Pitt has three new National Endowment for the Humanities awardees

Three Pitt faculty members have received new grants for their research from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grants are among 238 the federal agency announced last month.

Adam Cilli, an assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, will receive funding for a book examining efforts in Black communities to develop crime reduction programs and reform urban criminal justice systems during the Great Migration, in which millions of Black people moved north and west from Southern U.S. states from the 1910s to the 1970s. 

A grant to Mrinalini Rajagopalan, associate professor and chair of the Department of History of Art and Architecture in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, will support work on an article and essay about the Shah Jahan Mosque. Rajagopalan’s work will explore the larger architectural and political context of the construction of the mosque, built in 1889 in Woking, England, as the first purpose-built mosque in the U.K.

Annette Vee, an associate professor of English in the Dietrich School, will use the funding to write two essays looking at the use of technological writing tools. Her work will stretch from 18th-century “androids” to current large language models like ChatGPT.

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy and other areas of the humanities.