The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded Knox College a $248,000 grant to expand students’ opportunities through the immediate creation of humanities-based immersive domestic study programs.

Each program will consist of a two- to four-week immersive, intercultural and, in many cases, interlingual course for Knox students in summer 2022. 

“These new domestic programs represent a re-orientation of Knox’s study abroad and cross-cultural educational opportunities, which have been hit hard because of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic,” said Knox President C. Andrew McGadney. “Congratulations to our team of educators at Knox that developed these innovative programs, which will provide our students with unique immersive study experiences.”

Provost and Dean of the College Michael A. Schneider is the grant project administrator of Knox’s NEH-funded project, titled “Local Contexts, Global Connections: Revitalizing Immersive Cultural and Language Study at Home.”

“The purpose of the project is to infuse the value of study abroad into domestic immersive experiences,” said Schneider. “Because of the support from the grant, we’re able to experiment with entirely new ideas and programs and consider their value for study abroad in the future.”

In the grant proposal, Schneider noted that the decline of travel—especially international travel—during the pandemic “has dealt a stunning blow to higher education.”

“This impact has been felt perhaps most acutely in humanities education,” Schneider noted. “In addition to the loss of in-person experiences in theatre, music, and literature and poetry, nearly all fields highly dependent on language study, cross-cultural engagement, and international and area studies—all hallmarks of the Knox education—have suffered disproportionately.”

Knox faculty will be deeply involved with “Local Contexts, Global Connections.” The projects reflect faculty members’ “ongoing engagement and expertise around the nature of our simultaneously local and global communities in the 21st century,” the proposal stated. “Their talents will be redeployed to confront the consequences of the pandemic for our students while providing direct encounters with these issues.”

One set of projects will engage directly with immigrant communities in the Galesburg area, while another set will help students explore the meaning and consequences of diversity itself, and a third set will engage students conceptually to wrestle with issues of participation and representation in U.S. society. Additional details are expected to be announced soon.

ABOUT KNOX COLLEGE

Knox College and the city of Galesburg, Ill., were founded by a group of pioneers from upstate New York, led by the Rev. George Washington Gale, after whom the city was named. The Illinois Legislature approved Knox College's charter on February 15, 1837. Among the members of the General Assembly was Abraham Lincoln, who would later rise to national prominence in the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates, one of which was held at Knox's Old Main building. Today, Old Main is the sole remaining site from the historic debates. A nationally ranked liberal arts college, Knox has 1,200 students from 45 states and 49 countries, more than 60 courses of study, and 99 majors and minors. Knox also is one of the colleges listed in the book "Colleges That Change Lives" by former New York Times education editor Loren Pope.

ABOUT THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.

Read the full statement of awards from NEH here.