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NEH awards UH biggest Texas grant this funding cycle

Professor Casey Dué Hackney to receive $426,000 in grant funds for Iliad research

Casey Due Hackney

An image from the Homer Multitext Project
An image from the Homer
Multitext Project

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded Casey Dué Hackney, Professor and Director of Classical Studies in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, the full amount of her grant request - $276,115, which is the largest award to a Texas-based scholar or institution this cycle.

The grant comes with $150,000 in matching funds from Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C., raising the total value to $426,115.

On Thursday, the NEH announced $39 million in grants for 244 humanities projects, including four projects in Texas. UH led the list of Texas grantees in terms of money awarded, followed by the University of Texas at Austin with a $235,000 grant.

The City of Austin and the Museum of the Gulf Coast in Port Arthur were each granted $2,500 to participate in the national project, “America’s Music: A Film History of Our Popular Music from Blues to Bluegrass to Broadway.”

Dr. Dué Hackney and her collaborator Dr. Mary Ebbott will use the NEH funds to prepare over three years for the online publication of a scholarly edition of a 10th-century manuscript of Homer’s Iliad that is the oldest complete text of the Iliad known to be in existence.

Dr. Ebbott is an associate professor and chair of Holy Cross’ Department of the Classics. Both professors earned their Ph.D.’s at Harvard University and are co-editors of the Homer Multitext Project at the Center for Hellenic Studies.

This is the second NEH grant awarded to Dr. Dué Hackney in 2012. In March, she was awarded an Enduring Questions: Pilot Course grant of $20,881 to develop an undergraduate course on the question, ‘who owns the past?’ In that round of funding, the NEH awarded $17 million to 208 humanities projects.

A page from “Venetus A,” 10th-century manuscript of Homer’s Iliad
A page from “Venetus A,” 10th-century manuscript of Homer’s Iliad that is the oldest
complete text of the Iliad known to be in existence

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