TEAM PROJECTS MAKE STRIDES IN THE SUMMER

An individual wearing a jean jacket and glasses points a camera at an uneven cube-shaped slab of stone, sitting on a white background.

Welcome back to campus! Today we share a brief medley of summer activities by our Project Grant teams, who engaged locally and across the globe.

Retreats are often part of collaborative planning and a few teams held their own focused sessions in June. Black Washtenaw County gathered at Ann Arbor’s ZingTrain facility and included community partners. For the Ambivalence Project, a long-awaited writing retreat brought team members together for four productive days in Northport, Michigan.

In addition to a hybrid retreat, the Singing Justice team met weekly online, forging plans for their book project and ongoing research. The team’s “seminar recital” concept involves gathering data from audiences, and several such performances were held in conjunction with vocal music events in Michigan and Virginia.

Singing Justice team members taught and performed at SMTD’s “Singing Down the Barriers,” an institute presented for a hybrid audience of adult learners online and in-person.

Expanding the Reach of the Global Feminisms Project has been preparing oral history resources focused on Brazil, Peru, Italy, Japan, and Tanzania. In June, faculty collaborator Sueann Caulfield co-organized and presented at a conference of Brazilian project partners in Rio de Janiero.

International travels were pivotal to several projects. Team members with Centering the Northern Realms traveled for extensive fieldwork in Mongolia in June and July. Narrating Nubia collaborators built connections with African partners in Egypt and Sudan, and presented at conferences in Paris and Prague. Closer to home, the team’s work in El-Kurru was featured in the Kelsey Museum Newsletter (see p.10-15).

Heidi Hilliker photographs a museum object.

PhD student Heidi Hilliker visited the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in July to photograph an ancient offering table from the royal cemetery of El-Kurru. Her photos will be used by the Narrating Nubia team to create a 3D model of the artifact and ultimately to fabricate a replica.

Representatives of ReConnect/ReCollect traveled to Seattle in August to present at the annual conference of the Filipino American National Historical Society. The team also had a presence at the Kalayaan picnic in June, a large celebration organized by the Filipino American Community Council of Michigan.

Along with information about U-M’s Philippine collections, the ReConnect/ReCollect exhibit at Kalayaan 2022 included postcard giveaways, an interactive map of the Philippines, and a matching game.

We look forward to sharing more details and photos from these adventures as our collaborators return for a new semester and continue to move their projects forward!