Several universities and cultural organizations in the Southland, including USC and Cal State Long Beach, were awarded about $500,000 in grants today from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“Whether through preserving important cultural artifacts or supporting new discoveries about our common past, NEH grants play a critical role in making the insights afforded by the humanities available to all to help us better understand ourselves, our culture, our society,” said NEH Chairman William Adams.
“The remarkable scope of projects represented here speaks powerfully to the depth and excellence of humanities work that is going on across the country,” he said.
Locally, major awards included:
— $100,000 to USC to develop a prototype of a video game that lets users interact with writer Henry David Thoreau during his first year at Walden Pond;
— $50,400 to USC for a project entitled “Destruction, Mutilation, and Repurposing of Classical Images in Late Antiquity”;
— $50,400 to USC for a study of the Meiji era in Japan;
— $50,400 to USC for a look at anti-Nazi activities in Hollywood between 1933 and 1945;
— nearly $70,000 to the International Documentary Association for development of an 83-minute documentary film about the Teatro Povero di Monticchiello, a community theatrical tradition in Tuscany;
— $50,400 to Cal State Long Beach for research on the politics of slavery and antislavery in the late Spanish empire;
— $50,400 to Cal State Long Beach for a study of early modern women philosophers;
— $50,400 to Pomona College to look at the nation’s founding fathers as architects and urban designers; and
— $25,200 to Whittier College for a study titled “Food Frontiers: Indigenous and Euro-American Ecologies in Early America.”
Also, the Historical Society of Long Beach received $6,000 for materials preservation, and the Verdanta Society of Southern California received $6,000 to purchase environmental monitoring equipment.
In all, the endowment announced 233 awards nationwide worth a total of $17.9 million.
