NEH Grant to Help Explore New Climate Communication Major

Emerson won a nearly $50,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to develop a new interdisciplinary undergraduate major in climate and sustainability communication.

The project funded by the NEH Humanities Connections Planning Grant will be directed by four faculty members from the School of Communication, the School of the Arts, and the Marlboro Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies: Professor Nejem Raheem, chair of Marketing Communication; Christine Casson, Senior Writer-in-Residence in Writing, Literature and Publishing; and Associate Professor Jon Honea, Director of the Honors Program, and Assistant Professor Rituparna Mitra, both of the Marlboro Institute.

The four faculty members will bring together faculty from across the College to work on curriculum development and experiential learning in relation to communication around climate and sustainability, as well as convene student focus groups this fall. The project will culminate in a new major proposal to the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee in Spring 2025.

Emerson’s $49,978 grant was awarded through the NEH’s Humanities Connections program, which seeks to expand the role of the humanities in in undergraduate education by encouraging partnerships between humanities faculty and their counterparts in other areas of study. This year, Humanities Connections received 106 applications and made 18 awards totaling $1.7 million. I

NEH announced on April 16 that overall, it would support 238 humanities projects nationwide. The awards are for the preservation of historical collections, humanities exhibitions and documentaries, scholarly research and, like the Emerson grant, curriculum research.

For more information about this and other fellowships and grants Emerson faculty have won, visit the Office of Research and Creative Scholarship (ORCS) Blog.