For immediate release October 19, 2009

Media contact: Jacquie Lucy 443-840-4668

CCBC professor wins grant to co-direct National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute
Native Cultures of Western Alaska and the Pacific Northwest Coast – June 13- July 12, 2010

Baltimore County, Md. – George L. Scheper, Humanities coordinator in the School of Liberal Arts at the Community College of Baltimore County, Maryland, and Laraine Fletcher, chairman of the Anthropology department at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York, have won a grant of $227,196 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to co-direct a Summer Institute, Native Cultures of Western Alaska and the Pacific Northwest Coast. This Summer Institute, sponsored by the Community College Humanities Association, of which CCBC is an institutional member, will be held on-site at locations in Alaska and British Columbia from June 13 through July 12, 2010.

Even though NEH funded only seven Institutes nationally this year, Scheper and Fletcher were again chosen as recipients for their eighth NEH Institute grant since 2000. Faculty members from any Humanities discipline at community colleges or four-year colleges in the U.S. are eligible to apply. Twenty-four faculty Fellows will be selected to participate. Participants’ grant support includes all internal travel, lodgings and admissions for the four weeks of the project. Participants are responsible for their travel to and from the Summer Institute and for meals and personal expenses.

A roster of internationally known scholars and Native artists will conduct seminars and field study experiences focusing on the Yup’ik of Pacific Alaska, the Tlingit and Tsimshian of Southeast Alaska, the Haida of Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) and the Kwakwaka’wakw [Kwakiutl] of Alert Bay off the coast of Vancouver Island. Throughout the Institute visiting faculty and Native artists will offer seminars and conduct on-site study visits to museums, local heritage centers, and Native communities directed at understanding cultural history and contemporary concerns about cultural continuities and change, particularly in the areas of artistic and craft traditions, visual culture, identity and self representation, oral traditions, cultural performance, and property and repatriation issues of First Nations peoples.

For an information packet or to apply for a faculty Fellowship, visit www.ccha-assoc.org/nwcoastcultures10/index.html or contact David A. Berry, Executive Director of the Community College Humanities Association, by email at berry@essex.edu or call 973-877-3204.

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