Audience

Please review the eligibility criteria for participation in NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes here. All participants in NEH summer programs are required to follow the NEH’s Principles of Civility, which are available here. 

This program is designed to appeal to teachers of American undergraduate students, including adjunct and contingent faculty. At least three seats in this seminar are reserved for non-tenure-track faculty members. Qualified independent scholars, museum curators, librarians (including rare book librarians), advanced graduate students, and employees of historical societies are also eligible to apply. The program is geared to meet the needs of teacher-scholars interested in the literary, political, and/or cultural history of the late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and/or Protestant and Catholic Reformations, and who specialize in print culture, art history, women’s studies, religious studies, bibliography, library science, the history of mass communication, literacy studies, and more.

The selection committee will follow NEH guidelines and Affirmative Action regulations in choosing participants who are best able to contribute to seminar activities and advance individual projects. The selection committee will select a nationwide group that is diversified with respect to academic discipline, institutional affiliation, and stage of professional development. NEH requires admitted participants to be fully engaged in the seminar for its duration.

Expecting that many participants would arrive with projects under way, the seminar director plans to offer assistance at individual private conferences during our opening week. To those who seek guidance, he plans to recommend that they consider undertaking a “biography” of a book central to their own teaching and/or scholarship. Seminar participants can undertake this challenging project almost immediately. A participant in an earlier version of this seminar attested to the usefulness of this exercise when he told that his book “biography” enabled him to blossom after his research skills had become rusty while he discharged heavy teaching and administrative responsibilities during twenty-five years at a small and remote college that lacked significant library resources. A good model for this “biography” would be analysis and description of 1) a particular copy of a book and its peculiarities; 2) the relation of this copy to a theoretically perfect copy; and 3) the wider importance of this book in relation to reading practices, intellectual life, social movements, religious beliefs, and more.

Participants in this program will be asked to co-lead discussion of one shared seminar reading, and to make individual presentations on research and/or pedagogical interests. They will also be asked to participate in the dissemination of the seminar’s findings, in accordance with NEH guidelines for established summer programs.  Our schedule includes a concluding roundtable discussion which will address ways of presenting participants’ findings in teaching and/or scholarship.

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