While developing the geographic expansion, leaders of the project are
also continuing a focus on the Philadelphia region, where many of the
earliest conventions took place, including the very first at
Philadelphias Mother Bethel AME Church in 1830.
The hope, Foreman said, is that
Philadelphia and the Delmarva area will form a core mid-Atlantic hub for
the project, working with new satellite partners in the Midwest and
elsewhere.
Other initiatives being planned with support from the new grant
include outreach efforts to increasingly put history into public view,
Foreman said, and to enhance opportunities for the project to work with
visual and creative artists by attracting new Mellon-funded arts
fellows.
A new low-residency summer program will bring a media specialist in
digital humanities to UD this year to work with the CCP team and the
community.
By bringing specialists to campus, we want to share leadership
opportunities and also bring visibility to what were doing here, Casey
said. They can teach us things, and also learn from us.
The CCP began in 2012 with an assignment Foreman gave to one of her
graduate classes, asking each student to choose a delegate from the
convention they were reading and create an online profile that included
historic images and data visualization. Students and librarians
continued as project leaders, adding digital exhibits, a robust
curriculum and transcription options on the website that became the
Colored Conventions Project.
In the years since, the project has partnered with the UD Library on
several initiatives and has reached thousands of students across the
country who engage in original research through CCPs national teaching
partners.
"The Colored Conventions Project has provided our students and
hundreds of others at schools across the country a wonderful opportunity
to engage with historical materials both in Special Collections and in
Library-supported databases, said Carol A. Rudisell, a librarian in the
Reference and Instructional Services Department of UDs Library,
Museums and Press, who works with CCP. She noted that
transcribe-a-thons to mark Frederick Douglass Day have been held at
Morris Library, opening its doors to people who have historically felt
excluded from campus.
Support from the Mellon Foundation
should further the growth of black public humanities and digital
scholarship, and the library is very happy to collaborate with the CCP
on this new project," Rudisell said.
CCP has been honored by the National Endowment for the Humanities,
which named it one of the 50 essential projects the agency has
supported, the American Studies Association and the Modern Language
Association, which awarded CCP its Prize for a Bibliography, Archive or
Digital Project.
The generous support from the Mellon Foundation is a wonderful
endorsement of the important work the project accomplishes, said Lauren
Petersen, interim associate dean for the humanities in the College of
Arts and Sciences.
This interdisciplinary project is highly collaborativewith partners
both within the University and across the nationand serves as a model
for the public humanities as it bridges rigorous archival research,
teaching in the classroom and community building outside the classroom,
Petersen said. The University of Delaware extends its gratitude to the
Mellon Foundation.