PORT ANGELES — Three Peninsula College professors have received National Endowment for the Humanities grants for summer study.
History professor Michael Cassella-Blackburn’s award is for participation in a two-week workshop in Concord, Mass., on “Feminists, Utopians and Social Reform in the Age of Emerson and Thoreau,” the college said.
He will be one of 50 community college faculty members from across the nation who will study Concord’s central role in American 19th-century thought and social reform, focusing on historic sites and primary sources as they explore what Concord was like as an intellectual center of 19th-century America.
Private tours
Private tours of the sites associated with Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Amos Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott will be part of the program and will include Concord Museum, Emerson’s home, Walden Pond, First Parish Church, Concord School of Philosophy and the utopian communities of Brook Farm and Fruitlands.
Also included is research in the Concord Free Public Library, which holds materials on Transcendentalism and antebellum social reform that can be found at no other location.
English professors Matt Teorey and Kate Reavey have been selected to participate in “Advancing the Humanities at Community Colleges: An NEH Bridging Cultures Project” for their proposal, “Vision, Documentation, Practice: The Promise of Democracy and Our American Experience.”
Teorey and Reavey are among 18 community college teams nationwide to be chosen to participate and were selected from more than 70 applications by the Community College Humanities Association, which is directing the project.
As part of the grant award, the two will attend a national conference in Washington, D.C.
Humanities scholars will serve as mentors, assisting them in developing and implementing curriculum for their students when they return to the classroom.
Build understanding
Teorey and Reavey plan to develop curriculum to build understanding among the cultures on the Olympic Peninsula and to create dialogue by requiring students to research scholarly texts and conduct local interviews.
Students’ expression of their own voices and cultural traditions will be central to the curriculum development process.
Teorey and Reavey plan to incorporate history, literature and local resources and emphasize cultural traditions, artifacts, the creation of economic opportunity, the interplay of property and treaty rights, the challenges of tourism and museum curation, among other topics.