Saint Mary’s Faculty Earn Multiple NEH Grants for Innovations in Curriculum
SMC is one of few institutions to receive multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Together, the grants will bolster interdisciplinary partnerships and benefit underserved student populations.
When it comes to garnering support for curricular innovation, the year 2023 has proven to be a banner year for the Saint Mary’s community. In April, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced $35.63 million for 258 projects throughout the country. Two of those well-deserved awards went to Saint Mary’s faculty. The College is one of few institutions to receive multiple NEH grants this year.
These new grants come on the heels of an NEH grant announced in January 2023, which provided $35,000 to bolster SMC's Public History initiative, led by Professor of English Lisa Manter.
Of the latest grants, one supports a one-year project to create an Art Conservation minor and was funded through the NEH’s Humanities Connections program, which seeks to support curricular innovation at undergraduate institutions, “encouraging partnerships between humanities faculty and their counterparts in other areas of study,” according to the NEH website. The Saint Mary’s project focused on Art Conservation was also singled out in the press release issued by the NEH.
Another grant supports a two-year effort at Saint Mary’s to nurture a faculty learning community which, in turn, will develop courses integrating humanities study and professional skills. The project, known as “Humanities at the Core,” will enable the creation of courses designed to introduce students to the various ways humanities disciplines are adopting 21st-century technologies, communication media, and opportunities to bring positive social change through critical humanistic questions, methodologies, and instruments.
The project on Humanities at the Core is funded through the NEH program known as Spotlight on Humanities in Higher Education. Through this program, fewer than 20 colleges or universities received a grant for large curricular innovation.
Interdisciplinary Art Conservation Minor
Costanza Dopfel, a professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literature and former chair of the Art and Art History Department, is teaming up with Valerie Burke and Amy Chu of the Department of Chemistry to develop a minor in Art Conservation. The project received $35,000 from the NEH. When the program launches, it will be the first of its kind in Northern California and one of only a handful of such programs in the country.
Dopfel, who is spending summer 2023 researching medieval sanctuaries in Italy, says this grant represents a crucial step toward developing the Art Conservation minor. “If we assess that it is feasible and that we have institutional support, we will submit a new proposal in August 2024 and compete for a second, larger NEH institutional grant that will support the implementation of the minor.”
Most students interested in art conservation and restoration have to pursue a graduate degree in the field. While a minor won't eliminate the need for grad school, “this kind of instruction will give students the experience, vocabulary and broad understanding of issues of conservation and restoration that will set them apart from most other graduates,” Dopfel explains. Students will learn from active practitioners across multiple disciplines, from painting and object restoration to conservation science. The minor will be highly interdisciplinary, with courses offered in both the Art and Chemistry departments. The minor will also partner with Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art to offer hands-on experience and “close encounters,” as Dopfel puts it, with objects from the museum collections.
Ultimately, Dopfel hopes the potential minor will “help students understand not only that they have the power to act as caretakers of their cultural history, but that they have the responsibility of understanding, protecting, and conserving the visual heritage that is art.”
This NEH grant is noteworthy, too, for the fact that it is Dopfel's third NEH award; her work has also drawn attention and support through three other nationally-funded awards.
Creating a Faculty Learning Community in the Humanities
Humanities at the Core is led by Sunayani Bhattacharya, an associate professor of English and member of the Core Curriculum Committee, and Makiko Imamura, who serves as a professor of Communication and as Vice Provost for Institutional and Educational Effectiveness. With the NEH providing $60,000 to create a faculty learning community, the grant will foster the development of undergraduate courses that unite humanities study with professional skills training.
Why does that matter? “The benefits are really two-fold,” Imamura says. “One is making sure that the humanities continue to be vibrant on this campus. Along with that, this project integrates the building of career-related skill sets—not just as an add-on, but into how the teaching and learning happens.”
The timing of this project comes alongside some bigger curricular changes at Saint Mary’s: With an eye toward better meeting the needs of students and graduates, the College is implementing a new Core Curriculum this year. The new Core is geared to enable students to pursue cross-disciplinary paths—which is what these new courses will also emphasize.
What might some of the new courses look like? “The grant will make possible courses ranging from the ‘Radical Imagination Lab,’ which invites students to practice building communities, to students being taught how to collect and analyze oral histories, to a course teaching them the art of the video essay,” Bhattacharya says. “For current and prospective students, this will lead to courses that equip them with practical and transferable skills in the humanities classroom, which they can then take into the world beyond SMC.”
The grant also provides a spark when it comes to teaching. “For faculty, we hope that this will inspire them to rethink what is meant by the humanities today, and have the opportunity to design interdisciplinary classes,” Bhattacharya says. “The best part for me is that all this potential already exists on campus—we are creating a space where they can be actualized, and providing students and faculty the support they need to practice the humanities.”
READ MORE: “Lisa Manter’s 2023 NEH Award: A Win for Public History and a Win for Students”
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