FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 17, 2024

CONTACT
Dana Barcellos-Allen
dbarcellos-allen@cthumanities.org
860.937.6648

CT Humanities is grateful for and excited about the latest funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which this week announced $174,974 in humanities grants to four higher education organizations/projects in Connecticut involving artificial intelligence and historical perspectives, public libraries, and interreligious alliances.

University of Connecticut of Storrs was awarded $137,974 through NEH funding for projects relating to Dangers and Opportunities of Technology: Perspectives from the Humanities (Collaborative). UConn’s project, “Bringing the Past to the Future: Slavery and Artificial Intelligence on the Battleground of Popular Culture,” includes development of a podcast series and scholarly book chapters analyzing how persistent narratives of slavery and servitude have influenced popular understanding of artificial intelligence and humans’ ethical engagement with emerging technologies.

Eastern Connecticut State University of Willimantic was awarded $25,000 through a Spotlight on Humanities in Higher Education Exploration Grant for a project called Developing a Public Liberal Arts Humanities Curriculum: Empowering Students to Navigate an AI World. This one-year grant will fund the development of AI-related humanities curricula at five public liberal arts colleges.

NEH has also provided summer stipend funding to two Connecticut individuals and their humanities projects:

• Christopher Hager with Trinity College was awarded $6,000 for the project, “The Public Library and the Unfinished Civil War.” This covers research and writing leading to a book on how the ascendancy of U.S. public libraries during the Reconstruction Era (1863-1877) has shaped their subsequent history.
• Amy Weiss with University of Hartford was awarded $6,000 for “American Jews, Evangelicals, and the Interfaith Communal Politics of Israel, 1963-2018. This project funds writing leading to a book on the history of Jewish interreligious alliances with evangelical Christians in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. More information about NEH and its grant programs is available at neh.gov. CT Humanities is an independent, non-profit affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.