iath.virginia.eduThe Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities

University of Virginia Library About What We Do Mission Sponsors Projects All Projects Community Projects News Current News Archive People Staff Fellows HiDH Fellowships Guidelines Application Resident Fellows Visiting Fellows American Indian Land Loss McMillen, Christian - Professor of History Resident Fellowship: 2023-2024 American Indian land loss lies at the heart of US history. The legal and illegal transfer of Indian land to non-Indians is the foundation of American economic development and the basis for American Indian economic underdevelopment. Over the course of the twentieth century, after tribal land loss had largely run its course, millions of individual Indian land holdings disappeared as well, one sale at a time. Why and how was so much individual Indian land, supposedly held in trust for American Indians, sold to non-Indians? How much land was lost? How did Indian people respond? Using a variety of sources—legal records, government documents, land sale data, and other sources—this project will build a geo-located, nationwide database of individual Indian land sales. Layered Memories Parham, Angel Adams - Associate Professor of Sociology Fellow: 2022-2023 The "Layered Memories" project unpeels social and cultural layers of places that either have well-known controversial histories, or ambivalent histories that have been covered over or simplified. Such work is timely, in that protests over monuments, statues, and other historic sites are calls for us to reckon honestly with historical issues that we have never fully come to terms with. Our ability to move forward as a national community in the U.S. requires that we find ways to make excellent and nuanced historical research intelligible and accessible to public audiences. Virginia Emigrants to Liberia Ailes, Jane - Independent Scholar Lee, Deborah - Independent Scholar Between 1820-65, the American Colonialization Society sponsored the migration of almost 13,000 African Americans to the new colony of Liberia, maintaining careful records of the emigrants, the letters sent back to family and communities from their difficult and dangerous new home, and the people who enabled, supported, and coerced both free and enslaved to make the long transatlantic journey. This project is building a comprehensive dataset of 3,650 Virginia emigrants in this period, based on documents, ship records, and letters, which will explore the complex relationships and motivations behind this remarkable effort. Suzhou Urban Cultural Landscapes Guide Sewell, Jessica E. - Associate Professor Urban and Environmental Planning Fellow: 2020-2022 Suzhou, a city of about 12 million located approximately 100 km west of Shanghai in the Yangtze delta, brings together the very old and the very new. It was founded c. 514 BCE as a walled, gridded city, surrounded by a wide canal, and has been a major center of trade and culture since the tenth century. The Suzhou Urban Cultural Landscapes Guide will explore the spaces and buildings of Suzhou in their cultural and historical context. Moving between traditional and modern spaces, users will see the persistence of daily practices and the continuities as well as the differences between the ancient and the hypermodern cultural landscapes of Suzhou. Mapping Poetic Geographies of Revolutionary Russia, 1914-1922 Clowes, Edith W. - Brown-Forman Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Fellow: 2019-2021 "Mapping Poetic Geographies of Revolutionary Russia" investigates the connection between identity and place in literature written during World War I (1914-1918) and the Russian Civil War (1918-1922). The goal of this project is to build an interactive database of over 500 period literary works by 70 Russian authors, as well as provide a series of maps by year, showing the breadth of writing and publishing activity across Russia. The website, available in English and Russian, will allow readers to enter writers’ worlds of emotional engagement with the idea of homeland in a turbulent time when the tsarist Russian state was crumbling and a new order was not yet invented. The Independent Works of William Tyndale Felch, Susan - Professor of English Rankin, Mark - Associate Professor of English Externally funded project Best known as the translator of the first New Testament to be printed in English, William Tyndale played a formative role in shaping the English language, bending it toward a rigorous and colloquial style that survives to the present time. Scholars are hampered by a lack of ready access to his books, and these badly needed critical editions will provide scholars with the tools to reassess Tyndale’s importance, and to read him within the context of late medieval ecclesiastical and civic reforms, Augustinian vernacular preaching, Lutheran theology, Henrician politics, Erasmian humanism, sixteenth-century pedagogy, and more. The Architecture of The Negro Travelers’ Green Book Bruder, Anne - Architectural Historian, Baltimore, Maryland Hellman, Susan - Architectural Historian, Alexandria, Virginia Zipf, Catherine W. - Architectural Historian, Bristol, Rhode Island Independent Scholars The Architecture of The Negro Travelers’ Green Book is a public architectural history project that studies the sites listed in The Green Book to discover their history and support their preservation. This project reveals the overlooked history of mid-twentieth century African Americans and the unsung people who formed the backbone of the African-American tourist industry: the women who ran tourist homes, the men who opened motels to take advantage of increasing automobile traffic, and the business owners who offered beauty, entertainment, and style to middle class African Americans. Seeking to document every site listed in The Green Book, this public database allows users to explore this history and its associated sites by year, state, establishment type, and owner. Experiencing Embodied Cultural Practices through Motion Capture and Immersive Media: A Hybrid Research/Practice Collaboration Across Disciplines Dahl, Luke - Associate Professor of Music Kasra, Mona - Assistant Professor of Drama Fellow: 2018-2020 This project explores how new recording technologies such as immersive video, spatial audio, and motion capture can be used to document, preserve, and transmit embodied cultural practices of aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory regions of Australia. Working closely with the community, Kasra and Dahl are capturing communities’ ceremonial dances and music to help archive and preserve their cultural heritage. By recording multi-modal data, producing educational material, and creating interactive immersive experiences, this work will also lead to the development of new frameworks for new media art practices and humanities scholarship. Life of the Buddha Quintman, Andrew - Associate Professor Schaeffer, Kurtis - Frances Myers Ball Professor Project Director The Life of the Buddha project is the first full-scale study of murals at the Tibetan Buddhist monastery of Jonang and an extended narrative of the Buddha’s life story, Sun of Faith (Dad pa’i nyin bye). The murals date from the first decades of the 17th century and are among only a handful of fully preserved narrative paintings in Central Tibet. The project is the largest study to date on visual and textual Buddha narratives in Tibet, and the first complete visual documentation of these murals. Salmon Pueblo Archaeological Research Collection Heitman, Carrie C. - Associate Professor Anthropology, University of Nebraska, Lincoln Reed, Paul F. - Archaeology Southwest Externally funded project SPARC is a collaboration dedicated to the preservation and online publication of legacy cultural heritage data from the Salmon Pueblo excavations repository. Salmon was a the site of a large pueblo and cultural center built around 1090 CE, the first major colony established by the Chacoan people. It was occupied until about 1280...