Professors Jean Lutes and Hezekiah Lewis win a GRASP award: Black Women Writers Video Project
Jean Lutes and Hezekiah Lewis, associate professor in Communication, received a two-year $24,000 grant from the new GRASP program in CLAS to continue work on a series of short videos designed to make early Black women writers more accessible to K-12 teachers.
The video project involves selecting under-studied texts by 18th-, 19th, and early 20th-century African American women; recruiting contemporary Black women educators to read those texts and talk briefly what those texts mean to them personally; producing short videos – no more than 10 minutes each – designed for K-12 classroom use; and making the videos available and freely accessible online, along with accompanying explanatory materials.
The videos will be made available on the Just Teach One-Early African American Print initiative on the American Antiquarian Association website.
This video series is part of Taught by Literature: Recentering Black Women Intellectuals, a collaborative, public-facing humanities project co-founded in 2021 by Jean Lutes and two scholars from outside Villanova: Denise Burgher (senior team leader, Center for Black Digital Research, Penn State) and Brigitte Fielder (associate professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison). They work with a student team of one graduate student (Matt Villanueva) and three undergraduate students (Cynthia Choo, Jenine Hazlewood, and Adrianna Ogando).
Three videos have already been filmed: Crystal Lucky, associate dean and professor of English, reading Sojourner Truth's 1851 "Aren't I a Woman" speech in the Connelly Center; Shaquita Smith, social studies curriculum specialist with the School District of Philadelphia, reading Alice Dunbar-Nelson's 1922 article "Negro Literature for Negro Pupils" in a classroom at Constitution High in Philadelphia; and 2022 MacArthur Fellow Gabrielle Foreman – Founding Co-Director, Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk; Founding Director, The Colored Conventions Project; Professor of English, African American Studies, and History; The Paterno Family Chair of Liberal Arts, Penn State University –reading the preface to Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) in Mendel Hall.
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