This Institute for Higher Education Faculty funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities brings together faculty and advanced graduate students in the humanities whose research addresses traumatic and/or controversial memories and histories and relies on archival or museum collections to interpret them. We will host 25 participants and an interdisciplinary faculty team for a three-week residential program at Indiana University Bloomington, providing participants the opportunity to utilize campus and local community collections. Institute participants will learn ways to honor and respect identities and issues that have often been suppressed and misrepresented in collections. Most importantly, they will learn and develop practices to engage and sustain contact with traumatic and controversial collections without becoming overwhelmed or debilitated, so that they may share what they have learned with each other, their students, and the communities that they serve.
By the end of the institute, participants will develop techniques for engaging collections as sites for learning, healing, and growth despite painful encounters, to benefit themselves, community members, and their students. For their culminating project, participants will prepare a plan for trauma mitigation, care for self and others, and healing as connected to engagements with one or more of the collections they have identified. The institute will help form an interdisciplinary network of humanities scholars who can share materials, seek advice, collaborate, and provide mutual support, operating as a dispersed community of practice.
Higher education faculty members (tenured, tenure track, or non-tenured, including staff in university and college archives, museums, and libraries) and advanced graduate students who have reached candidacy in a PhD program or are in the final year of another terminal degree program are invited to apply.
