Eight faculty members from UMass Boston's College of Liberal Arts announced as Mellon Grant winners

Eight faculty members from UMass Boston's College of Liberal Arts have received grants to develop innovative humanities courses as part of UMass Boston's High Impact Humanities Initiative. Support by a three-year $515,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, this initiative connects curriculum, community, and careers with the aim of ensuring greater student interest and academic success in the humanities.

The High Impact Humanities initiative provides funding for faculty to create a new infrastructure of courses that showcase exciting and important fields of study and career pathways in the humanities. The award winners in this cohort represent a range of fields, including American studies, Asian studies, English, Latin American and Iberian studies, performing arts, philosophy, and women’s, gender and sexuality studies.

These courses will engage students in topics of contemporary relevance and global reach. In Consent, Danielle Bromwich will explore the philosophy of consent, especially to medical procedures and to sexual relations, while Isabel Gómez will interrogate translation and interpretation as tools of both colonization and decolonization in Building Language Justice: Translation, Migration, and Linguistic Human Rights. Students in Elora Chowdhury’s Gender, Human Rights, and Global Cinema will learn to interpret the narration of human rights through cinematic representations of inequality, empire, nationalism, and minority rights. Rachel Rubin’s The History of Hip Hop and Hip Hop as History will introduce students to the Healey Library’s recently-acquired hip hop archive, where they will carry out an analytical project.

Imagine taking a class on yoga, the history of dress, or cutting-edge literary studies. In Meditation Traditions of Asia, Shaman Hatley will combine contemplative and creative practices to explore traditional and modern meditation practices derived from Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist traditions. Rafael Jaen’s Enlivening Identities through Dress studies the role of costuming in activities such as historical reenactment, cosplay, dance, and theater. Queer Literary Histories, taught by Aaron Lecklider, will focus on U.S. LGBTQ fiction, poetry, and drama from 1900 to the present, in print and in the archives. Daniel Remein’s Race and Medieval Literature asks how race can shape our understanding of medieval literature like Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales

The Mellon Foundation is investing in UMass Boston so that it can become a leader and innovator in humanities curriculum in the Boston area. Students this fall are taking classes in English, history, and performing arts that were funded in the grant’s first phase.

“This is the third faculty cohort we have been able to support with our first Mellon Foundation grant, significantly expanding our ability to simultaneously support academic programming and student success in the humanities,” said College of Liberal Arts Dean David Terkla. “I’m thrilled to recognize this cohort that will develop engaging new courses to strengthen our already exciting humanities curriculum. As these classes will feature experiential learning in the community in combination with high impact practices, they’re sure to become extremely popular with our students.”