Awards Announced: Pitch Your Own Immersive (Fall 2020/Spring 2021)

December 1, 2020

Humanities Engage is delighted to announce that five Ph.D. students have received funding for immersive fellowships for fall and/or spring 2020/21.

Immersives provide Ph.D. students with the opportunity to gain experiences with host organizations in collaborative, mission-focused project work drawing on their high-level skills as researchers and writers.

Amanda Awanjo (English) will utilize her experience with digital humanities to support the Carnegie Museum of Art’s upcoming 125th anniversary. She will work with the museum’s anti-racist task force to create digital content surrounding and amplifying the museum’s equity and anti-racism strategy and conduct archival research with the museum’s special collections.

Building on her research into the history of landscape photography, Paula Kupfer (History of Art and Architecture) will produce an online exhibition/publication that focuses on the history of the plant collections in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s herbarium as well as organize a guided outdoor walk around local plant species.

Ben Naismith (Linguistics) will use his pedagogical experience, background in computational linguistics, and interest in technology and education to help startup Clearspace develop the study tool Leto (aka Learning Together). This will entail a literature review, offering feedback on the tool, and producing Natural Language Processing (NLP) modules.

Applying her training as an ethnomusicologist, Hannah Standiford (Music) will mix and edit recordings and interview participants to help Classical Revolution RVA develop soundscape.social. The interactive website permits listeners to move through a sonic space and enables musicians and audience members to interact with one another in real time.

Celena Todora (English) will draw on her scholarly interests in prison education as well as her grant writing and research skills to facilitate Let’s Get Free’s Let’s Get Smart initiative that aims to increase opportunities for higher education in Pennsylvania prisons through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

Check back later on the Humanities Engage blog to learn about the experiences the following students will gain with their host organizations.

The competition for funds to support immersive experiences this academic year remains open. Applications will be reviewed, and grants awarded, on a rolling basis and as long as resources last.