OU Faculty Receive National Endowment for the Humanities Funding

“Expanding Coptic Digital Online Collections” led by Caroline T. Schroeder, Ph.D., professor of women’s and gender studies, Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma. Amir Zeldes, Georgetown University, is the co-principal investigator for the project.

For over a decade, the Coptic Scriptorium project has developed open access to online resources for Coptic language and literature. The Coptic language is the last phase of the Egyptian language family, a direct descendant of the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Coptic texts and the study of Coptic linguistics are important for multiple academic disciplines and for the heritage community of Coptic Orthodox Christians who use the language for liturgy and their cultural identity.

Funded by $349,887 from an NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Implementation grant and a $15,568 matching grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships at OU Norman, the project will enable improvements to the user experience, expand the digital database of richly annotated texts in the classical dialect of the language and develop natural language tools and searchable, annotated, digitized corpora for additional dialects. 

“Indigenous Media Portal” led by Amanda Minks, Ph.D., associate professor in the Honors College and affiliate faculty in the Department of Native American Studies; Amanda Cobb-Greetham (Chickasaw), professor, Department of Native American Studies; Joshua Nelson (Cherokee), associate professor of English and affiliate faculty in the Department of Native American Studies; and Lina Ortega (Sac and Fox), associate curator of the Western History Collections and Native American studies librarian for OU Libraries.

Funded by $47,487 from the NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Foundations grant, the Indigenous Media Portal will be an interactive website developed at OU providing access to Indigenous media in collaboration with Tribal heritage communities. The project will incorporate historic photographs, radio, and other audio media starting with the OU Western History Collections, which contain invaluable oral histories, traditional singing, and photographs from nearly forty Tribes across the state.

The Indigenous Media Portal will also include new videos that contextualize the archival collections through the voices of Indigenous knowledge holders. Tribal partners and project leaders will choose materials appropriate for sharing in a publicly accessible platform and present them in ways that support community interests and broader public understanding. The Indigenous Media Portal will prioritize the self-representation of Oklahoma Tribal communities through their own voices, music and audiovisual media.

“Mother of the Waters: The Life and Death of the Glaciers of Bolivia’s Cordillera Real” led by Sarah Hines, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of History, Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences.

Hines received a $6,000 NEH Summer Stipend for her book project. “Mother of the Waters” interjects Indigenous perspectives into contemporary conversations on glacial retreat as an effect and symbol of global climate change. Policymakers are interested in tapping Indigenous knowledge to develop responses to the impacts of shrinking glaciers, but policies and studies often fail to account for long histories of ethnic oppression or the changing, diverse ways that Indigenous peoples have related to their environments.

This project traces Aymara Indigenous communities’ shifting relationships with glaciers in the Bolivian Andes from the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-1800s to the present as temperatures have risen and glaciers have receded. Drawing on archival records, oral histories, scientific studies, and ethnographic interviews, this study moves beyond simple narratives of harm or resilience to reveal the diverse ways that indigenous communities’ caretaking practices have evolved in response to changing climatic, social, and political conditions.