It’s not every day that an English professor is rewarded for working to tear down stereotypes and reveal the true nature of a people’s culture. But a University professor recently received such an honor.
Katrina Powell, an English professor, won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a research project she is conducting using 70-year-old letters written by residents of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia to study their lifestyles.
NEH is a federally-funded program that offers support to individuals seeking to “advance research that contributes to scholarly knowledge or the general public’s understanding of the humanities.”
“Research in the humanities provides the foundation of scholarship,” said NEH Chairman Bruce Cole in a written statement. “With the Endowment’s support, NEH fellows and Faculty Research Award recipients will deepen our understanding of ourselves and our world to benefit scholars, students and lovers of knowledge for many years to come.”
The $40,000 fellowship Powell received will allow her to take a year off from teaching so she may further her research on her first book, titled “Rhetoric of Displacement: The Politics of Literacy in Shenandoah National Park Letters.”
“I found a collection of about 300 letters in a small archive in Virginia, which was only recently opened to the public,” Powell said. “The letters were written by mountain families to government officials in response to being forced off their land when the Shenandoah National Park was being created.”
Though Powell, who grew up in Virginia, said she thinks the national park is a valuable resource, she believes it came at a high cost.
“Ever since the park formed in the ‘30s, there has been a lot of bad blood between the families living in the mountain and government officials,” Powell said.
Powell said she will use the letters to examine literacy and education in the region during the 1930s.
“The people living in the mountains at that time were usually thought to be uneducated and illiterate,” Powell said. “I’ll be looking at the letters in a way to counter that stereotype.”
Powell said that in spite of their misspellings and grammatical errors, the letters reveal a beautiful voice unique to the Shenandoah Valley.
“They show a lot about how intelligent these people were even though they weren’t formally educated.”
Department of English Chair Anna Nardo said the department is pleased Powell was one of 195 researchers chosen for a fellowship in the humanities.
“There are very few granting agencies for scholarships in the humanities, so the competition is keen for such a prestigious award,” Nardo said.
Nardo said she thinks Powell’s work is a great contribution to American studies, and she is glad the NEH rewarded Powell for her research.
“This is just the kind of project that the NEH should be funding,” Nardo said.