Next year, those interested will be able to learn and help create a more comprehensive record of U.S. Black history in a summer institute led by professors from Furman University and Clemson University.
Dr. Kaniqua Robinson
The institute, “Reconstructing the Black Archive: South Carolina as Case Study, 1739–1895,” will be led by Dr. Gregg Hecimovich, a Furman professor of English; Dr. Kaniqua Robinson, a Furman assistant professor of anthropology; Dr. Rhondda Thomas, the Clemson Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature; and Dr. Susanna Ashton, a Clemson professor of English.
“It's a complex thing because white history has made it difficult and tried to obscure the stories of Black history,” said Hecimovich. “The institute itself takes a set of scholars who created and developed tools for encountering the silences and gaps to recover Black history."
Hecimovich said the focus of the institute is train the next generation of scholars.
"You can't just go to the collected letters of Mark Twain," she said. "You have to go into what is preservable archives and dig, and then you have to dig into Black communities, oral histories, family records, these materials that aren't indexed and readily available because library collections weren't built that way.”
The three-week seminar scheduled to take place from June 18 through July 08, 2023, is funded by a $198,317 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). It is open to undergraduate faculty and a more limited number of “others whose work lies outside undergraduate teaching but who demonstrate that their participation will advance project goals and enhance their own professional work,” Hecimovich said in an email.
Applications will open Dec. 1, 2022, and close on March 3, 2023.
