The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded approximately $80,000 to two professors in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Mark Evan Bonds, Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Music, received an NEH fellowship to complete Music as Autobiography, a monograph examining the concept of music as a form of self-expression. Seth Kotch, assistant professor of digital humanities in the department of American studies, received an NEH Digital Projects for the Public grant to create an online archive of broadcasts from noncommercial and African American radio stations during the civil rights era.
“Any work of art necessarily bears at least some trace of its creator’s personality,” Bonds wrote in the proposal for his project. “Yet not until the 18th century did critics and philosophers begin to wrestle with the question of how a composer’s personal feelings and innermost self might manifest themselves in any given work of music.”
He expects to complete preliminary research for Music as Autobiography by next fall.
Kotch is co-director of Media and the Movement: Journalism, Civil Rights and Black Power in the American South, an oral history project that UNC’s Southern Oral History Program in the Center for the Study of the American South is conducting in collaboration with Duke University. “As we interviewed deejays and staffers at major North Carolina activist radio stations [for Media and the Movement] … we learned of their troves of recordings, stacked in boxes, in attics and basements,” Kotch and co-director Joshua Davis of Duke the two wrote in their grant proposal. “As we celebrate the civil rights milestones of the 1960s, we grow aware, too, that crucial sound recordings of the movement’s legacies are gravely endangered.”
However, digitizing these fragile reels of tape is easier said than done. The two researchers will work in conjunction with the Digital Innovation Lab to repurpose the audio.
The Making Civil Rights Radio Digital project is expected to be completed in August 2015.
The NEH announced its latest round of awards Dec. 8. The federal agency provided funding for more than 200 humanities projects across the nation.
