UNO Collaboration Awarded Prestigious Mellon Grant

Four faculty members from UNO’s College of Arts and Sciences will highlight the role of the literary imagination in making and remaking worlds and societies with the support of a grant from the Mellon Foundation. The “Tell All the Truth” project aims to increase understanding across economic, racial, and ethnic divides in the metropolitan community of Omaha by providing meaningful opportunities for collaborative truth-telling through diverse forms of literary expression informed by critical analysis of the nation’s intersectional histories.

Kristin Girten, Ph.D., assistant vice chancellor for Arts and Humanities in the Office of Research and Creative Activity and associate professor of English, is the principal investigator on the project. Collaborators include Alecia Anderson, Ph.D., associate professor of Sociology; Danielle Battisti, Ph.D., chair of the department of History; and Tanushree Ghosh, Ph.D., associate professor of English.

With an interdisciplinary team comprised of faculty from English, History, and Sociology, Girten says the project has been strategically designed to draw benefits from each field.

“We look forward to measuring the beneficial impacts our ‘Tell All the Truth’ project has in the classroom and in the Omaha community at large so that others — locally as well as nationally — may take inspiration from our project and what we learn along the way,” Girten says.

"In the History Department, we're really excited to have the opportunity to deepen our relationships with members of the Omaha community,” Battisti says. “We are also hopeful that this project will afford faculty and students alike the chance to pursue public history projects. Being able to share what we are doing in the classroom with members of the community is so important to all of us at UNO."

Of the 280 applications to the Mellon Foundation’s Higher Learning Call for Concepts, the UNO project was one of 26 to be chosen. The project is a perfect example of UNO’s metropolitan mission to be a university with both strong academic values and significant relationships with our community that transforms and improves lives.

Ghosh says the Mellon Foundation grant will enable more meaningful engagements with Omaha’s complex history and present-day realities. The humanities disciplines are uniquely positioned to showcase diverse perspectives, foster community dialogues, and shape public cultures, she adds.

“As an educator, I am invested the university’s collective mission of forming responsible citizens who think critically and rigorously, while acknowledging their interconnectedness to local and global communities,” Ghosh says.

Challenges and opportunities exist to demonstrate the ongoing value of the humanities — and their importance to the public good — in the classroom and within our communities. Girten says that the humanities are “unparalleled in their ability to inspire students’ intellectual curiosity while also fostering their awareness of the ethical contexts and dimensions of their learning.”

“This public humanities grant from the Mellon Foundation will allow us to expand UNO’s capacity to fulfill this public promise as we give students and community members opportunities to use the humanities to help explore and confront inequities in our city through the creative telling of truths,” Girten says.

The Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest funder of the arts, culture and humanities, and the open call invited proposals from institutions exploring three distinct topical categories.

Learn more about the Mellon Foundation and the other grantees.