Ken Price, Hillegass University Professor in the Department of English, received funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to continue the development of the Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive. The grant will support focusing on records left in Cleveland where Chesnutt lived most of his life and thrived as a writer, businessman, and civil rights activist, according to Price, who is co-director of the archive.
The archive seeks to make Chesnutt's writings accessible to all. Writing in the years after Reconstruction, Chesnutt addressed topics including race, identity, violence, class, and familial and economic relations.
"What a lovely project!" one grant proposal reviewer wrote. "It has just a fantastic approach to community involvement and ownership. It manages to hit so many different areas—it collaborates across a wide range of institutions, it is led by an academic and has the support of [the university's] digital humanities expertise but is still deeply embedded in a community."
"This project's biggest strength is its efforts to incorporate community engagement," a second reviewer wrote, and a third added, "The collaboration with Cleveland-area organizations, as well as the strategies for promotion in scholarly and community conversations, shows a thoughtful approach to community and end-user engagement."
The project, housed at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, previously received funding from the NHPRC.
