National Endowment for the Humanities

Mason Momentum

For Mason professors, NEH grants are personal

Colleen Rich — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 15:47:19 +0000

For Mason professors, NEH grants are personal Colleen Rich Mon, 02/12/2024 - 10:47

Two ��AV faculty members received year-long grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), part of 260 grants worth $33.8 million from the NEH this year for humanities projects across the country.

Jo-Marie Burt. Photo by Ron Aira/Office of University Branding

Jo-Marie Burt, an associate professor in the Schar School for Policy and Government, was awarded a $60,000 fellowship to further her research for a book she will write that examines four war crimes trials that took place in Guatemala between 2013 and 2022.

Arthur Romano, an associate professor in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, was awarded $148,022 for the recovery of documentation and to collect oral histories of racial violence in Forsyth County, Georgia, for the purpose of creating educational materials, a video library, and an online viewing portal.

“Very happily surprised,” Romano said of the grant.

Said Burt, “I jumped up and down for quite a long time.”

Though their research of consequence is focused on different parts of the world, Burt and Romano will investigate something similar: accountability.

For Romano, it is an opportunity to hear the voices and recollections of those whose families were part of a Black community outside Atlanta, and were driven out by terrorizing White mobs in 1912.

For Burt, who previously wrote a book about political violence and authoritarianism in Peru, it is a chance for another deep dive into a Latin American country besieged by internal armed conflict, with the military, she said, primarily responsible for the violence.

“I believe that impunity, in other words the failure to investigate or prosecute those responsible for those abuses, erodes democracy,” Burt said. “It erodes the social contract. It perpetuates the idea that some people are less citizens, are less worthy than others.”

It’s not so much about relitigating the past, Romano said, as it is, in the case of Forsyth, Georgia, about giving voice to descendants of the victims. Romano's co-principal investigator is Margarita Tadevosyan, executive director of Mason's Center for Peacemaking Practice. The stories they record will be housed at the Truth Telling Project, which, among other things, helps document the impacts violence has on families and communities.

Arthur Romano. Photo by Cristian Torres/Office of University Branding

While there has been some reporting about what went on in Forsyth, Romano said the incident has been under-researched. He said his inquiry will provide descendants “the space to grieve and share their experiences without a media spotlight on it, where people can just share about the ways they are hurting and what they’re hoping for in the future.”

Romano is the founder of the Carter School’s Program on Urban Peacebuilding, and his book Racial Justice and Nonviolence Education is about ways to disrupt cycles of violence by recognizing that people impacted by violence can be effective educators.

For me, that’s a big part of what this is all about,” he said. “Not only understanding past harms, but what are the echoes of that and how it affects who we are today. It’s part of building a framework of repair and reconciliation for us to be able to function better and be better together and actually live out the values we hope to build.”

Burt said she has been interested in human rights violations in Latin America since college. Her book Silencing Civil Society: Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru came out in 2007, the same year former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori went on trial for corruption and human rights abuses committed from 1990 to 2000.

Burt attended the first week of the Fujimori trial with the help of a Mason grant. She then secured a grant from the Open Society Foundation to monitor the trial in its entirety. Fujimori was found guilty and sentenced to 25 years in prison, an outcome regarded as a historic ruling for international justice.

Her research in Guatemala will include the trial of retired army general Jose Efraín Ríos Montt, who came to power in a military coup in March 1982. Human rights organizations estimate 10,000 people were killed in the first three months of his government, which remained in power until August 1983. Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide and sentenced to 80 years in prison, though higher courts nullified the proceeding.

“These are crimes that occurred many years ago, but they’re not in the past,” Burt said. “Especially for the victims, they are very much in the present.”

And also, in a way, for Burt.

I just got hooked into this dynamic of searching for justice, for accountability, for mass atrocity crimes,” she said. “Can trials, which normally focus on perpetrators’ needs, take into account the victims’ needs, perspectives, and rights? Over the years, I began to think about trial monitoring not just as a research tool but as a tool to support and advocate on the behalf of victims.”

In This Story

Arthur Romano

Jo-Marie Burt

Topics

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution

Schar School of Policy and Government

Schar School News for February 2024

Schar School Featured Stories

Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan’s papers are now accessible to scholars

Colleen Rich — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 18:09:33 +0000

Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan’s papers are now accessible to scholars Colleen Rich Wed, 07/12/2023 - 14:09

Located in ��AV’s Special Collections Research Center in Fenwick Library, this collection consists of the papers of the Nobel Prize-winning economist James M. Buchanan and documents his career and research from the mid-20th century through the early 2000s. There are also materials chronicling his time at Mason’s Center for Study of Public Choice.

The work of organizing, describing, and rehousing (i.e., processing) the Buchanan papers was made possible by a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant. Helmed by project archivist Rebecca Thayer, she and her students processed the 270 linear foot collection from spring of 2021 through May 2023.

“The SCRC wishes to thank Thayer for her excellent work guiding the project, as well as her student assistants Rachel Barton, Vilma Chicas Garcia, and Colin McDonald,” said SCRC Director Lynn Eaton. “The University Libraries would also like to thank the College of Humanities and Social Sciences for their support.”

We expect strong researcher interest in the collection. The guide to the collection, or finding aid, for the Buchanan collection is found here.

All reference inquiries should be directed to speccoll@gmu.edu. A celebration of the collection’s opening is being planned for Fall 2023.

Topics

Special Collections Research Center

University Libraries

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

NEH grant helps Mason, partners create digital archive of Civil War graffiti

Colleen Rich — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 20:47:15 +0000

NEH grant helps Mason, partners create digital archive of Civil War graffiti Colleen Rich Tue, 03/14/2023 - 16:47

When Civil War soldiers were stationed in Northern Virginia, they left behind drawings, written passages, and other graffiti that serve as a historical record.

Mason's Mills Kelly working in the Brandy Station house. Photo provided

Now those markings at two historic Virginia sites are being preserved thanks to a partnership between ��AV’s award-winning Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), the Fairfax City’s Office of Historic Resources, and the Brandy Station Foundation. The partnership recently received a $60,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Preservation and Access, to support the project.

The grant “Off the Wall: Digital Preservation of Civil War Graffiti Houses” will develop a proposal for an eventual implementation grant aimed at digitizing and contextualizing the graffiti and associated ancillary materials held by Historic Blenheim in Fairfax and the Brandy Station Foundation in Culpeper related to the graffiti in their two historic house museums.

Working with R.B. Toth Associates LLC of Oakton, this grant will use a range of digital imaging technology and work processes to capture the graffiti on the walls of Historic Blenheim and the Graffiti House at Brandy Station, and develop a metadata schema that will allow for the digitization and contextualization of the graffiti. This schema will serve as a model for future digitization projects of images on vertical surfaces.

R.B. Toth Associates is providing equipment to digitize the graffiti. Photo provided

“The graffiti gives you an insight into the lived experience of an individual soldier who was struggling to deal with an incredibly brutal war,” said Mills Kelly, director of RRCHNM and project manager.

R.B. Toth Associates provides digitization services and application of new technologies for cultural heritage preservation and research around the globe. They conducted multispectral imaging of both Civil War houses as part of a National Park Service technology development grant.

Mike Toth, president and chief technology officer of R.B. Toth Associates, who audits classes at Mason for personal enrichment, is providing technical support to the project.

For his business, Toth works with X-ray Synchrotrons and other various advanced systems. For this project, everything from cell phone cameras to a $50,000 Phase One 100-megapixel camera has been used to document the graffiti, said Toth.

“[The graffiti] may be the only first-person record [that says] the men who were out there fighting and dying were, at one point in time, here in Fairfax,” said Toth. “They may have gone on to die or gone home and moved on, and we're capturing that small bit of their life.”

The graffiti varies and includes poems, drawings, and even games that resemble Chinese checkers. “Some [are] talking about how they got paid and then lost all their money drinking booze,” said Toth.

Also working on the project is Stephanie Martinez, a second-year graduate student in Mason’s History and Art History Department. Martinez has been researching the murals and organizing the metadata that are the signatures, images, texts, and cartoons left behind by the soldiers.

“[Kelly] was actually my professor for a digital humanities class, so he was very instrumental in helping me develop these skills,” said Martinez. “He mentioned that they had an opening with the project and knowing my background with public history institutions, he thought it would be a great opportunity for me.”

From left to right: Mike Toth, Peggy Misch from Brandy Station Foundation's Graffiti House, Andrea Loewenwarter from Fairfax City's Historic Blenheim, and Mills Kelly.

After the last major earthquake in the region, there was damage to the Blenheim house, said Martinez. “It's very clear that these inscribed signatures and stories are not going to be there for forever, so [this project is] especially important,” she said.

Kelly stressed the importance of the collaborative nature of the grant. “As a research center at a public research university, we are so pleased to be collaborating with our two community partners in Fairfax and Culpeper. We see this project as a first and important step toward building stronger linkages between our three organizations that will benefit our students and the communities we serve.”

"The graffiti gives you an insight into the lived experience of an individual soldier who was struggling to deal with an incredibly brutal war." - Mills Kelly

Learn more about RRCHNM

Study the Digital Humanities at Mason

Topics

NEH/AHRC grant puts digital art history in the spotlight

Colleen Rich — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 17:23:25 +0000

NEH/AHRC grant puts digital art history in the spotlight Colleen Rich Tue, 01/25/2022 - 12:23

Deepthi Murali. Photo provided

��AV’s Deepthi Murali and Mills Kelly were recently awarded a collaborative grant co-funded by National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The NEH/AHRC New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions grant will provide $49,999 in funding for the project "Subaltern Histories of Global Textiles: Connecting Collections, Expanding Engagement."

“We are very pleased to receive this grant and look forward to working closely with our partners in the U.S. and the UK,” said T. Mills Kelly, director of Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at Mason.

Kelly and Murali are one of two sets of project directors. Meha Priyadarshini of the University of Edinburgh and Avalon Fotheringham of Victoria and Albert Museum in UK make up the second set. The Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York City is also a partner in the grant. The co-directed project includes data collection, analysis, and construction of a prototype website to explore the use of Indian-style textiles in the African diaspora in the 18th and 19th centuries.

“I was absolutely thrilled to receive the grant,” said Murali, who is a postdoctoral research fellow at RRCHNM. “I am still in disbelief that we get to work with two of the largest design museums in the world on this project, as well as with the rich archival material at University of Glasgow.”

Mills Kelly. Photo provided

Murali says her inspiration for this project stems from a series of conversations that she organized in Spring 2021 on the Material Histories of the Indian Ocean World, hosted by the center. Talks between Murali and co-director Meha Priyadarshini about lesser-known textiles from South Asia and their presence in the Americas in the late 18th and 19th centuries motivated them to craft a digital public history project that visualizes this complex networked history in ways that are accessible to a global public.

Murali said she hopes this project shows how collaborative research is the way forward for the humanities, especially for those interested in transcultural or global studies.

A cloth merchant from South India in the early-19th century displaying textiles to an Indian middleman who is commissioned to buy the textiles for British traders. Circa 1807. Photo courtesy of the British Library Board

“As the first digital history project from the center/department that is art history-centered and on South Asia specific, it would be wonderful if this kind of collaborative work becomes part of the training for students in the humanities,” said Murali.

Murali said they plan to have at least two graduate students from Mason’s Department of History and Art History on the team and hope to include undergraduates in the research.

“Graduate students working on the project will be working closely with me in identifying textiles and imagery of African diaspora that will be used in the project along with collections research at Cooper-Hewitt,” said Murali. “We hope at least one graduate student will also take part in the design of the digital prototype itself after we gather our research data.”

Murali said a prototype website will be available in 2023.

Murali said they also plan to convene a workshop at Mason this academic year to bring together a diverse group of scholars from textile and material culture historians to scholars of African-American, colonial, and South Asian history.

Topics

NEH funding

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

Mason Libraries receives NEH grant to preserve legacy of James M. Buchanan

Colleen Rich — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 18:25:13 +0000

Mason Libraries receives NEH grant to preserve legacy of James M. Buchanan Colleen Rich Thu, 04/09/2020 - 14:25

Topics

James M. Buchanan

University Libraries