UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Four high-profile faculty-led projects within Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts received critical funding boosts courtesy of a recent round of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

The grant recipients are the Hemingway Letters Project; the Matson Museum of Anthropology; Tawny Holm, head of the Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies (CAMS) and associate professor of CAMS and Jewish studies; and Elizabeth Kadetsky, professor of English specializing in creative writing.

The Hemingway Letters Project received a three-year NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations grant worth $282,520, plus $150,000 in federal matching funds. That will fund the seventh, eighth and ninth volumes of “The Letters of Ernest Hemingway,” which will eventually produce 17 volumes of the American literary icon’s more than 6,000 letters written between 1907 and 1961.

Established in 2002, the Letters Project is led by Sandra Spanier, general editor and Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Women's Studies, and Verna Kale, associate editor and associate research professor of English.

Earlier this year, Cambridge University Press published the sixth volume of Hemingway letters, and the project recently received the Association for Documentary Editing’s 2024 Lyman H. Butterfield Award for “exceptional contributions to the field of documentary editing.”  

The next three volumes will cover the period from July 1936 to December 1943, “a particularly eventful time in world history and in Hemingway’s life and work,” according to Spanier. Specifically, the NEH funding will help support student involvement in the project by graduate research assistants and undergraduate interns, as well as research travel by project scholars to special collections libraries and institutional archives that hold Hemingway letters and other original documents.

“We are honored by this recognition of the significance and quality of our ongoing effort to publish the authoritative scholarly edition of the collected letters of one of the most influential writers of the 20th century,” Spanier said. “This is the seventh three-year NEH grant we have received since 2005. This support has been very important in launching and sustaining this long-term effort, enabling us to keep up a steady pace of publication.”

The Matson received a $9,333 Preservation Assistance Grant for Smaller Institutions that funded a consulting conservator who examined the condition of the museum’s collection of over 800 global textiles in advance of its move to the new Susan Welch Liberal Arts Building.

The grant was secured by James Doyle, associate research professor of anthropology and director of the 31-year-old museum, which is devoted to the study of human culture and supports teaching, research and outreach initiatives within the Department of Anthropology.

“As we prepare to debut the museum’s new state-of the art galleries and storage spaces, the NEH-funded conservation assessment provided crucial information on the future care of its important collection of garments created by talented makers from all over the world,” Doyle said. “We look forward to displaying some of these textiles for the first time as we expand access to the holdings for scholarship, learning opportunities and community engagement.”

Holm and her colleague, University of Notre Dame faculty member Dan Machiela, received a $50,000 Collaborative Research grant for their project, "The Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls at the Crossroads of Empire: Negotiating Jewish Life under Foreign Rule,” which is focused on how the Aramaic texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls interpret and reinterpret Jewish experiences under foreign rule during the first millennium BCE.

While the approximately 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls were written primarily in Hebrew, some of the texts are in Aramaic, then a commonly spoken language across the ancient Near East that was “uniquely positioned to be the language of intercultural communication due to its use in imperial bureaucracies,” according to Holm.

“Unlike the Hebrew scrolls, those in Aramaic have been largely unexplored as a resource for understanding ancient Judaism, yet they are particularly creative in describing Jewish life under the powerful Persian and Hellenistic empires, while also reinterpreting experiences under the earlier Egyptian, Assyrian and Babylonian empires,” Holm said.

Specifically, the NEH grant will help fund two collaborative workshops. The first will take place at Notre Dame in summer 2025, and the second in Munich in summer 2026. Participants will include scholars of Aramaic and Hebrew, as well as an interdisciplinary group of experts who work on other ancient Near Eastern languages and literatures — Greek, Akkadian, Old and Middle Persian, Ethiopic among them — and specialists in Levantine and Classical archaeology.

“The outcome of this project will be a panoptic presentation of the ancient Near Eastern imperial enterprises — Assyrian, Babylonian, Achaemenid, Egyptian and Hellenistic — as seen through the lens of the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls,” Holm said. “The two workshops funded by the NEH will result in a collective volume but will also represent the first stage in what Dan and I hope to continue as a larger digital project that would allow for public access and interactive exploration of the cultural contexts of the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls.”

Kadetsky received a $60,000 Public Scholars grant for her current non-fiction book project chronicling her journey to trace the whereabouts of the Tanesar sculptures, a series of sixth-century stone figures, most of them mother goddesses that are also called matrikas, that were stolen from a temple in southwestern Rajasthan, India, during the early 1960s and ended up in the collections of high-profile art collectors and several prominent museums. Last year, she published an essay on the sculptures in The American Scholar.

Public Scholars grants support non-fiction book projects by scholars whose work is geared to a general audience.

“The operative concept, as I see it, is translating complex topics without watering them down, but presenting them through storytelling and an accessible, artful and narrative writing style,” Kadetsky said. “Some of my favorite research-driven non-fiction books have been supported by the grant over years past.”

The grant is often given to independent scholars who work outside of academia. Since that doesn’t apply to Kadetsky, she plans to give the grant money back to Penn State while taking advantage of the leave from teaching she’ll be afforded for the 2025-26 academic year. She previously received two Fulbright awards to facilitate her research on the project.

Kadetsky said she will use the time to “make sense of my voluminous field notes and archival research, and to write.” She also plans to travel to several American archives to examine correspondence by some of the book’s central characters — primarily museum curators and art dealers.

She said she hopes to have the book completed by the end of the grant year.

“The idea began as a fairly black and white exploration of an incidence of East-West exploitation,” Kadetsky said. “Spending several years with the material has enabled me to complicate and deepen my thinking on the topic of who owns objects. The result is now an interrogation of the antiquities repatriation movement as much as it questions the ethics of the museum establishment.”