Interdisciplinary and Public Initiatives Panel

Please join us for a panel discussing Interdisciplinary and Public Initiatives on Thursday, April 11, from 4-6 p.m. in the Bromery Center for the Arts Lobby, which will highlight the college’s major funded projects.

Mellon Sawyer Faculty Seminar on "Race and Visual Culture in the Americas," 2022-2023

Ximena Gómez, Department of History of Art and Architecture
Karen Kurczynski, Department of History of Art and Architecture

The Mellon Sawyer Faculty Seminar on “Race and Visual Culture in the Americas, 20th-21st Centuries,” convened by Ximena Gómez and Karen Kurczynski from History of Art and Architecture, invited an interdisciplinary group of humanities and social science faculty and graduate students from the Five Colleges to meet with visiting scholars and artists in the 2022–2023 academic year. Its final public conference in May was followed by a community celebration of a new monumental mural, La Cultura es Poder, on Main Street in Holyoke. Commissioned by Gómez and Kurczynski with the Mellon Sawyer grant in coordination with community organizations Nueva Esperanza and La Cultura Consulting, it was designed by the Puerto Rican mural artists Colectivo Moriviví and painted by the artists with the help from local community members.

Documenting the Early History of Black Lives in the Connecticut River Valley

Marla Miller, Department of History
Erika Slocumb, Department of History

The community-based project "Documenting the Early History of Black Lives in the Connecticut River Valley" (funded by MassHumanities and the UMass PSEG program) is a partnership between the Pioneer Valley History Network (a consortium of some fifty local history organizations in Hampden, Hampshire, and Franklin counties) and the Public History Program. Begun in 2020, the project assists local past-keeping organizations in 1) locating archival content documenting Black lives in western Massachusetts from the era of enslavement into the late nineteenth century; 2) facilitating new research in support of a wide range of objectives, from families’ genealogical work to academic scholarship to reparations efforts; 3) and surfacing connections that cross town boundaries, essential for piecing together larger narratives. It also develops mechanisms to aid future researchers, curators, and educators undertaking similar initiatives. In partnership with the international discovery hub Enslaved.org and with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project’s dataset (with almost 5000 entries) will be published next year.

Slavery North Initiative

Charmaine Nelson, Department of History of Art and Architecture

Slavery North is a one-of-a-kind academic and cultural destination where scholars, artists, and cultural producers build community and produce research and cultural outcomes that transform our understanding of the neglected histories of Transatlantic Slavery in Canada and the US North. Since Transatlantic Slavery has become synonymous with tropical plantations, there is a profound academic neglect of temperate climate regions where the enslaved became the minority of the population. Concomitantly, there is a profound ignorance of the centuries-long roots of anti-black racism in these regions. Slavery North seeks to be a conduit through which to confront and heal these traumatic histories. It is an academic initiative with a social justice mission.

World Studies Interdisciplinary Project

Laura Doyle, Department of English

Founded in 2012 by Laura Doyle (English) and Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji (Economics), the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project (WSIP) is an international collective of scholars and teachers anchored at UMass Amherst. The Project is devoted to decolonial and intersectional paradigm-rethinking in both research and teaching.  Working within longue-durée, non-eurocentric, and intersectional frameworks, our interdisciplinary work centers on collaborative methods. We have hosted several think-tank seminars alongside our ongoing WSIP Graduate Workshop. In all of these we aim to actualize among ourselves the very forms of ethical community that we imagine for decolonized futures. Now co-coordinated by Laura Doyle, Mwangi wa Gῖthῖnji, and Asha Nadkarni (English), WSIP receives crucial support from both the Mellon Foundation and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Most recently, WSIP received a $500,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create a Mellon Fellows Program and a Graduate Certificate Program in Decolonial Global Studies (DGS) at UMass Amherst. The Certificate fosters an interdisciplinary intellectual community for intersectional, indigenous, decolonial, and race studies scholars.  In conjunction with the Certificate, we host activists and scholars who engage with UMass communities in both public discussions and small seminars, as well as through Liaison Fellowships.

'Courage is Contagious': Building on the Life and Legacy of Daniel Ellsberg

Christian Appy, Department of History

The Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy is devoted to the advancement of public understanding, scholarship, and activism in support of compelling, democratic, and sustainable alternatives to militarism, authoritarianism, and environmental degradation. Our work is inspired by the life and legacy of whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, whose papers were acquired by UMass in 2019. In 1971, Ellsberg risked a life in prison by releasing to the press and public a 7000-page classified history of the Vietnam War—the Pentagon Papers—exposing decades of government lies and deceit. His principled commitment to nonviolent activism for peace, nuclear disarmament, and democratic rights continued until his death in 2023. The Ellsberg Initiative, launched in 2022, has a five-year plan to engage and educate our students and the general public on these vital issues. Our programs include a week-long "activist in residence," an annual Ellsberg lecture, institutes for high school teachers, film screenings, workshops, panel discussions, and an annual conference.

Renaissance Music and Poetry in the Digital Age: The Tasso in Music Project

Emiliano Ricciardi, Department of Music and Dance

Emiliano Ricciardi’s research mission is to use cutting-edge digital technology to study and bring to life poetry and music from the Italian Renaissance. This mission has resulted in the Tasso in Music Project, the first complete digital edition of the musical settings of the poetry of Torquato Tasso, arguably the most prominent poet of late sixteenth-century Italy. The project, of which Prof. Ricciardi is principal investigator, has been awarded two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities: a Scholarly Editions and Translations grant (2016-19) in the amount of $260,000; and a Digital Advancement grant (2022-25), in the amount of $224,688. Thanks to these two grants, among the largest ever awarded in the field of music history, Ricciardi’s Tasso in Music Project has emerged as one of the leading digital projects devoted to the study of Renaissance culture. Realized with the technical support of Stanford University’s Center for Computer Assisted Research for the Humanities, the Tasso in Music Project features newly made critical editions of the over 800 extant settings of Tasso’s poetry, encoded in a variety of non-commercial electronic formats and accompanied by computational tools that support music analysis of this vast and hitherto largely unexplored repertoire. Given its literary component, the project also features encodings of the poetic texts as they appear in the literary and musical sources, with dynamic tracking of variant readings, as well as tools for metric analysis. Thanks to these features, the project has addressed a wide audience encompassing music scholars, performers, literary philologists, and more generally anyone with an interest in the interaction between poetry and music and in the culture of the Italian Renaissance.

UMass Cornerstone Scholar Initiative

Moira Inghilleri, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Supported by a two-year grant funded by the Teagle Foundation/NEH, the UMass Cornerstone Initiative is implementing a program of curricular reform on our campus that will build—through a richer and more meaningful engagement with the humanities—an enhanced sense of intellectual community among participating students and faculty. The initiative is designed to empower faculty to teach sections of two new Gateway gen-ed courses ‘Traversing Difference with Critical and Creative Thinking,’ one a DU and one a DG. The courses are designed to ‘transcend’ individual majors, bringing students from across campus into shared conversation, helping them develop and practice skills for success in college, career, and life. Tailored for incoming students, these courses are grounded substantially on a set of primary texts that offer a shared learning and teaching experience. Students who complete the Gateway courses earn the opportunity to enroll in a 16-credit Cornerstone Scholar Certificate where students choose from four thematically organized clusters of themed Pathway courses: environment; science and technology; business; and global studies.