Christie Harner Receives New England Humanities Consortium Award

Christie Harner, a faculty member of the Department of English and Creative Writing, has won an award from the New England Humanities Consortium for her project Reactivating and Reshaping Humanities Communities!  This is the second year that these grants have existed, and the first time that an award has been made to a Dartmouth faculty member.

Harner's project is titled "Reactivating and Reshaping Humanities Communities: Collaborative Humanistic Inquiry in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Today.” She  proposed it along with a colleague at Wheaton College, Winter Jade Werner.

 

The goal is to take diverse and newly formed nineteenth-century communities of humanistic inquirers (working men’s clubs, libraries, natural history museums, the first mass distance learning program, the Boy Scouts, etc.) as inspiration to rethink humanities education. The core questions in the proposal are: What institutions, in the nineteenth-century and today, complicate or help to redefine the function of the humanities? How might public humanities projects, specifically those engaged with nineteenth-century Britain, reactivate learning communities within and beyond the university: on campus, in local organizations, and online? What humanistic projects do participants want to pursue? What histories of humanistic inquiry might we find in the records of our local communities?

 

On a practical level, the project involves identifying colleagues and partners across NEHC institutions who can guest lecture in classes (sharing expertise and bringing in new definitions of the humanities) and collaborating with local off-campus partners (like the Norwich Public Library) to broaden definitions of humanities social impact. All participants, including local partners where possible, will join together (virtually or in person) for a symposium next spring, and Harner and Werner will then co-edit a special issue of a journal focused around the re-mapping of humanities education over the course of the project.