In addition to its annual seminar series, the Scholl Center’s current projects are:
Out of Many: Religious Pluralism in America
In December 2011, the Scholl Center was one of five recipients of an National Endowment for the Humanities’ Bridging Cultures at Community Colleges grant to provide research opportunities for community college faculty. The Scholl Center’s program will involve teams of faculty and sponsoring administrators in a multiyear effort to develop new curriculum that integrates the study of America’s religious diversity into humanities courses at community colleges. Participating faculty will conduct research in the Newberry’s collections, participate in seminars and public lectures with prominent scholars of American religion, and contribute to a forthcoming digital resource on teaching religious pluralism. Learn more about the Scholl Center’s upcoming National Endowment for the Humanities institute, Making Modernism: Literature and Culture in Twentieth-Century Chicago, 1893-1955.
Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North
The Scholl Center staff is currently at work on an exhibition in partnership with, and with major funding from, the Terra Foundation for American Art. The exhibition, opening at the Newberry in autumn 2013, will explore the ways that lives on the home front were altered by the Civil War. It will juxtapose an outstanding group of paintings from the Terra Foundation for American Art collections with a wealth of material drawn from the Newberry collections, including popular prints, illustrated newspapers, photographs, maps, magazines, sheet music, fashion plates, letters, diaries, advertisements, and other ephemera. The exhibition will be accompanied by a book published by the University of Chicago Press.