Provost Funds Scholarly Initiatives in the Humanities

The Provost’s Office has awarded funding to eight projects as part of its Special Initiative to Promote Scholarly Activities in the Humanities. 

The awards initiative, which is part of Pitt’s Year of the Humanities in the University, supports “significant and innovative scholarship” in the humanities and creative arts. Individuals or groups of tenured or tenure-stream faculty were invited to submit proposals for new scholarly projects or to advance existing ones. Proposals could request as much as $20,000, but most were funded at $5,000 or less. 

A listing of the projects and their principal investigators follow.

• The Kamaicha: A Cultural History of a Musical Instrument

Shalini Ayyagari, Assistant Professor, Department of Music

• Evolving Concepts of Body Sensation and Motor Control in the Neuroscience of Movement

Mazviita Chirimuuta, Assistant Professor, Department of History and Philosophy of Science

Co-Investigator: Mark W.D. Paterson, Visiting Lecturer, Department of Sociology

• Once the Sun, a novel and website

Angie Cruz, Assistant Professor, Department of English

• Preserving the Memory of the World: A Study of Jataka Tales, Folktales, Local Myths, and Legends in the Endangered Palm-Leaf Manuscripts from Mahachai Temple, Mahasarakham, Thailand

Tuangtip Klinbubpa-Neff, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown

• Nonfiction Book on Benjamin Franklin

Michael Meyer, Assistant Professor, Department of English

• Computational Approaches to Textual Networks

Benjamin Miller, Assistant Professor, Department of English

Co-Investigators: Alison Langmead, Joint Faculty Appointment in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the School of Information Sciences; Matthew Lavin and Annette Vee, both Clinical Assistant Professors, Department of English

• Music Composition: Ostatnia runda (Last Round)

Matthew Rosenblum, Professor, Department of Music

• Original Music Composition by Amy Williams

Amy Williams, Associate Professor, Department of Music