Mason faculty awarded three NEH grants

George Mason University is proud to announce that four faculty in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences have been awarded grant awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Three grants, totaling more than $600,000, were awarded to faculty conducting research in Mason’s Higher Education Program, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), and the Department of History and Art History.

“It is wonderful to see so many of our faculty being recognized with prestigious NEH awards,” said Michele Schwietz, the college’s associate dean for research. “Receiving multiple peer-reviewed NEH grants is truly a testament to the influential humanities work that our faculty conduct throughout the college.” 

Unpacking the History of Higher Education in the United States

Kelly Schrum, professor of higher education, and Nate Sleeter, research assistant professor and RRCHNM’s director of educational projects, received a $220,000 Institutes for Higher Education Faculty award for the project, “Unpacking the History of Higher Education in the United States.” The grant will fund a four-week institute for 25 higher education faculty about the history of U.S. higher education. Read more about the project. 
 
Mathematical Humanists

Together with the University of California, Los Angeles, Jessica Otis, assistant professor of history and the director of public projects at RRCHNM, received a $240,787 Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities award for the project, “Mathematical Humanists.” Otis will co-direct the project, which includes a series of in-person, online, and asynchronous professional development workshops on statistics, graphs and networks, linear algebra, and discrete mathematics methods that inform computational humanities methodologies such as network analysis, and text mining and analysis. The workshops will be hosted by Mason and University of California, Los Angeles.
 
La Sefra (The Globe): A Late Medieval World of Merchants, Maps, and Manuscripts

Mason is a sub-recipient on a $150,000 Scholarly Editions and Translations grant awarded to the New College of Florida for the project, “La Sefra (The Globe): A Late Medieval World of Merchants, Maps, and Manuscripts.” Amanda Madden, assistant professor of history and director of geospatial history at RRCHNM, is Mason’s lead on the project, which will prepare an interactive digital edition of the 15th-century Florentine geographic textbook called La Sfera. Madden and the RRCHNM team will develop the project’s website, which will include a crowd-sourcing feature. Read more about the project.