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Wake Tech Receives Grant to Preserve Veterans Memories
RALEIGH, N.C. (June 1, 2016) - Wake Tech Community College has been awarded $99,673 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to collect Triangle veterans’ stories of military experience. The grant, the first Wake Tech has received from the NEH, will fund a project that incorporates veterans’ perspectives into courses in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
The grant is part of a $21.1 million investment NEH has made in humanities projects across the country. Wake Tech is the only community college in North Carolina to receive a grant during this round of NEH funding.
“This is an important project,” says Wake Tech President Dr. Stephen Scott, “and we are excited and proud to be a part of documenting veterans’ experiences.”
Dr. Barry Malone, administrative head of the Humanities Department, agrees: “We look forward to working with veterans and sharing their stories with the larger community.”
The project, America’s Wars: Individual Experience and Collective Memories, will begin in July 2016. It will include new curriculum material, a digitally-archived oral history, and guest lecturers. Veterans, historians, and faculty from Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC-Charlotte, and NC State will lead symposia on the nature of combat, the causes of wartime atrocities, and the social and cultural effects of war.
Dr. Jim Neilson, associate head of Wake Tech’s English department, says integrating ideas from the project into humanities courses is “a central strategy for teaching the realities of war, the moral questions it raises, and the ways it is shaped by cultural memory.”
The project will span U.S. armed conflict from the Civil War to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It aims to reach 4,000 students and aligns with the broader goals of humanities education: promoting cultural awareness and enhancing critical thinking.
