Two faculty members in the College of Letters & Science have the opportunity to continue their research with renewed focus, thanks to support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Pamela Potter, a professor of German and recent director of the Center for German and European Studies, has been awarded a $60,000 fellowship, one of 84 given to college and university teachers and independent scholars pursuing advanced humanities research.
The fellowship supports 12 months of full-time research. Potter will apply it to the 2020-21 academic year, when she will continue her research project investigating Berlin’s music life from the reign of Wilhelm II to the building of the Berlin Wall, specifically through the interaction of music, politics and economics.
“Berlin grew to become a world-class music metropolis during this time, despite the turmoil of two world wars, a failed democracy, a dictatorship and the Cold War,” Potter says. “Yet no one has written a history of this remarkable feat.”
While Potter has pursued this research for several years, the NEH fellowship will allow her to take her project to the finish line.
“[It is] enabling me to devote my attention entirely to synthesizing and analyzing materials I have been collecting in archives and libraries and giving me the rare opportunity to focus and write without distraction,” she says. “There are very few programs available to humanities scholars that furnish us with the necessary time and space we need to see complex and long-term projects to completion, and I feel extremely fortunate to have this opportunity.”
Laura McClure, a professor of Classics and Mellon Morgridge Professor in the Humanities, is receiving a $6,000 summer stipend. It’s one of 82 that NEH awarded to support two months of full-time work for humanities scholars.
For more than two decades, McClure’s work has focused on the representation of women in ancient Greek drama and their status in classical antiquity. Her current work moves beyond the ancient world to explore how late 19th and early 20th century women writers and scholars have shaped views of classical antiquity through their reading and translation of Greek tragedy, with an emphasis on Hilda Doolittle, an American poet known as H.D.
“H.D., like many other female writers, had a particular fascination with the chorus, a unique component of ancient Greek plays that is both part of the dramatic action and yet distanced from it,” McClure says. “H.D.’s early translations of choruses from the plays of Euripides in turn influenced the growth and development of her own lyric poetry, allowing her a means to situate herself within a traditionally male domain. From a broader perspective, the project challenges the idea of a monolithic, static view of the classical past by demonstrating that different readers across different cultures and time periods give rise to multiple classical antiquities in order to powerfully evoke contemporary concerns.”
McClure will use the summer stipend to conduct additional archival work on H.D.’s collected papers, housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and work on the resulting book, Reimagining the Chorus: H.D. and Greek Tragedy.
NEH also granted support to the History of Cartography project, directed by Matthew Edney in the Department of Geography. Part of its Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grants, which allow institutions to preserve and offer access to humanities collections, the award allows for continued development leading to publication of volume four of the multivolume reference work, as well as work toward a fifth volume.