The West Virginia University Humanities Center is pleased to announce and celebrate the recipients of its research grants for 2026-2027.
This year, the Humanities Center supported eight research projects and one team project. Research support grants provide support of up to $4,000 for individual researchers. Collaboration grants provide teams of three or more scholars with up to $15,000 to support a collaborative research project with a strong humanities focus.
The Humanities Center promotes a deeper understanding of all aspects of the human experience. Our mission is to expand perspectives, challenge assumptions, inspire the imagination, and support respectful, honest, and joyful programming, all with the goal of making our campus, our region, and the world, a place where all human beings can flourish. We are WVU’s main hub for humanities-focused research and through our competitive grants and fellowships program, we provide vital support to advance WVU’s noble research mission.
If this work is something that you believe in, consider being a financial supporter of the WVU Humanities Center. All of our work depends on private donors.
Research Support Grant Winners
Nina Assimakopoulos
School of Music
College of Creative Arts and Media
Professor Nina Assimakopoulos will use her research support grant to cover travel costs to visit rural regions of West Virginia and Virginia to enable critical field documentation, archival research, and oral history work necessary for the ongoing development of The New: Appalachian Resilience in the Land, River, and People of the New River Gorge, a feature-length documentary and companion soundtrack CD, uniting artists, scholars, and community voices in a profound collaboration. The New explores the deep relationships between land, water, labor, and culture that have shaped the New River Gorge region of West Virginia. More than a documentary film, the project functions as a creative humanities compendium—bringing together historical research, cultural memory, and artistic expression to illuminate the ways Appalachian communities understand place, identity, and resilience while expanding the possibilities of contemporary Appalachian storytelling.
Ben Bascom
Department of English
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Assistant Professor Ben Bascom will use his research support grant to conduct archival research at Cornell University for his second book, Eccentric Queers: Sexuality and Debility in the Nineteenth Century and to participate in a small and intense writing workshop at the University of Kentucky for scholars working on 19th century American literature. Bascom’s research project takes up issues about the circulation and institutionalization of lives considered deviant, pathological, problematic, or otherwise nonnormative. Bascom uses literature to tell this story because of how the imagination helps us tell stories that are otherwise difficult to narrate.
William Hal Gorby
Department of History
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Associate Professor Hal Gorby will use his research support grant to conduct archival research for his second book. His book project, tentatively titled West Virginia in the Age of Globalization, will focus on the ways West Virginians had to respond to the major shifts in the global economy beginning in the 1960’s, which by 2000 had dramatically altered the state’s major industrial economy. From a state dominated by coal mines, steel mills, glass houses, and other high wage, unionized employment, by 2000, the state’s economy was transformed. Gorby’s book will provide a detailed history of the shifts that occurred in the late 20th century. Gorby will conduct research at the West Virginia State Archives in Charleston, Marshall University Libraries and Special Collections, and the American Flint Glass Workers Archives in Weston.
Joseph Hodge
Department of History
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Professor Joseph Hodge will use his WVU Humanities Center Research Support Grant to support research travel to the United Kingdom in order to finish archival research for his second book. Between Empire and Development: The Ubiquitous Life and Careering of Arthur Hugh Bunting follows the life and career of Arthur Hugh Bunting, an internationally renowned tropical agronomist and agricultural botanist. Hodge uses Bunting’s career as a window into the wider world of international scientific cooperation, development, and conservation in the late colonial and early postcolonial era (1940-1990). It combines biography, the “new imperial history,” and recent research on network approaches to science and expertise to write a global history of development through the micro-narrative lens of the life history of an internationally renowned scientist.
Mary Ann Samyn
Department of English
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Professor Mary Ann Samyn will use funding from a WVU Humanities Center Research Support Grant to conduct research in Rome, Assisi, and surrounding regions of Italy for her eighth full-length collection of poetry, currently titled Come to Find Out. Her latest collection will include poems about “Saints and saints—the famous and familiar ones and the private and personal ones—and about their relics—not just the incorrupt bodies and chips of bone and other highly dramatic displays that we associate with Saints but also all those everyday objects—a pair of worn sandals, a writing desk, a rosary—that serve as reminders of regular human life coinciding with deep purpose. And when I think of relics, I think also of the objects I’ve kept to remember my parents, saints with a small “s,” for sure: my father’s old-fashioned wood-handled hairbrush; a stack of file cards where, ever the scientist, he recorded his blood pressure and heart rate; my mother’s handwritten notes about our family’s genealogy; a lake (or is it a sky?) scene she painted in her last years at a senior living facility. Why do I keep these things? Why do they mean so much? How can I tell you?” Samyn’s research trip will include visits many holy places and opportunities to view the relics of several Saints. 2026 is the 800th anniversary of the death of Saint Francis of Assisi. Assisi is also where the bodies and other relics of Saint Clare and of the newly canonized Saint Carlo Acutis are on display. While in Rome and the surrounding area, she will visit the papal basilicas of Saint Peter, Santa Maria Maggiore, San Paolo Fuori le Mura, and San Giovanni. Time permitting, she will visit several other churches in the region.
Devin Smart
Department of History
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Assistant Professor Devin Smart will use his research support grant to complete the research for his second book, Working the Water: Fishing and Extractive Industries in Kenya and the World. He will conduct archival at Oxford University and several other archives in London. Smart’s book examines the environmental and economic history of Kenya’s commercial fisheries during the twentieth century. This project is grounded in East Africa’s regional history, exploring how the transition to capitalism created new commercial fisheries that transformed Kenya’s food system, the working lives of fishers, and the ecology of the region’s lakes, rivers, and the Indian Ocean. Working the Water situates commercial fisheries into a larger global and comparative history of extractive industries, a perspective that has been shaped by Smart’s time working at WVU and living in Appalachia.
Florian Walsh
School of Music
College of Creative Arts and Media
Assistant Professor Florian Walsh will use his WVU Humanities Center research grant to conduct research in Norway and Sweden for his first book, Generic Outliers: Extreme Metal Across the Digital Divide. This book examines the intersection of extreme musical aesthetics and changing technology. Walsh will visit historically important record studios, interview key musicians and engineers, and gather archival materials. This data fills a gap in our understanding of how European metal production responded to US-pioneered digital production. This research grant funding will also help offset permission costs.
Judith Wasserman
Landscape Architecture Program
School of Community and Economic Development
Davis College of Agriculture and Natural Resources
Professor Judith Wasserman will use her WVU Humanities Center research grant to visit the Jens Jensen archives, located in the Bentley Historical Library archives at the University of Michigan. There, she will have the opportunity to study carefully Jensen’s drawings and writings focused on his institutional and hospital projects. Wasserman is especially interested in Jensen’s therapeutic landscapes in medical and institutional settings, where his designs feature native plants as healing elements. This visit and study will provide extensive new knowledge focused on his healing practices as a landscape architect. This research will inform a chapter of Wasserman’s book project, Designing Healthy Places, a manuscript under contract with Routledge, which examines the interface between health, wellness, and design strategies.
Collaboration Grant Winner
Nina Assimakopoulos and Team
School of Music
College of Creative Arts and Media
Professor Nina Assimakopoulos and her outstanding team of scholars, community partners, and organizations, including Dr. William H. Turner, Dr. Ted Olson, Raymond Thompson Jr., Eric Jordan, Carrie Klein, Michael Klein, Dr. Elessa Clay High, the New River Conservancy, the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, the West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture, and History, and others, will use their collaboration grant to create short, film modules for their feature length documentary, The New: Appalachian Resilience in the Land, River, and People of the New River Gorge. The modules allow portions of the larger project to be filmed, edited, and released as stand-alone short films that can circulate through film festivals and public screenings. Historically, documentation of the New River Gorge region has largely centered on industrial development, often overlooking the contributions of Indigenous communities, Black Appalachians, and women in the timber and coal frontier. Through humanities-driven research and artistic interpretation, The New uncovers these long-overlooked narratives, amplifying their voices alongside those of contemporary Appalachian storytellers, musicians, and artists.