Two Trinity Faculty Members Receive NEH Grants
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded two grant fellowships to Duke University faculty members for their respective work in humanities-based advanced research programs —one focusing on post-apartheid mobility, while the other is digital catalog connected to an upcoming Duke exhibit.
Anne-Maria Makhulu, associate professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies, and Kristin Huffman Lanzoni, instructor in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, were among university teachers and independent scholars who received the awards. The NEH recently announced it would help fund 290 humanities projects, including 86 instructor/scholar fellowships.
Makhulu’s $50,400 grant is for her project “The New Financial Elite: Race, Mobility and Ressentiment After Apartheid.” The project examines questions of race and mobility in contemporary South Africa and specifically the trajectory of black professionals since the end of apartheid in 1994. Now regarded as the most unequal society globally, moving out of poverty and into the ranks of the professional classes is particularly difficult for black South Africans who were previously trained almost exclusively for semi- and unskilled employment under apartheid.
Lanzoni’s $33,600 grant is for her project “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice (ca. 1500): A Digital Exhibition Catalog.” The catalog expands upon scholarly content that will be displayed in an interactive exhibition at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke in Fall 2017. This digital publication project addresses questions that range from the production of the large-scale early modern print to the historical and social themes that emerge from the image, such as the systems for provisioning food, water, and raw materials to a city built on water; the housing systems for foreign communities; religious and civic ceremonies and processions; the Arsenal and Venetian trade and empire; and the locations of printing presses, art collections, and destroyed religious institutions.
The NEH, an independent federal agency created in 1965, supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation.