Projects Share in National Humanities Grants
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe Washington D.C.-based National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded grants to four Indiana cultural preservation initiatives. The nearly $1.3 million will be split among groups in Bloomington, Richmond and Indianapolis. The Indiana awardees are as follows:
Bloomington
Language Conservancy
Outright: $500,000
[America's Media Makers Production]
Project Director: Wilhelm Meya
Project Title: Rising Voices/H?thaninpi
Project Description: Production of a 60-minute documentary, an interactive website, and an open source online discussion platform for use by scholars and the general public exploring the cultural significance of the Lakota language and efforts to save it.
Indianapolis
Indiana University, Indianapolis
Outright: $290,000
[Collaborative Research]
Project Director: William Schneider
Project Title: An International Collaboration on the Political, Social, and Cultural History of the Emergence of HIV/AIDS
Project Description:
An international research collaboration leading to the publication of a book that will examine the political, social, and medical processes of the emergence of HIV/AIDS in Africa. (36 months)
Indiana State Library
Outright: $200,000
[National Digital Newspaper Program]
Project Director: Connie Rendfeld
Project Title: Indiana Digital Newspaper Project, Phase Two
Project Description:
Digitization of 100,000 pages of Indiana newspapers issued in English
and German, dating from 1836 to 1922, as part of the state's continuing participation in the
National Digital Newspaper Program.
Richmond
Earlham College
Outright: $290,000
[Scholarly Editions]
Project Director: Marc Benamou
Project Title: Javanese
Sung Poetry in Translation
Project Description:
Preparation for print publication, and development of a database and
website, of Javanese gamelan song texts, translated into both Indonesian and English. (36
months)
Source: The National Endowment for the Humanities
August 15, 2013
News Release
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. – An international team of historians and anthropologists, including two Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis professors, will spend the next three years hunting down the origins of HIV/AIDS.
The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a $290,000 three-year grant to IUPUI for the project titled “An International Collaboration on the Political, Social, and Cultural History of the Emergence of HIV/AIDS.”
Under the leadership of IUPUI professor William H. Schneider, six humanities scholars assisted by three medical research consultants will study evidence supporting the most frequently offered explanations for the emergence of the global AIDS pandemic.
“It is a clear and a worthwhile goal: figuring out the origin of AIDS,” said Schneider, a historian of medicine who teaches in the history department and directs the medical humanities and health studies program, both part of the IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI. “The emergence of new diseases, such as avian flu and swine flu, is one of the most important health concerns in recent decades.”
The new study could prove invaluable to those working in global health by providing information about how other new diseases emerge, the principal investigator said. “It can offer a model for medical science and public health researchers who recognize that their studies need to account for the larger historical, political, economic, social and cultural relations and processes that shape disease emergence.”
Three prominent HIV/AIDS researchers — virologists Preston Marx and Fran?ois Simon and epidemiologist Ernest Drucker — will serve as medical research consultants. The collaboration began 10 years ago and was recently assisted by the IUPUI Office of Vice Chancellor for Research, which provided $15,000 in seed money for the project.
Scientists widely agree that immune viruses have existed in the African simian population — chimps and monkeys — for tens of thousands of years. Some of these evolved and adapted into viruses that were devastating to the human population less than 100 years ago. Through DNA sequencing, scientists have identified a dozen human immunodeficiency virus strains, two of which, HIV-1 and HIV-2, are responsible for the current AIDS pandemic among humans.
Because there were several adaptations, most scientists agree that the transfer was not a random incident, and they point to colonial rule of Africa as the circumstance permitting the adaptations.
The question is how and why?
Until now, explanations have focused on finding a “smoking gun,” i.e., the first case of human immunodeficiency virus. But that scholarship has lacked a critical humanities approach to the wide array of available field and archival resources.
Schneider’s team will address those shortcomings.
“This project is meant to place the medical, public health and biological dimensions of the origin of (HIV/AIDS) in its historical context in sub-Saharan Africa — bringing attention for the first time to the details of the specific social and cultural consequences of the introduction of (Western) medicine which was followed in short order by the appearance of the HIV epidemic,” Drucker said.
The research team will focus on the three most feasible explanations: changes in great ape and monkey hunting; social transformations during colonial rule including urbanization, prostitution and human mobility; and new medical interventions, specifically injection campaigns and blood transfusions, that facilitated transfer of viruses.
Schneider, an expert in the history of blood transfusions in Africa, along with Guillaume Lachenal of the University of Paris, will study the role of blood transfusions and vaccination campaigns, health interventions unheard of in Africa before colonial rule.
IUPUI professor Ch. Didier Gondola, chairman of the history department, is also a member of the research team. He is an authority on the history of Brazzaville and Kinshasa, the two neighboring African cities considered to be the place where the HIV-1 epidemic began, which is responsible for 85 percent of today’s AIDS cases. Gondola will investigate the impact of equatorial African urbanization, migration and gender on the emergence of AIDS.
The team will conduct field research and consult several archives and colonial and medical service records in Africa and Europe.
Beginning with an IUPUI meeting in February 2014, the scholars will meet periodically to review the research, which will conclude with the publication of a book in 2016.
The HIV/AIDS project was one of four Indiana awards among the 173 NEH grants announced in July for a total of $33 million.
Source: IUPUI
News Release
Originally Posted July 25, 2013
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced today $33 million in grants for 173 humanities projects, including the publication of the complete papers of the first Federal Congress, which met from 1789 to 1791, and the archaeological excavation and analysis of Bronze Age settlements around the Marmara Lake Basin in Anatolia, Turkey.
This funding will support a wide variety of projects including collaborative research, archival conservation programs, the creation of new digital research tools, professional development opportunities for teachers and college faculty, traveling exhibitions, efforts to build long-term support for humanities initiatives at community colleges, and the production and development of films, television, and radio programs.
Among the grants are those that will support the production of a new documentary that uses the brief presidency of James A. Garfield as a lens to explore the numerous political, social, cultural, and scientific issues current in the United States at the time, and help preserve collections of ethnographic and historical materials relating to the four tribes of central Maine, known coll