'Help people make connections': NC Humanities awards grants to UNC faculty projects

North Carolina Humanities awarded a $20,000 grant to fund a summer program centered around the work of author Jane Austen, which is organized in collaboration with UNC's College of Arts and Sciences faculty.

N.C. Humanities provides Project Planning Grants up to $2,000, Small Project Grants up to $5,000 and Large Project Grants up to $20,000, to support initiatives such as lectures, exhibitions, tours and workshops. 

According to the program's website, the grants highlight projects regarding North Carolina's history and culture; it keeps stories, past and present, of the state's people alive and shared.

On Oct. 30, the organization announced a combined donation of over $378,000 to 21 local history and storytelling projects.

Four projects involving faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences received Large Project Grants — Medicine, Food, and Domestic Life in Regency England and Colonial North Carolina, Celebrating and Reflecting on 50 Years of Women's and Gender Studies in North Carolina, Celebrating Diversity: Combatting Refugee Isolation Through Cross-Cultural Storytelling and Legacies of Lynching: An Inaugural Gathering. 

Inger Brodey, professor in the UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature, said the Medicine, Food, and Domestic Life in Regency England and Colonial North Carolina project aims to continue the Jane Austen Summer Program, a local public humanities symposium under Brodey's nonprofit, the Jane Austen Collaborative.

The program, which was started in 2013, is organized by professors both at UNC and other universities. 

“The reason we applied for [the grant] is that we have some very special years coming up,” Brodey said.

In an email statement to The Daily Tar Heel, Susan Ford, a professor at Delta State University, wrote this upcoming year of the summer program will be focusing on the novel “Sense and Sensibility.”

“It's always useful to step into someone else's mind, someone else's world,” Ford wrote.

Brodey said that with the upcoming year being the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth, and 2026 being the 250th anniversary of the United States' formation, the program will be looking at Austen’s work through a transatlantic theme.

She said that unknown to some, Austen was a popular author in the U.S. during her life, not just in England.

“We want to look at kind of domestic, medicinal, culinary things because that's such a big part of the Triangle now, right? So we want to look at the history and how they're linked to to England as well,” she said.

With the program kicking off on Juneteenth, Brodey said that JASP will also look into North Carolina's involvement in slavery and the British Slave Trade.

“We want to make sure we are also looking at the history of enslaved persons in North Carolina and on both sides of the British slave trade as well,” she said. “And then we always have one book that we focus on each time.”

In past years, Brodey said JASP was kept intimate, with the events at the Ackland Art Museum or Wilson Library, but this year, the program will hold events in New Bern, N.C., to reflect the region's Scottish ties and history around the Revolutionary War. Many activities will take place at Tryon Palace. 

Sarah Walton, assistant professor at Marshall University and organizer involved with JASP, can bring in people from across the state and world. Walton said that in past years, there have been participants in their preteens to their 80s, consisting of students, scholars and mother-daughter pairs. 

Brodey said Austen's work offers a great window into everyday life, especially for women, in this time period. She said that misconceptions of Jane Austen as trivial or flighty act as a disservice to the topic and Austen, who was very politically aware and suffered a lot during her life.

Walton said Austen's writing is funny, witty and true to human behavior, which is why readers feel so immersed in her literary setting.

“We can kind of emphasize how much about Austen's experience was either specific to England or was actually representative of a broader global cultural context,” she said. “So I think it will kind of help people make connections that maybe they haven't made before, but also learn more specifically about their own environment, about their own state.”

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