Proposal Development Grants 2017

Three research projects were awarded proposal development funding for work in May and June 2017.

Argentine Afrikaners: Interrogating Hybridity in a Unique Diasporic Community
This project will examine the practices of a unique settlement in Patagonia, Argentina, which presents an exceptional situation of cultural and linguistic contact between Afrikaans and Argentine-Spanish communities. By studying the archive of oral narratives both for their linguistic structures and in terms of their ideological content, the team will determine the nature and extent of linguistic hybridity between Afrikaans and Spanish in individual speakers. To preserve cultural history and language, the team will also create a multilingual archive and website (in English, Spanish, and Afrikaans) that would provide access to open-source applications containing video and sound clips, transcripts, and the history of the community.

Team Members: Nicholas Henriksen, PI, Assistant Professor, Romance Languages & Literatures; Andries Coetzee, Associate Professor, Linguistics; Lorenzo Garcia-Amaya, Assistant Professor, Romance Languages & Literatures; Ryan Szpiech, Associate Professor, Romance Languages & Literatures; Paulina Alberto, Associate Professor, History, & Romance Languages & Literatures; Katharine Jenckes, Associate Professor, Romance Languages & Literatures; Graduate students, including two close collaborators and one IT assistant (TBD); Undergraduate students: Mallory Fuller; Ella Deaton; Meghan Samyn.

The Gabii Digital Publication Collaboratory

This project is grounded in the publication of a series of “next generation monographs” reporting the results of excavations in the ancient Latin city of Gabii led by Dr. Nicola Terrenato and sponsored by the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology since 2007. Using these monographs as examples, the project will pair disciplinary experts with information scientists, scholars of rhetoric and composition, technologists, librarians and publishers from Michigan Publishing (including University of Michigan Press) to investigate the ways in which users engage with digital publications and improve the practice of digital publication in the humanities.

Team Members: Nicola Terrenato, PI, Esther B. Van Deman Professor of Classical Studies; Naomi Silver, Associate Director, Sweetland Center for Writing; David Stone, Associate Research Scientist, Kelsey Museum of Archaeology; Kentaro Toyama, W. K. Kellogg Professor of Community Information, School of Information; Charles Watkinson, Associate University Librarian (Publishing), University Library; Graduate students: Zoe Jenkins, Classical Studies; Matthew Naglak, Classical Studies; Tyler Johnson, Classical Studies; Adrienne Raw, English Language and Literature; and one member from the School of Information TBD).

 

On the Emergence and Development of Three Atlantic Creoles: A Linguistic and Historical Perspective on Haitian, Sranan and Cape Verdean
This project will examine a set of early creole texts written in the 16th and 18th centuries and the historical context in which they were written. Specifically, the team will bring together historians and linguists to study the earliest written records of Haitian Creole, (a French-based creole), Sranan Creole (an English-based creole) and Cape Verdean Creole (a Portuguese-based creole), and draw a fuller picture of the linguistic and historical insights that these texts have to offer in addressing the following questions: What did a given creole look like in the early stages of development? Who were the original founding populations and what were the languages in contact? Who were the early agents of creolization: adults and/or children? What was the socio-historical context in which the creole developed?

Team Members: Marlyse Baptista, PI, Professor, Linguistics and DAAS; Sarah Thomason, Professor, Linguistics; Jean Hébrard, Professor, History/Humanities Institute; Graduate Students: Ariana Bancu, Linguistics; Yourdanis Sedarous, Linguistics; Andrew Walker, History; Undergraduate Students: Naomi Gottschalk, Linguistics.

Image: David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, 2010), courtesy of “Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database,” a digital library research initiative at Emory University, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute of Harvard University and the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation of the University of Hull.