Pictured above are National Endowment of the Humanities grant winners David Seubert (Special Research Collection), left, and Patricia Fumerton (Early Modern Center).
By Savannah Daniels
The Division of Humanities and Fine Arts is thrilled to announce that English professor Patricia Fumerton and performing arts curator David Seubert, of the Special Research Collection at UC Santa Barbara’s library, have been awarded a total of $630,000 in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities for research projects that relate to music.
English Professor Patricia Fumerton is pictured with early broadside ballads.
Fumerton, a professor of English literature, received $315,000 for her ongoing project titled "EBBA and the British Library: Making Popular Ballads of the Past more Present." The project continues the development of the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) by adding 1,300 rare, pre-1701 printed ballads from the British Library. The project will also catalog 905 tune titles and approximately 18,250 woodcut impressions and improve access to the existing ballad collection by providing enhanced searching and other features to improve the user experience. Fumerton conceived of the ballad archive in 2003, and developed it as an initiative of UCSB’s Early Modern Center, which studies the period from 1500 to 1800.
David Seubert, of the UCSB Special Research Collection, displays an Edison recording.
Library curator David Seubert also won $315,000 for his work on “The American Discography Project: Edison Disc Recording Access Initiative,” which is to complete discographic entries for the entire output of Edison Diamond Discs, Thomas Edison's recording company, for the Discography of American Historical Recordings. The project will make available information about 14,000 discs recorded and released between 1912 to 1929 and digitize 9,000 selections for public streaming through the National Jukebox, a Library of Congress initiative to create a free online database of historical audio footage. The university’s American Discography Project has provided a large proportion of the national website’s digitized material from that that time period.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency that has been dedicated to supporting research and education in history, literature, philosophy and other areas of humanities since 1995. The UC Santa Barbara awards were among 200 humanities projects nationwide that received a total of $18.6 million in grant support. The funding spans a two-year period.
Savannah Daniels is a Senior at UC Santa Barbara, double majoring in History and Communication.