For your application to be successful, it will be critical to articulate the significance of your project to knowledge on the humanities. The following are excerpts from successful applicants, which may serve as a guide for how you can explain the significance of your project.
From 2016-2017 subvention grant winner Jessica Frazier, for her manuscript “Women’s Antiwar Diplomacy during the Viet Nam War Era”
Evaluating this alliance between American and Vietnamese women reveals an unusual story. Scholars studying women’s international activism and transnational feminism have often identified cultural imperialism or attempts to impose American ways on others. This study, however, brings to light an instance when U.S. women crossed geopolitical boundaries to criticize American Cold War culture, not to promote it. U.S. women denounced the U.S.’s campaign to contain communism (and spread democracy) and solicited Vietnamese women’s opinions on how to end the U.S. war. Unlike the many histories of the Vietnam War that end with an explanation of why the memory of the war still divides U.S. society, by focusing on linkages across national boundaries, my work illuminates a significant moment in history when women formed effective transnational relationships on genuinely cooperative terms.
From 2016-2017 research grant winner Erik Loomis, for his project “From Timber Capital to Portlandia: The Transformation of the Pacific Northwest, 1960-2010”
My work, and this chapter specifically, touch on key questions for the humanities. I am deeply motivated by centering the human experience in issues traditionally dominated by scientific narratives and by exploring the cultural, social, and political implications of environmental change. My work places the experiences of the working class and average citizens into larger environmental and cultural debates to illustrate the complexity of how natural resource policy affects different constituencies in the Northwest. I also aim to influence debates over how to bring environmental and working-class communities together to build alliances to create a more sustainable planet.