A $200,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities is funding a new Dickens Project initiative, an in-person institute for 25 high school teachers from across the United States.
The institute, “Great Expectations in the Global Imaginary,” will help participating teachers consider bold new approaches to teaching Charles Dickens' classic 1861 novel Great Expectations by incorporating multicultural and global perspectives, said University of California, Santa Cruz Associate Professor of Literature Renée Fox, who will direct the institute at the UC Santa Cruz campus.
This grant is one of 22 NEH grants distributed to California colleges and universities this year, amounting to more than $4 million in funding.
This year, the NEH announced $37.5 million for 240 Humanities projects nationwide, supporting the creation of scholarly hubs for AI research, new nonfiction books, documentaries, podcasts, exhibitions, collaborative and individual humanities research, and enrichment programs for educators.
“The NEH grant enables the Dickens Project to extend its public-facing mission by reaching high school teachers from across the country and exploring how their experiences teaching Dickens in diverse classrooms help us understand novels like Great Expectations in new ways,” Fox said,
Since the pandemic, the Dickens Project has focused on expanding its outreach to high schools, particularly through the Dickens Day of Writing, which now includes schools from Georgia, Ohio, Southern California, the Bay Area, and Santa Cruz County. “We hope this institute will help us grow our community of teachers and students,” Fox added.
The institute will be taught by Christian Lehmann, who teaches literature at Bard High School Early College in Cleveland, Ohio, and Nirshan Perera, a lecturer in the Humanities Division at UC Santa Cruz and an English teacher at Pacific Collegiate School in Santa Cruz.
“The institute will provide an opportunity for teachers to become scholars as it explores criticism and theory that re-situates the Victorian literary canon within and against nineteenth-century imperial networks, contemporary racial and social politics, and global systems of knowledge,” Lehmann said.
“Great Expectations is one of the most taught and assessed novels in U.S. high school classrooms—often safe from the caprices of local censorship—and thus provides abundant opportunities for teachers to energize their classrooms with the new reading practices the institute will model,” Perera said.
The institute will investigate how new geographical, political, and historical contexts can lend the novel renewed relevance and purpose in unexpected times and spaces.
“By hosting this institute in the California redwoods rather than in Dickensian London, we aim to experientially decontextualize Great Expectations, opening participants to the intellectual creativity and political power of reading old novels through new landscapes and amidst modern social injustices,” Fox said.
Focused on the global afterlives of Great Expectations, the institute will draw from critical race studies, postcolonial theory, adaptation studies, and literary/media studies to engage teachers in current academic conversations about decolonizing the classroom, Fox said.
