SEMO professor receives 147k in grant funding for William Faulkner project

A federal grant will help Southeast Missouri State University students study William Faulkner.

Christopher Rieger, director of the Center for Faulkner Studies and professor of English at Southeast, has received a Digital Humanities Advancement grant, totaling $147,673. The grant was distributed by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The NEH website states the grant "supports innovative, experimental, and/or computationally challenging digital projects, leading to work that can scale to enhance scholarly, research, teaching and public programming in the humanities."

The department distributed $24.7 million in grant funding this year to 208 humanities projects nationwide, SEMO received the second-highest amount out of the five universities in Missouri to receive funding.

The grant funds the Digital Yoknapatawpha Project, which was started in 2011 by the University of Virginia and is a database and website that digitally maps all 68 of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County novels and stories. The fictional county is based on Faulkner's home county of Lafayette in Mississippi and each story is set within the county. The program is typically used by Faulkner scholars and researchers, but Rieger's goal is to bring the program into the classroom.

"Our grant is trying to help train teachers how to use the database in the classroom, so we are recruiting teachers from high schools, community colleges and universities and we should have about 10 teachers in the program," Rieger said.

"This summer, we'll have about three to four weeks worth of workshops online and over Zoom, where we will try to help them create some lesson plans and learning modules, incorporating the Digital Yoknapatawpha website in the way they already teach a Faulkner short story or novel."

The teachers will then implement the lesson plans and modules into their school year and then reconvene the following year to discuss successes and modifications the lesson plans need in order to improve. Eventually, the plans and modules will be added to the website for instructors and/or students to access around the world. All the teachers who participate in the initial phase of the project will receive a stipend. Rieger will work alongside Johannes Burger, assistant professor of English and Digital Humanities at Ashoka University in India, and Worthy Martin, associate professor of technology at the University of Virginia, will act as director of technology for the project.

Rieger said Faulkner is the author who has the most articles and books published about him every year and believes his worldwide appeal stems from the themes Faulkner explores such as life, death, race and gender issues, all relevant in present day.

"Faulkner's themes are sort of universal, so people of different cultures can read and get something out of Faulkner," Rieger said. "Sometimes he is pigeon-holed as a Southern writer or Mississippi author, but he uses that small-town setting to talk about much bigger, universal themes. I think Faulkner's work needs to keep being taught and that it is still relevant. Sometimes his work is seen as very challenging and difficult to read, so it might be something teachers shy away from. We'd like to help them feel more comfortable teaching Faulkner to the students. I think it will help appeal to students as well, through getting to use a great online tool."

The funded portion of the project will end in 2023, but Rieger said the project will be ongoing and changes will be made to the website as additions are made.