Renata Kobetts Miller and Thomas Peele lead the NEH-funded project establishing an innovative digital humanities minor at CCNY.
The City College of New York Division of Humanities and the Arts is the recipient of a $150,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Initiatives Grant to develop and pilot an innovative curriculum for a minor in digital humanities. The grant is over three years.
“This is a tremendously important and timely award that will support our ongoing efforts to build a compelling 21st century humanities curriculum and that will fuel vital DH faculty research,” said Erec R. Koch, Dean of Humanities and the Arts at City College.
Students in the program will augment their traditional humanistic study with an array of techniques in performing critical analysis and problem-solving, two of the central values of a humanities education. One of the courses in the program will create public-facing digital resources on the history of slavery and antislavery in New York City, including digital mapping of the city’s slaveholding and enslaved populations. Others will engage students in digitizing, annotating, and mapping unique texts in the City College Cohen Library’s archives on student activism or on CCNY founder and public higher education pioneer Townsend Harris. In addition, Capstone research experiences will allow students to work with collections such as the George Lois Archive on campus, the City College Art Collection, and the Litoff Jazz LP Collection.
Such instruction, both within and outside of conventional classrooms, will increase students’ inquiry-driven and experiential learning in the humanities.
Humanities and Arts Deputy Dean Renata Kobetts Miller and Center for Teaching and Learning Director Thomas Peele serve as co-principal investigators on the project, leading an interdisciplinary team that includes faculty in History, English, Art History, Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures, Media and Communication Arts, Computer Science, the City College Libraries, and the Dominican Studies Institute. The grant also establishes a partnership with the MA Program in Digital Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
About the City College of New York
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided a high-quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. CCNY embraces its position at the forefront of social change. It is ranked #1 by the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights out of 369 selective public colleges in the United States on the overall mobility index. This measure reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at CCNY can move up two or more income quintiles. In addition, the Center for World University Rankings places CCNY in the top 1.8% of universities worldwide in terms of academic excellence. Labor analytics firm Emsi puts at $1.9 billion CCNY’s annual economic impact on the regional economy (5 boroughs and 5 adjacent counties) and quantifies the “for dollar” return on investment to students, taxpayers and society. At City College, more than 16,000 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity and scholarship. CCNY is as diverse, dynamic and visionary as New York City itself. View CCNY Media Kit.