TAMU-CT professor among NEH grant recipients
By LYNETTE SOWELL
Cove Leader-Press
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) recently announced the awarding of $39.3 million in grants for 245 humanities projects across the country.
Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University Central Texas, Luke Nichter, Ph.D., received a $50,400 grant for his project, A Biography of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.
The funding will help support the research and writing leading to publication of a biography of the politician, ambassador, and U.S. presidential adviser Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (1902–1985).
Nichter is among six grant recipients in the state of Texas, with other grants going for projects at Texas A&M Univesrity College Station, Texas State University – San Marcos, Brookhaven College in Farmers Branch, and an award to the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art in Fort Worth.
“The award is prestigious and Dr. Nichter’s work on Nixon (and now, Henry Cabot Lodge) has gained a national following,” stated Karen Clos, interim director of communications and marketing for TAMU-CT. “He’s a credit to the Central Texas region.”
This round of funding, NEH’s third and last for fiscal year 2017, will support vital research, education, and public programs in the humanities. These peer-reviewed grants were awarded in addition to $46.1 million in annual operating support provided to the national network of state and local humanities councils during fiscal year 2017.
“NEH grants ensure that Americans around the country have the opportunity to engage with our shared cultural heritage,” said NEH Acting Chairman Jon Parrish Peede. “From traveling exhibitions and teacher workshops to efforts to preserve local history, these projects demonstrate the power of the humanities to build connections, stimulate discovery, and contribute to vibrant communities.”
This funding cycle includes grants for a number of notable publication projects that, through sustained NEH support, help illuminate the nation’s founding. NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations grants were awarded: for the George Washington Papers Project and the publication of volumes covering Washington’s second term, which ended with the rise of political parties; for the Adams Papers Editorial Project for an edition of John Adams’s papers from his final months as president; and for continuing work on the presidential papers of James Madison and James Monroe. A grant for the final volumes of The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, which makes available the content and context of state-by-state debates over the most important document in U.S. history, brings to completion a landmark work of historical and legal scholarship that has been supported by NEH since 1982.
NEH grants will also support production of a documentary on four centuries of the Atlantic slave trade by award-winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson; the development of computational methods for identifying etchings made by Rembrandt; a statewide series of community reading and discussion events in Indiana focused on the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; and a traveling exhibition on whaling in 19th-century popular culture and literature organized around a restored 1,275-foot panoramic 1848 painting of a whaling voyage.
Other grants will support the creation of a digital edition of Civil War–era records from Kentucky documenting the impact of the war on public and private life; analysis of 43 Native American sites in Arizona’s Gila River Valley; summer institutes for schoolteachers on Appalachian culture and history and on Roman daily life in ancient Pompeii; and the use of aerial thermal images to explore buried archaeological sites in the U.S., Mexico, Cyprus, and Iraq. NEH’s Public Scholar awards, which support popular books in the humanities, will support a history of modern Syria from the 19th century to the present, a new biography of American poet Sylvia Plath, and a book on the Blackwell sisters, 19th-century doctors who founded a women’s medical college.