Seven University of Iowa faculty will pursue creative and scholarly projects across a range of disciplines, thanks to the support of the Arts and Humanities Initiative (AHI).

The Office of the Vice President for Research backs AHI, a competitive, internally reviewed grant program that supports scholars in the humanities or creative, visual, and performing arts. AHI provides up to $7,500 for a standard grant, $10,000 for a major conference, and $30,000 for a major project grant.

“For more than two decades, AHI has been a cornerstone in supporting scholars across the arts and humanities at the University of Iowa,” said Kristy Nabhan-Warren, associate vice president for research, professor, and V.O. and Elizabeth Kahl Figge Chair of Catholic Studies. “These grants provide essential funding that empowers scholars to do transformative work in their fields.”

The fall 2024 winners are:

Major Project Grant

Katina Lillios, professor of anthropology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) 

Making Visible the Invisible Histories of the Nabão Valley, Portugal

Lillios will lead an interdisciplinary team of students, faculty, and staff from the US and Portugal as they use remote sensing to uncover communities that lived in the Nabão Valley of central Portugal between the Neolithic (4000–3000 BCE) and medieval period (1200-1600 CE). The team will investigate Agroal, a hilltop settlement with Bronze Age (2200-1500 BCE) and medieval occupations, that Lillios had previously excavated in the 1980s. Remote sensing will help the team identify otherwise invisible architecture from the early Bronze Age and Medieval period. Architecture of the Bronze Age will help us understand how communities reorganized after a major climate event around 2200 BCE, and Medieval structures identified will clarify the function of the site and its relationship to urban centers. The team will also survey for megaliths, Neolithic burial structures, in the municipality of Ourém to develop a fuller understanding of the diverse ways Neolithic communities shaped their landscape for ritual purposes. The findings will support external funding applications and help guide local initiatives for cultural or ecological tourism.

Major Conference Grant

Katy Ambrose, assistant professor of horn, School of Music, CLAS

Mid-North Horn Workshop

Ambrose will spearhead the Mid-North Horn Workshop, which will take place at the UI School of Music March 14-16, 2025. This conference will invite French horn students, amateurs, and professionals from International Horn Society’s (IHS) Mid-North region to share research, perform, compete, and commune. World-class musicians will offer featured performances while students will participate in competitions and masterclasses. Professors will present research in the form of both lectures and recitals, and all attendees will have the opportunity to perform in large horn choirs. The IHS Mid-North Region, which encompasses Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wisconsin, offers few fulltime professional music opportunities scattered across a handful of symphony orchestras and military ensembles. The workshop will offer hundreds of horn players across the region access to performance and pedagogy more readily available to musicians in urban areas.

Standard Grants

Jennifer Kayle, professor of dance, CLAS

Ageing Virtuosity

Kayle will conduct new research as a choreographer and featured performer in a screen dance directed by Tori Lawrence, award-winning dance filmmaker. Combining two media that are unfriendly to ageing, Kayle will explore how ageing and maturity become visible (and valued) in dance and on screen. Also starring in the film will be the Arizona desert, a place where flora and fauna, like the ageing dancer, make efficient use of the available resources. In addition to showing a full version of their work at film festivals, Kayle and Lawrence will present a re-edited collage of clips through individual “viewer boxes,” each featured within a designed gallery installation. After testing choreographic methods that support all dancers who wrestle with limitations, Kayle will consider the outcomes of the project in a new scholarly article. 

Anna Morrison, assistant professor of instruction of cinematic arts, CLAS

Avalanche

Morrison will produce Avalanche, the final short narrative film in a trilogy about madness and motherhood. She also produced the preceding films, Toothache (2023) and Mammoth (2024), with support from the University of Iowa. Film and video production faculty and graduate students will collaborate with Morrison on every stage of the production. The film follows Martha, a bereft single mother, who takes her daughter Dahlia to a cabin on strange lake, where Martha grapples with grief, single parenthood, and after an encounter with a bear, the connection between the female body and the wild. Morrison plans to screen the complete trilogy at FilmScene after completing a festival run. 

Stephen Warren, professor of history, CLAS

Mino Bimadiziiwin: Rediscovering the Indigenous Foodways of the Great Lakes

Warren will explore Mino Bimadiziiwin, or “life in the fullest sense, life in the sense of longevity, health, and freedom from misfortune,” a concept intimately tied to ancestral foodways among the Anishinaabe-speaking peoples of the Great Lakes. For these Indigenous peoples, the good life is built on practices that allow humans and nature to work in cooperation, such as harvesting wild rice, tapping maple sugar trees, spearing walleye, and hunting deer. Historians, however, know little about how Native peoples understood Mino Bimadiziiwin before massive land cessions of the 1820s and 1830s. Warren will conduct archival and ethnographic research aimed at illuminating the complex food traditions of the Great Lakes Native people, and what this heritage can reveal about their worldviews and society.

Marian Wilson Kimber, professor of musicology, School of Music, CLAS

Milestones of a Race and the Music of African American Progress

Wilson Kimber will study the musical score of Milestones of a Race, Ada Crogman’s 1920s pageant about African American history, which a cast of hundreds of people performed 35 times in 17 cities. Consisting of nine chronological tableaux accompanied by instrumental music and spirituals, the pageant educated Black participants about their legacy and fought racial prejudice by providing evidence of African American contributions to society. Wilson Kimber will conduct archival research in Kansas City and Minneapolis to compare Crogman’s musical vision to contemporary Black scholars and other pageants of the era. 

Cory Young, Assistant Professor of History

A Just and True Return: Pennsylvania’s Surviving County Slave Registries

Young is collaborating with the UI Libraries’ Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio to create a relational database and accompanying website using information about 6,300 unfree people and their enslavers. Young collected these records from 15 Pennsylvania county slave registries while researching his dissertation and current book project. In the 1780s, Pennsylvania implemented a gradual abolition law that mandated enslavers register everyone they claimed as property within six months or forfeit their claim to them. This included individuals born before the law’s passage, who could be enslaved for life, and any children they bore, who could be enslaved for 28 years. Enslavers would register multiple decades of a single family as property, perpetuating hereditary slavery in Pennsylvania into the 1820s. Young is making the first attempt to compile all surviving registrations in a single location and is also standardizing and organizing these documents.