the South Florida area, speak with wildlife experts about the impacts writing from and about these locations can have, and participate in projects, such as creating public-facing arguments for real audiences using a variety of modes. The course’s activities will help students see the importance of the larger humanities field by situating it as a powerful player in the way lands are shaped, maintained, and shared. The course is innovative in its use of technology and its partnerships with environmental experts.
CloseSouthwest Georgia has a rich cultural and artistic heritage that students at our institution have few opportunities to explore in the context of the humanities. This course is designed (1) to introduce students to our region’s history, art, literature, and natural environment through a combination of field experiences, interviews with local residents, and selected readings; and (2) to enable them to interpret or reimagine the region through their own creative writing. Students will examine the relationship between art and place as it relates to their exploration of southwest Georgia, and they will apply their understanding to their own writing inspired by their course experiences, which they will distribute to the community as a public-facing website and a printed volume of regional writing. In the process, students will become more connected with our regional community, and they will demonstrate the value of the humanities to local civic and business leaders.
CloseMainstream representations of endangered languages overemphasize the morbid (a dying language, spoken mostly by the elderly) and the lachrymose (nostalgia for a better past). By contrast, this course draws upon a representative case study in Ladino (i.e. Judeo-Spanish, the language spoken by the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492) to propose that an inquiry into endangered languages through Web 2.0 and 3.0 technologies can help dismantle prejudices about their supposed unsuitability for the 21st century. Mid-level undergraduate students will use digital archives, language learning apps, smart transliteration engines, cryptocurrencies, Oculus Quest headsets and 3D prototypes to recast knowledge about endangered languages and their digital revitalization in the 21st century. Drawing upon the case study of Ladino, students will focus on shifting perceptions of further endangered languages and their revitalization prospects before and after the Internet era, thus reinvigorating their own interest in endangered languages and their digitally mediated future.
Close2021
Project’s rationale: This project is part of the Creative and Academic Writing course. The project’s goal is to create and subsequently expand collection of bilingual children’s books (English and Spanish) to promote bilingualism among the Spanish-speaking school-age children. This project tackles both the academic goals of the course (developing and improving writing skills in Spanish) and community outreach (producing academic work to be consumed and used by our Spanish-speaking community members). Audience: Spanish majors or minors who may need to complete a course on creative and academic writing. As part of the Spanish program, students act as designers and producers of children bilingual books for children 5–12 years old. Goals: By completing this course and subsequently this final project, students will
- have a better grasp of the academic and creative writing process and Spanish writing conventions;
- learn effectively and cohesively in an academic or creative setting;
- better understand and use Spanish grammar and vocabulary as part of the writing process in the target language;
- make important and independent yet well thought out choices on stylistic, grammatical, and lexical content of any written text; and
- distinguish among the different types of writing modes and apply their stylistic features with ease and confidence.
The project will be an integration of all the course goals: students will be practicing writing in both languages and specifically sharpening their Spanish writing skills in different settings or contexts.
CloseRepresentations of terrorism are pervasive in our global moment, yet the specific legal and cultural contexts that give meaning to this term are less often understood. This course proposes that a study of terrorism through literature, cinema, and visual art can transform conceptions of “the terrorist” in popular culture and can begin to repair biases inherent in textual and visual renditions across media and jurisprudence. Students will meet with former detainees, investigate archival materials concerning counter-terrorist policies, visit sites, and learn from writers and filmmakers seeking to reshape knowledge of terrorism in contemporary culture. These experiences will illuminate shifting legal definitions of terror devised at various moments and points across the globe. In the process, students will work to reframe perceptions of terror, culminating in a public-facing digital exhibition that curates objects of material culture to expose racism, xenophobia, and other prejudices inherent in current frameworks for understanding terrorism.
CloseBlack Lives is the 2021–22 World Affairs Signature Series sponsored by the School of Languages, Cultures, and World Affairs. In the spirit of the Akan aphorism “Sankofa,” which emphasizes the importance of looking to the past to understand the future, this series features several events and a range of courses taught in fifteen different disciplines to enhance our understanding of Africa and peoples of African descent across time and space. At the College of Charleston, humanities faculty members are deeply engaged in research, teaching, and service projects that coalesce around African studies, African American studies, and studies of the broader African diaspora. Black Lives calls critical attention to how the College of Charleston is uniquely positioned to lead in the study of Africa and the African diaspora in liberal arts and humanities disciplines. Our theme and Charleston’s importance to the global economy also calls attention to how the African continent and transnational Black experiences (via Afro-Caribbean, Afro-LatinX, Black British, Afro-European identities) are hubs for international engagement. The goal of the series is to highlight the international and cross-cultural connections to Africana experiences and culture in the course work, scholarship, and cocurricular activities on campus during the 2021–22 academic year.
CloseThe aim of our course is to develop skills in active reading and expository writing for students who are transitioning out of the New Jersey correctional system. Students will close-read and interpret a diversity of texts that explore the social construction of power. They will interrogate the explicit, as well as implicit, mechanisms that define and organize an individual's free will in the midst of disciplined conformity. Students choose between two disciplinary focuses, autonomously deciding on which reading progression they'd like to pursue. This choice empowers students to explore their interests and take responsibility for their learning. Weekly exercises reinforce class lessons and scaffold the growth of writing skills. By the end of the course, students will be able to critically read complex texts, differentiate summary from analysis, synthesize multiple arguments, and write their own claim-driven essays. Such techniques build student confidence, allowing students to find their voice and pursue future educational goals.
CloseFollowing a “Languages for the Professions” approach, I am developing a certificate in Spanish court interpreting, focused on immigration from the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras). Phase 1 of the program comprises three courses, in which students attend the Buffalo Immigration Court to observe proceedings several times each semester, followed by classroom conversations to become acquainted with immigration issues. In the second phase, students undergo an oral proficiency interview (OPI) in Spanish and take their last class, in which students translate documents for pro bono lawyers helping asylum seekers. Students also undertake the New York State Spanish Court Interpreting Test to become state certified interpreters. Students and instructor attend New York State Association of Foreign Language Teachers (NYSAFLT), a regional educational conference to share their impressions and experience in learning Spanish as a “Language for the Professions.” A practicum as a Spanish interpreter at Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York culminates the program.
Close2020
Introduction to the Environmental Humanities at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa will introduce students to historical and contemporary understandings of the environment in the humanities in fields spanning art, film, history, languages, literature, media, music, philosophy and religion. The course will connect understandings of the environment in these fields with disciplines in the Colleges of Natural Sciences, the College of Social Sciences, the School of Engineering, and the School of Ocean and Earth Science Technologies. Texts engaged will encompass landscape painting, photography, nature-writing, cli-fi and nature documentaries. The course will consider how Indigenous worldviews foreground the environment culturally.
Two crucial components of the program’s offerings will be coursework that firstly includes experiential learning and secondly partners with area organizations to foster place-based learning as well as community and civic engagement. In our estimation, these components of the curriculum encourage a civic-mindedness and skillsets that benefit students after they graduate.
CloseThis project builds upon the interdisciplinary course development at Houston Community College in the first sequence of the composition courses and its co-linked ESOL courses, in collaboration with the Nutrition course. This project aims to engage students in food writing for the purpose of self-care and community healing in the aftermath of COVID-19. Using the diversified notions of food literacy, nutrition literacy, and health literacy, this collaborative pedagogy contributes to students’ writing for public advocacy through creating a cookbook and thereby aims at promoting communities’ well-being. This interdisciplinary pedagogy between English and Nutrition will offer a concrete example of design thinking-based integrative learning.
CloseThis course extends the Tulane Medieval and Early Modern Studies program’s successful new courses in critical events studies and writing for exhibitions to focus squarely on retelling the story of the Middle Ages and Early Modernity through collaborative writing projects, new media, and new approaches to writing instruction. Medieval and Early Modern Studies is an ideal program for these innovations because it is inherently interdisciplinary, because these periods were themselves back-formed during the age of European imperialism and provide a locus for a critical reconsideration of how and why history is written, and also because, sadly, the place for the Middle Ages and Early Modernity in the humanities curriculum continues to shrink even while it has never been more popular in movies, television, gaming, and public events. The humanities’ struggle for relevance is, in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, cast into high relief, but for precisely this reason innovative solutions may have the most immediate and palpable benefits.
CloseI will develop a new course for students of intermediate and advanced Spanish to improve their ability to translate legal documents and interpret between Spanish-English in the context of crisis immigration and asylum seekers. Students will learn about asylum law with a focus on cases from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Cuba (the origin of a majority of Spanish-speaking asylum seekers) and research the country conditions leading to persecution. During the course, we will produce translations through a partnership with Respond Crisis Translation, a network of volunteer translators working with asylum seekers on the Mexico border. After this course, students will be qualified to volunteer for one of the many organizations relying on volunteer translators and interpreters to help prepare asylum seekers for their hearings. At the same time, we will read short stories, view films, and read non-fictional testimonies from the perspectives of economic migrants and asylum seekers.
CloseIn this service-learning course, English majors will learn how to create data visualizations and craft stories about data for varied audiences. Students complete two projects: a data story about a humanities artifact and a data story for a local non-profit that will have a social impact. Students will learn Tableau, an industry standard for data visualization, and get the opportunity to earn a Tableau certification/digital badge. My goal is to simultaneously help humanities students gain a recognized “hard” skill (Tableau) while encouraging them to use a humanities mindset to open up, explore, and explain data in a contextual, ethical manner. The project’s rationale is to give humanities students confidence in the transferable skills and abilities their humanities education has instilled in them, while adding technical skills to their portfolio, all in the broader interest of helping a local non-profit turn its data into an impactful story.
CloseHolding History, a public humanities program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is requesting a grant to establish Holding History: Page to Digital Stage, a crossdisciplinary credit course aimed at undergraduates of all majors. Taught by Holding History cofounders Joshua Calhoun (Associate Professor of English) and Sarah Marty (Codirector of the Bolz Center for Arts Administration, School of Business), the learning objectives for this class are twofold. Firstly, students will learn about archival texts and cultural heritage objects as they analyze the mixed media surfaces on which readers, writers, and printers recorded and revised history. Secondly, they will be trained to translate their specialized coursework to varied public audiences through interactive, in-person events and through digital programming such as podcasting and blogging. This course therefore takes an integrated approach to humanistic education: connecting the hidden histories of old media to new directions in media, communications, and public engagement.
Close2019
This project is to develop an add-on creative component, ENG 215-A “Colonialism Today” for students at Guttman Community College. This opportunity is open to all motivated second year students who take an existing course on colonialism (sites include India, the Caribbean, and South Africa seen through a cultural studies lens) with me. In weekly meetings, students will work closely with me and selected Teaching Artists to develop creative projects that reflect upon their personal and familial connections with colonial history. Student work will culminate in a prominent gallery show and be archived online. This project increases contact between program faculty and students, allowing for deeper mentoring opportunities. It allows students to demonstrate excellence through curricular work that strengthens their transfer applications to four-year college liberal arts programs. Inherently interdisciplinary, it cements the connections between students’ academic and personal experiences and addresses our institutional goals of social justice and civic engagement.
CloseThe proposed course, HUM 2xx Cultures of Play, introduces general education students to the Humanities through studying the significance of play across cultures. The course expands Buffalo State’s Humanities program beyond its two existing courses, HUM 100 Introduction to the Humanities and HUM 200 The History of Rhetoric, which have emphasized Western traditions. The target audience is our increasingly diverse population, including African-American, Native American, Latinx, and international students. Experiential, game-based activities will feature guest lectures and site visits with local educators and scholars, librarians, game designers, and players. Goals include diversifying the curriculum, enriching the first-year experience, extending community outreach, and establishing an introductory course for a proposed program in Games Studies with courses in literary games, digital literature, and experiential learning.
CloseThis project, based in an environmental humanities course offered at Lafayette College in 2020, will establish an ongoing phenological record—a record of cyclic and seasonal events related to climate—for Easton, Pennsylvania. The goals are threefold: first, to introduce students to the rich array of literary genres related to seasonality; second, to provide these students with the archival skills necessary to uncover historical phenological data; and third, to generate a digital phenological resource for local farmers and climate scientists confronting rapid global warming here in the Lehigh Valley. After studying genres related to phenological observation—herbariums, literary almanacs, georgics, and natural history journals—students will document both historical and current planting dates, blooming dates, frost dates, and migratory arrivals in the region. Past dates uncovered through archival research and present dates documented through student observations at the college farm will be entered into a public database for comparison.
CloseEnvironmental poetry, when taught in the classroom, can leave metaphors of place too remote for students to engage with. But what happens when students are put in the literal places of the poems? This course takes students out of the classroom, and to particular places across our desert region that inspired poems, which we will read on site. Texts will range from the work of poets like Naomi Shihab Nye and Carmen Tafolla, to working with Coahuiltecan natives (support secured) to understand the meaning of ancient religious paintings like the White Shaman mural, and studying the poetry of detained migrant children (as recorded by Seth Michelson in Dreaming America). Questions of place (who belongs where, and who decides what a place means?) will be further engaged with by having students create their own works using GIS storytelling methods.
CloseAs most Americans continue to consider Vietnam as a war rather than a country with history and culture, this course addresses the representational issues in Vietnam War literature by developing a digital humanities project that would promote active learning and global engagement. Targeting students in English, history, psychology, education, business, political science, computer science, and mass communication, we not only expose students to alternative perspectives and comparative methodology by teaching diverse texts, critical methods, archival research tools, and oral history techniques, but we also engage them in global exchange and active knowledge production, which encompass creating wikis, video conferencing with students in Vietnam, doing archive research, and designing oral history projects to interact with veterans and refugees in local communities. Students will publish their oral history work on-line and further their expertise through wikis on issues like PTSD, environmental destruction, refugee experiences, colonial legacy, and economic development in Vietnam today.
Close2018
Based upon disaster pedagogies developed in the wake of Hurricane María, the proposed course interweaves three aspects of auto/biography studies—the analysis, creation, and collection of life narratives—into one undergraduate course offering. This course is designed to immediately address the vulnerable post-hurricane contexts in which Puerto Rican students are currently situated while preparing to offer a permanent course that uses the study of life narratives to foster engagement with and understanding of the lives in life stories. “Puerto Rican Lives” is further shaped by work done in collaborate research projects with the public humanities programs, Voice of Witness and the Humanities Action Lab (a joint project of Columbia University, Rutgers University, and The New School), and engages community partners throughout Puerto Rico and within Diasporican communities across the United States.
CloseThe Nisqually tribe has invited us to collaborate on a project that engages with indigenous knowledge of local food and medicine. With the support of Nisqually elders (already secured), we will gather oral histories. This is an interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences project that focuses on the power of stories to transmit cultural knowledge. This hands-on experiential learning is aimed at enabling students and Nisqually youth to both tell their stories and to listen to Nisqually elders. Rather than have us “teach” about indigenous issues in a traditional sense, this is a collaboration between faculty, students, the Nisqually tribe, and a local non-profit radio. Students will engage with diverse aspects of Nisqually food-related culture, history, and activism by listening to and documenting these stories as related by Nisqually Elders. In turn, students analyze their own histories with food cultures and the significance of preserving and better understanding such narratives.
CloseAs science and tech leaders are divided on whether artificial intelligence is humankind’s biggest advance or our greatest mistake, one thing is certain: the questions it raises are far bigger than big tech. As increasingly intelligent machines automate more tasks, interpersonal communication and critical thinking--in short, humanistic inquiry--may emerge as the ultimate “future-proofed” skill, ready to evolve with any technical landscape that nuances our understanding of our own humanity. This course examines representations of machine/human interactions in post-Revolutionary French novels, comics, and films to give students a transhistoric perspective and conceptual foundation for formulating their own questions about the intersections of technology and humanity today.
By targeting undergraduate students with interests in French and in the STEM fields, this class will increase enrollment in the short-term while paving the way for a future dual-degree initiative between the departments of Computer Science and French and Italian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
CloseThe Black Studies faculty at SUNY Geneseo proposes collaboratively developing a new undergraduate General Education course: HUMN 222: Black Humanities, an alternative to the only two courses that fulfill students’ humanities (H/) requirement, both Western Humanities courses. It will launch a more culturally-responsive curriculum at SUNY Geneseo, a primarily-White institution with a declining Black non-Latino student body. It will teach digital humanities skills including ArcGIS as students collaborate on an ESRI StoryMap and devise experiential learning opportunities with community partners. The grant will also support two faculty development workshops, the first honing interdisciplinary faculty digital humanities skills and the second helping non-black studies faculty integrate texts and methodologies that make Black experiences of humanity visible within Western Humanities sections. The proposal will directly affect 70 students annually taking Black Humanities, 245 annually taking Western Humanities sections that integrate Black thought, and the wider culture of 1600 students completing the H/ requirement.
CloseCleveland’s Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, “…the only juried prize in the nation for books that confront racism and celebrate diversity,” is rooted in the idea that literature is a vehicle for social justice. It brings renowned authors and scholars to the city to explore globally and locally important themes such as race and identity. In a rustbelt city like Cleveland, a “city of neighborhoods”, marred by a history of segregation and uneven decline, these themes are of special significance. We propose an English course committed to the spirit, literature, and activities of Anisfield-Wolf, in which students read the canon, meet the authors, explore the legacy of the founder, and enliven and contemporize the works through the digital humanities. Students will engage in traditional close-reading, while also using mapping platforms to analyze and contextualize the literature. The class will culminate with the creation of a public-facing exhibit.
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