NEH Awards in Ancient Studies, March 29, 2010

NEH announces $16 million in awards and offers for 286 humanities projects, March 29, 2010. Following are the funded projects relating to the Ancient World:

University of California, Berkeley Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends]
Project Director: Robert Goldman
Project Title: The Final Chapter: Introduction, Translation, and Scholarly Annotation of the Uttarakanda of the Critical Edition of the Valm

University of California, Berkeley Outright: $49,942 [Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants] Project Director: Niek Veldhuis
Project Title: Berkeley Prosopography Services: Building Research Communities and Restoring Ancient Communities through Digital Tools
Project Description: Development of the Berkeley Prosopography Service (BPS), an open source digital toolkit that extracts prosopographic data from TEI encoded text and generates interactive visual representations of social networks.

University of California, Berkeley Outright: $234,495 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources
Project Director: James Matisoff
Project Title: Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus: Sustainability
Implementation
Project Description: The development of an online etymological dictionary and thesaurus of
Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the common ancestor of languages spoken in China, India, and Southeast
Asia. The project would also implement strategies for sustaining this resource over the long term.

University of Southern California Outright: $24,933 [Enduring Questions: Pilot Course Grants] Project Director: David Albertson
Project Title: NEH Enduring Questions Course on the Power of Visual Images Project Description: The development of an undergraduate seminar on the significance

University of California, Los Angeles Outright: $50,000
[Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants]
Project Director: Lisa Snyder
Project Title: Software Interface for Real-time Exploration of Three-Dimensional Computer
Models of Historic Urban Environments
Project Description” The prototype development for a generalized, extensible platform that will
allow for real-time exploration, annotation, and tours in 3D computer models, using the NEH-
funded Digital Karnak as the test case.

National Geographic Society Outright: $800,000 [America's Media Makers Production]
Project Director: Maryanne Culpepper Project Title: In the Footsteps of Heroes
Project Description: Production of a six-part television documentary series about the history and culture of Ancient Greek civilization from the Bronze Age through the Roman annexation of Greece in 146 BCE.

Emory University Outright: $24,965
[Enduring Questions: Pilot Course Grants]
Project Director: Andrew Mitchell
Project Title: NEH Enduring Questions Course on How Does One Live a Life that Ends?
Project Description: The development of an introductory level undergraduate course that charts a three-part historical trajectory from ancient Sumerian and Greek texts to 20th-century thought.

University of Chicago Outright: $300,000
[America's Historical & Cultural Organizations Implementation]
Project Director: Anthony Hirschel
Project Title: Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan
Project Description: Implementation of a traveling exhibition, a website, an international
symposium, a catalog, and programs on the sculptures of Xiangtangshan caves in China.

Northern Illinois University Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends]
Project Director: John Bentley Project
Title: Dictionary of Ancient Japanese Orthography

Walters Art Museum Outright: $315,000
[Humanities Collections and Reference Resources]
Project Director: William Noel
Project Title: Parchment to Pixel: Creating a Digital Resource of Medieval Manuscripts
Project Description: Cataloging and digitizing 105 medieval illuminated manuscripts dating
mostly from the 9th to the 16th centuries that derive from diverse Christian cultures. Images and
catalog data would be freely accessible via the museum's Web site and a portal maintained by
Johns Hopkins University.

Harvard University Outright: $215,099 [Humanities Collections and Reference Resources] Project Director: William Fash
Project Title: Digitizing, Re-housing, Cataloging, and Creating Online Access to the Peabody Museum's Photograph Collection*
Project Description: The second phase of a project to catalog, digitize, and mount on the Internet 25,000 photographic images from the Peabody Museum Photographic Archives that document archaeological and ethnographic objects and major expeditions, dating from 1866 to the 1930s.

Mount Holyoke College Outright: $18,535
[Enduring Questions: Pilot Course Grants]
Project Director: Elizabeth Markovits
Project Title: NEH Enduring Questions Course on What Is Family?
Project Description: The development of a first-year seminar on the changing meanings of family from classical to modern times.

Documentary Educational Resources, Inc. Outright: $50,000
[America's Media Makers Development]
Project Director: David Lebrun
Project Title: The Royal Cup
Project Description: Development of an hour-long documentary film on ancient Maya pottery and the ethics of studying and collecting objects that may have been looted.

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends]
Project Director: Alex Jassen
Project Title: Violence, Religion, and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Carleton College [Teaching Development Fellowships]
Project Director: William North
Project Title: Cultures of Empire: Byzantium, 711-1453
Outright: $21,000

University of Mississippi, Main Campus Outright: $6,000 {Summer Stipends]
Project Director: Steven Skultety Project
Title: Conflict in Aristotle's Political Philosophy

College of New Jersey Outright: $21,000 [Teaching Development Fellowships]
Project Director: Deborah Huton
Project Title: Arts of South Asia: Exploring Monuments in Depth

University of New Mexico Outright: $49,832 [Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants]
Project Director: Jennifer von Schwerin
Project Title: Digital Documentation and Reconstruction of an Ancient Maya Temple and Prototype of Internet GIS Database of Maya Architecture
Project Description: This project brings together an international team of archeologists, technologists, and cultural heritage site managers to develop a test implementation of a new online platform for virtual environments of significant cultural sites, using the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Copan, Honduras as a testbed

New York Botanical Garden Outright: $40,000 [America's Historical and Cultural Organizations Planning]
Project Director: Susan Fraser
Project Title: Medicinal Plants: Ancient Culture to Modern Medicine at The New York Botanical Garden
Project Description: Planning for a multiformat traveling exhibition and public programs that explore how plants have shaped the trajectory of medicine throughout the world.

Aquila Theatre Company, Inc. Outright: $800,000
[America's Historical & Cultural Organizations Implementation]
Project Director: Peter Meineck
Project Title: Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives: Poetry-Drama-Dialogue
Project Description: Implementation of a national program series exploring classical literature, to be presented at 100 libraries and performing arts centers in 20 states.

New York University Outright: $298,457 [Humanities Collections and Reference Resources] Project Director: Thomas Elliott
Project Title: Pleiades: Content and Community for Ancienty Geography Project Description: The continued development of an open-access digital gazetteer for Greek and Roman history with reusable open-source software that could be employed in other digital humanities publications.

Hartwick College Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends] Project
Director: Martha Zebrowski
Project Title: William Smith's 1753 Translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War

Cleveland Museum of Art Outright: $40,000 [America's Historical and Cultural Organizations Planning]
Project Director: Sue Bergh
Project Title: The Realm of the Condor: Wari, the Art of a Pre-Inca Empire Project Description: Planning for a traveling exhibition and a publication on the art of the Wari Empire which flourished in highland Peru from about AD 750 to AD 1000.

University of Pennsylvania Outright: $240,655 [Humanities Collections and Reference Resources]
Project Director: Grant Frame Project Title: Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period Project Description: Online publication of the official inscriptions of the rulers of ancient Assyria, which are preserved on clay tablets and other artifacts. The project would also provide transliterations, translations, and bibliographic information.

University of Virginia Outright: $50,000 [Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants]
Project Director: Bernard Frischer
Project Title: New Digital Tools for Restoring Polychromy to 3D Digital Models of Sculpture Project Description: The development of a set of tools that would allow for the accurate inclusion and display of color for Classical sculpture, using the Augustus of Prima Porta in the Vatican Museums as a case study.

University of Virginia Outright: $48,549 [Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants]
Project Director: David Koller
Project Title: Supercomputing for Digitized 3D Models of Cultural Heritage
Project Description: The development of new algorithms and software to process large-scale,
data-intensive 3D models of cultural heritage materials on supercomputers.

W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research Outright: $320,400 [Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions]
Project Director: Seymour Gitin
Project Title: Post-Doctoral Fellowships in Middle Eastern Archaeology Project Description: The equivalent of two twelve-month fellowships a year for three years.