More than $450,000 of the grants go to the IU-Bloomington campus, according to a University press release.
A project that will receive part of the funding will be the Archives of Traditional Music at IU-Bloomington. The project will receive the largest amount of funding, $275,000, according to the press release. The grant money will go toward digitally preserving a collection of ethnographic wax cylinders outside the Library ?of Congress.
The wax cylinder preservation will contain almost 7,000 cylinders comprised of 160 collections made in 60 countries around the world, according to the press release.
“The research value of these recordings lay in their uniqueness and their early documentation of texts, songs, performance styles and the ethnographic encounter as it was constructed in the late 19th and early 20th century,” said Alan Burdette, director of the Archives of Traditional Music and co-principal investigator of the project, in the ?release.
The recordings are artifacts of cultural history and a record of the development of ethnographic science at the turn of the 20th century that cannot be replaced, ?according to the release.
The Black Film Center/Archive will also receive $150,000 of the NEH grants to fund a project titled “Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking: Reprocessing and Digitization,” according to the release.
“The Norman Collection constitutes a unique resource for the study of the formation of American cinema in general and the history of race films in particular,” said Michael T. Martin, director of the Black Film Center/Archive and a professor of American studies and of communication and culture in the Media School, in the press release. “This Grant ensures the preservation and access of our Norman holdings for current and future generations of researchers, film historians and the public.”
The Richard E. Norman project will add more than 20,000 digitized items to the Black Film Center/?Archive.
Norman’s son, Capt. Richard E. Norman Jr., donated the collection to the Black Film Center/Archive.
IU-Purdue University Indianapolis will receive $119,000 and partner with Ivy Tech Community College to create 150 course modules on world religions, according to the release.
An associate professor of history and an adjunct associate professor of American studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington also received funds. Ellen Wu received $6,000 for the project “Asian Americans in the Age of Affirmative Action,” according to the release.
Storme Dayhuff
