2024-25 Georgetown Humanities Initiative Grant Recipients

Congratulations to the AY 2024-25 grant awardees, who received support for collaborative activities, individual research, and book manuscript workshops and were featured at the October 25 ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Georgetown Humanities Collaboratory Grants

Bernard Cook
Georgetown College of Arts & Sciences; Film & Media Studies Program; American Studies Program.

Randall Amster
Earth Commons

Yuki Kato
Department of Sociology

Adam Rothman
Department of History; The Center for the Study of Slavery.

Katrina@20
Katrina@20 will convene a national symposium that will examine the impacts of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans twenty years after the storm made landfall, the levees failed, and the City flooded.  As a dynamic form of Public Humanities, the symposium will involve community partners from outside of the academy, including GU272+ descendants, urban gardeners, musicians, filmmakers, and other culture bearers (including Mardi Gras Indians and Social Aid and Pleasure Club Members).

Ricardo Ortiz
MA Program in Engaged and Public Humanities; Department of English

Public Humanities Faculty Seminars
The MA Program in Engaged and Public Humanities (ENPH) is using its GHI Faculty Collaboratory Grant for a series of Public Humanities Faculty Seminars in fall 2024 and spring 2025 which will showcase the variety of creative partnerships that both ENPH core faculty in the program and affiliated faculty on the Hilltop Campus have forged with cultural and other organizations in the DC community. The grant also supports mentorship of ENPH MA students on the part of faculty participating in the Seminars for students’ pursuit of community-based capstone projects required for completion of the ENPH MA degree.

Georgetown Humanities Individual Research Grants

Paul Elie
Berkley Center; Faith & Culture Conversation Series
The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s
This book braids narrative, portraiture, and criticism to recount the ways “crypto-religious” figures working in the arts and popular culture explored the boundaries of belief and disbelief, ecstasy and blasphemy, apprehending the crises of the moment (the AIDS pandemic, specifically) in ways that only art and artists could do.    

Rosemary Ndubuizu
Department of Black Studies
Copy-editing services and copyright permissions for book The Undesirable Many
This book examines Washington, D.C.’s post-1960s affordable housing market and politics to illustrate how numerous political and economic actors use negative discourse about the domestic lives of low- wage black women and their families to enact involuntary displacement, defend gentrification, and entrench the city’s affordable housing shortage.

Vivaldo Santos
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Editing of the book manuscript Money Matters: Finance in Brazilian Literature (1850-1922). 
The grant supports professional editing of the book manuscript Money Matters: Finance in Brazilian Literature (1850-1922). The book analyzes the intersection of finance and the literary production of Brazil between 1850 and 1922, from the empire to the formation of the Brazilian Republic to the Week of Modern Art of São Paulo.

Erin Twohig
Department of French and Francophone Studies
English translation of Maïssa Bey’s Bleu blanc vert
The grant supports the purchase of the translation rights to Algerian author Maïssa Bey’s 2006 novel Bleu blanc vert, to be translated for the first time into English with a critical introduction. 

Melanie White
Department of Black Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies Program
Research assistance for the book Sovereign Mosquitia: Intimate Colonial Violence and Black Feminist Refusal
This book project explores how racialized, gendered, and intimate, settler colonial violence have deeply shaped the imperial borderlands of the far western Caribbean. It focuses on  the historical role of Black and Afro-Indigenous women and girls in crafting and envisioning a path for the region rooted in intimate, rather than settler, sovereignty.

Faculty Book Manuscript Workshop Grants 

Verena Kick
Department of German
Photobook Politics – Materiality and Ideology in Germany 1918-1945
This book shows how the materiality of photobooks shaped the public’s ideological views in Germany between 1918 and 1945. It reflects Prof. Kick’s research expertise in visual and material culture in the first half of the 20th century. 

Anne O’Neil-Henry
Department of French and Francophone Studies
Energy and the Parisian Universal Expositions: 1855-1900
This book examines the fuels and energy systems on display at the five Parisian universal expositions (1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, 1900). It studies how they were discussed and represented and also how they permeated the popular culture surrounding these global events.

Joel Reynolds
Department of Philosophy; Department of Philosophy; Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Disability Studies Program;
The Meaning of Disability
The book offers a new theory of disability, focused upon how we use the concept in practice instead of upon what we think disability really “is”.