Undergraduate students in Jesse Erickson’s “Digital Archive Production” class on a recent visit to Lead Graffiti, a letterpress studio and testing lab in Newark, Delaware.

Faculty funding available

Article by College of Arts and Sciences Communications Staff Photo by Evan Krape November 27, 2017

Humanities center seeks proposals for collections-based courses

The University of Delaware’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center (IHRC) in the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) is accepting grant proposals from faculty members interested in offering collections-based courses.

The deadline for submitting proposals is Jan. 15.

Interested CAS faculty are invited to attend an information meeting from 1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m., Friday, Dec. 1, in Faculty Commons in Pearson Hall. Those planning to attend are asked to RSVP at IHRC@udel.edu.

The session will feature discussions with Jesse Erickson and David Kim, who both received IHRC funding for 2017-18.

Erickson, the UD Library’s postdoctoral researcher in special collections and digital humanities, was awarded the grant for his proposal, “Teaching African American Material Culture with Digital Humanities,” which consists of two provisional courses in archival and digital immersion.

Erickson is teaching an undergraduate English course, “Digital Archive Production,” this semester and will lead a graduate course, “Scrapbooks as Literary Documents,” in the spring. Both courses make use of collections housed in the library’s Special Collections.

Kim, visiting assistant professor in digital humanities, is the lead coordinator of the new Wilmington Archives Project. Building on a series of digital scholarship workshops and initiatives sponsored by the IHRC and the UD Library in recent years, the pilot project will explore the city of Wilmington in a cluster of six courses, with three offered in spring and three in fall 2018.

The courses will be taught in conjunction with community partners, including the Creative Vision Factory and the Delaware Art Museum. Topics will focus on art and social change, environmental journalism, the 1968 occupation of Wilmington by the Delaware National Guard, sociology of art and culture, the environment and health, and a creative writing course modeled on the national StoryCorps project.

More information about the call for proposals, including details on how to submit a proposal, is available at this website.