Goucher College Receives National Endowment For The Humanities Grant

Press release from Goucher College:

February 2, 2021

Goucher College will create the Collaborative Humanities Laboratory to enhance the
study of visual, material, and historical culture using a $149,961 National Endowment
for the Humanities (NEH) grant. The laboratory will be a physical and virtual storytelling
space where students across disciplines gather, curate, produce, and present original
scholarship centered on images, objects, and artifacts. The NEH supports research
and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities
by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Goucher was one
of only five institutions nationwide to receive a grant from their Humanities Initiatives
at Colleges and Universities, and this is the first major NEH grant for Goucher in
20 years.

The college’s Art and Artifacts Collection and the Special Collections and Archives
materials, which include manuscripts, rare books, and artifacts, will be used for
the applied, object-centered research that will take place both in a physical lab
as well as in an online format. Additionally, through an ongoing archaeological excavation
of artifacts found on the college campus, the Hallowed Ground Project will investigate
the untold stories of the enslaved people who lived and worked on the land prior to
the college’s existence.

“I am absolutely thrilled that we will have the opportunity to embark on what has,
until now, been a much-discussed vision: to engage our students in hands-on work with
Goucher’s extraordinary collections through student-curated exhibitions in the Collaborative
Humanities Lab,” says April Oettinger, professor of art history and visual culture.
Oettinger is also the director of the Visual and Material Culture Program and the
director of the Sweren Wogan Institute for the Study of the Book at Goucher College.
“This innovative project will enhance the study of the humanities at Goucher through
object-based, experiential learning.”

The Collaborative Humanities Laboratory aims to engage students in telling the stories
of objects and to share these stories with the broader community. As a physical and
online space that enhances student learning by exploring found objects, the laboratory
aims to advance humanities at the college and foster a dialogue with the greater Baltimore
community and the wider world.

“This prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities grant underscores the academic
excellence Goucher is known for and will help support the interdisciplinary, hands-on,
collaborative research that our students experience with faculty and other scholars,”
says Kent Devereaux, Goucher College president. “The laboratory also offers a distinct
opportunity for Goucher to create a space for digital scholarship in the humanities
that will be shared with a larger community online.”

The Collaborative Humanities Laboratory will provide a physical and online space for
faculty, staff, and students to connect with Goucher’s interdisciplinary curriculum.
The project is closely tied to the new visual and material culture major, which brings
together art history and preservation to examine the role of images, objects, architecture,
and the built environment not only as reflections of history but also as agents that
make history.

This is not the first time that Goucher College housed a curated collection of artifacts.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Goucher College, then known as the Woman’s
College of Baltimore, was home to a prominent museum that contained nearly 100,000
objects, including numerous natural history specimens, a wide range of ethnographic
artifacts, art objects, and historical books, as well as two Egyptian mummies.

For more information on the Visual and Material Culture Program at Goucher, visit https://www.goucher.edu/learn/undergraduate-programs/visual-and-material-culture/.

This press release was produced by Goucher College. The views expressed here are the author’s own.