Lina Insana will study Italian American experiences through a National Endowment for the Humanities grant

Lina Insana, associate professor of Italian, is part of a project with the Senator John Heinz History Center and partners at West Virginia University that received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The $50,000 grant supports the Italian Diaspora Archive Resource Map (IDARM) project, which catalogues archival materials that document the Italian American experience in Western Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.

The grant is one of 33 new NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grants that will help preserve and expand public access to important historical records and humanities collections at archives, libraries and museums across the country.

IDARM is the first archival project of its kind in the fields of Italian American and Italian diaspora studies. This project identifies, catalogues and maps archival materials relating to the Italian diaspora in this region to make them more globally accessible to students, researchers and the public. The NEH grant will pave the way for the creation of a digital map where the institutions’ information, including representative samples of digitized materials, may be easily viewed and aggregated.