Places Project Summary
I copied over this article from the UMass History Dept blog. In 2015, I set off for south-central Tennessee’s South Cumberland plateau to take up a two-year Mellon fellowship with the Collaborative for Southern Appalachian Studies at Sewanee: the University of the South. The Collaborative, a partnership with Yale, envisioned starting and sustaining multidisciplinary, community-engaged, curricular projects that had place as their focus. In other words: pretty much any public history endeavor would fit the bill. I had some basic goals for my Mellon project. I wanted it to be something I could begin and complete in two years. I wanted it to be digital. I wanted it to engage local history and memory. I wanted students with different interests and strengths to have meaningful roles to play. Most of all, I wanted to undertake a humanities project that the pragmatic people of the region would see as useful — if not while I was doing it, then at least when