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Three Ohio State Projects Win Global Midwest Grants from Humanities without Walls Consortium

January 13, 2015

Three Ohio State Projects Win Global Midwest Grants from Humanities without Walls Consortium

Three projects spearheaded by Arts and Sciences faculty members have been named winners of Global Midwest grants from the Humanities without Walls consortium, for a total award amount of $77,000.

Recipients are:

  • Isaac Weiner, assistant professor, comparative studies, who receives $30,000 for the Religious Soundmap of the Midwest project
  • Kris Paulsen, assistant professor, history of art and film studies; and Lisa Florman, professor and chair, history of art, whose grant of $27,000 will help support ThereThere: A Journal of Global Contemporary Art in the Midwest, and
  • Glenn Martinez, professor and chair, Spanish and Portuguese, who receives a $20,000 grant for the Midwest Heritage Language Network.

Humanities without Walls is a consortium that links humanities centers at 15 Midwestern research universities, including Ohio State’s Humanities Institute. The consortium was founded three years ago with a $3 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and exists to create new avenues for collaborative research, teaching and the production of scholarship in the humanities, according to Rick Livingston, associate director at the Humanities Institute.  The consortium is based at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Earlier this year, Ohio State’s Humanities Institute presented planning grants to six university projects. Of the six, four of the proposals were presented to the consortium for consideration. Each of the projects includes collaborators from at least one of the other consortium member universities.

“This is an extraordinary opportunity for stimulating intra-institutional and cross-institutional research,” Livingston explained. “It draws on the idea that the different institutions can contribute to projects in different ways.”

The Religious Soundmap of the Midwest project will use audio recording and digital mapping technology to study the religious diversity of American cities. Student researchers will produce audio recordings of religious practices across a wide range of local sites. These recordings will be integrated along with interviews, visual images and explanatory texts, onto a publicly accessible, online mapping platform, which will provide a valuable research tool and pedagogical resource for specialists and non-specialists alike. The project is being headed by Isaac Weiner at Ohio State and Amy DeRogatis at Michigan State University.

“We are thrilled to receive this recognition of our project from the consortium,” said Weiner. “The grant will provide critical support for launching the Religious Soundmap project and will allow us to hire graduate and undergraduate student researchers, who will be trained to produce high-quality field recordings of religion ‘in practice’ throughout the central Ohio region.”

Paulsen’s and Florman’s project – ThereThere: A journal of global contemporary art in the Midwest – will be an online journal focused on works of art exhibited, and in some cases made, in Ohio and the Midwest. Building from Ohio State’s new master’s program in contemporary art and curatorial practice, the journal will showcase the range of activity happening in museums, studios and gallery spaces across the region. It will also provide a collaborative platform for curators, artists and art historians working throughout the Midwest.

In Martinez’s project, Ohio State’s Center for Languages, Literatures and Cultures will engage with language scholars throughout the consortium to create the Midwest Heritage Language Network. This network will provide a platform to link researchers, teachers and community members in the region and provide a hub for ongoing research on heritage language communities in the Midwest.

Martinez explained, “Even though our region is home to a rapidly growing heritage language population, heritage language loss in the Midwest is known to occur in as little as two generations. Heritage language researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Nebraska, University of Iowa, Michigan State and Ohio State will develop a multigenerational and multilingual collection of speech samples and oral narratives of heritage language speakers in Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and French to better understand linguistic and social factors contributing to abrupt language loss in these heritage language communities in the Midwest.”

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