Hao Huang, professor of music at Scripps College, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Teaching Development Fellowship, “Bridging Cultures,” one of only nine such grants out of 218 applications.
NEH Teaching Development Fellowships support college and university teachers pursuing research aimed specifically at deepening their knowledge in the humanities to improve undergraduate teaching. NEH’s new “Bridging Cultures” initiative encourages development of courses that explore the great variety of cultural influences on, and myriad subcultures within, American society. Huang’s project title is “Listening to Sacred Sounds: Black Gospel Music, Hawaiian Hula Kahiko and Auana, and Tewa Pueblo Ceremonial Dances.”
On receiving the grant, Huang said, “Teaching at Scripps, and particularly in the Humanities Core, has spurred me to undertake significant interdisciplinary research and scholarly writing. I’m grateful for this select national honor for myself and the College.”
In its current award cycle, the NEH awarded $18.8 million in total grants in 11 categories, including Teaching Development Fellowships. These grants will support a wide variety of projects, including fellowships for scholarly research and the development of new undergraduate courses in the humanities, traveling exhibitions, production and development of films, the development and staging of major exhibitions, digital tools, and the preservation of and access to historic collections.
Prior to Huang’s award, the latest NEH grant to a Scripps College professor was in 2009 to Professor of French Nathalie Rachlin to develop a new course on an “enduring question.” Rachlin developed the course “What is happiness?,” which takes a historical overview of happiness’s changing interpretations from Greek antiquity to the present day; she will teach the course for the second time in fall 2011 as part of Scripps College’s Core Curriculum in Interdisciplinary Humanities.