Two HFA Faculty Receive Fellowships from National Endowment for the Humanities

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AMHERST, Mass.—The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) recently announced $32.8 million in grants to support 213 humanities projects in 44 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Two UMass Amherst faculty members, Melissa Mueller and Traci Parker, are among the new cohort of NEH fellowship recipients. They each were awarded $60,000 to work on projects in their fields.

According to NEH Chairman Jon Parrish Peede, “These new NEH grants will foster intellectual inquiry, promote broad engagement with history, literature, and other humanities fields, and expand access to cultural collections and resources for all Americans.”

Melissa Mueller, associate professor in the department of Classics, will work toward completing her book entitled “Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading Project,” which will explore the reception of Homeric epics in the work of the ancient Greek poet Sappho (c. 630–570 BCE). The book will offer “a new way of reading the literary kinship between Sappho and Homer devoting particular attention to the material aesthetics, temporalities, and queer effect of Sappho’s lyrics,” explains Mueller. According to Mueller, her book seeks to disentangle Sappho’s reception of Homer from the combative moves and politics of current practices of literary criticism by providing in-depth discussions of the major fragments, including those only recently published, while also initiating a conversation between philological scholarship on Sappho and Homer and more recent trends in the humanities.

Traci Parker, associate professor in the W.E.B. Du Bois department of Afro-American Studies, is focusing on her book in progress, entitled, “Beyond Loving: Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Black Freedom Movement.” The fellowship supports research that sheds light on questions related to “Black love, marriage and family as integral expressions of Black freedom movement ideology.” Ahead of writing the book manuscript, Parker plans to conduct necessary archival research in Georgia, California, Wisconsin and Mississippi and interview veterans of the Black Freedom Movement. “The interviews, in particular, promise to unearth details about dating, marriage, divorce, and parenthood on the movement’s battlegrounds—topics seldom documented in extant oral histories,” says Parker.