Carleton College Receives National Endowment for the Humanities Grant

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded Carleton College a $25,000 focus grant to fund two week-long faculty seminars on the teaching of European studies. The project, titled “European Studies: Individual and Community,” was created to help faculty members reevaluate the place of European studies in Carleton’s curriculum. The seminars will encourage collaborative thinking by humanities faculty currently teaching courses on collaborative thinking and may lead to new interdisciplinary courses focused on Europe. Dana Strand, professor of French, is directing the project.

The goal of the project is to give students a productive approach to the study of European thought, culture and history by developing courses that address European themes and cut across national and chronological boundaries.
Twenty Carleton professors from several departments met in the first week-long seminar during winter break, where they read selected texts and discussed their current approaches to such issues as nationhood and citizenship, the formation and interplay of personal and group identities, and cultural continuity and change within a European context. The purpose of this first seminar was to assess how the seminar participants are currently addressing Europe in the classroom, to share current disciplinary insights on common issues and to reconsider unconscious assumptions about Europe.

A second seminar will be held next summer, during which participants will focus on the possibilities and problems of developing European studies within the Carleton curriculum. Faculty members will team up to present proposals for interdisciplinary courses.