Humanities Summer Stipends
Celebrating Faculty Research: Center for Humanitites 2026 Summer Stipend Awardees
The Center for Humanities awards $4000 summer research stipends to five Virginia Tech faculty in support of their work and commitment to advancing the humanities.
Title: "A Venetian King Solomon: Andrea Loredan’s Art Collection and Palace in Renaissance Venice"
My project involves a book manuscript tentatively titled "A Venetian King Solomon: Andrea Loredan’s Art Collection and Palace in Renaissance Venice." It is the first book-length monograph to critically reconstruct the collection and display of art objects acquired by the Venetian nobleman Andrea di Nicolò Loredan (1450–1513). Focusing on Loredan's paintings and sculptures housed in his grandiose palace on the Grand Canal, it argues that the nobleman cultivated collecting and display practices equating him with the legendary Old Testament King Solomon, renowned as a patron of the arts and architecture since antiquity.
Jason A. Higgins, Ph.D | Author, Editor, Historian
Title: "Revisiting the 'Spitting Image': Collective Memories of Betrayal among Vietnam Veterans"
This project explores collective memories, personal traumas, and enduring myths about the Vietnam War through an analysis of 15 oral histories collected with Virginia Tech alumni who served in Vietnam. My proposed research article will analyze and contextualize homecoming narratives, experiences of disabilities, and reflections of U.S. military veterans on war, protests, and the military-civilian divide today.
Title: Legends of Stone Land
Based on a book by poet and humanitarian Maria Boris-Ciobanu, the short documentary film Legends of Stone Land preserves and uplifts Romania’s folk storytelling potential for global audiences by connecting historical writings and present day oral history interviews with the specific mythologies and landscapes of the Rosia Montana region of the Apuseni Mountains.
Title: "An Aesthetics of Resistance: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and the Russian Invasions of Ukraine"
This project examines the convergence of cultural resistance and cinematic philosophy in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Sergei Parajanov. Drawing on the traditions and spiritual practices of the Ukrainian Carpathians, the film develops a distinctive experience of consciousness, time, and subjectivity that engages central questions in phenomenology and contemporary philosophy of mind while articulating a powerful vision of Ukrainian cultural identity. Long regarded as a masterpiece of Ukrainian cinema and a seminal work of the “poetic cinema” movement that emerged in the later decades of the USSR, the film has acquired renewed significance following the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and the escalation of the war in 2022.
Title: "Maize Always: The Central Mexican Nahua-Cintli Relationship in the Sixteenth Century"
Edward Anthony Polanco is drafting two chapters for his second book project. "Maize Always" unearths the importance “in cintli,” (maize or corn; Zea mays) had for sixteenth-century Nahuas (Indigenous peoples with communities in Mexico and Central America) as tlacualli (sustenance), pahtli (medicine), and ilwit (ceremony). Moreover cintli served to maintain community and self-identity in the face of settler colonialism.