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Montclair Professor Receives Prestigious Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities

The nearly $350K award is in support of a web app documenting the history of Sicily under the Normans

Montclair, NJ (04/23/2024) — Montclair State University Professor of History Dawn Marie Hayes is the recipient of a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The three-year award in the amount of $349,971 is in support of The Norman Sicily Project (NSP), a prototype web app that documents the history of Sicily under the Normans. The funded application, "Documenting the Past, Triaging the Present and Conserving a Legacy for the Future: A Web App for Sicily's Norman Heritage," was one of the 33 funded as part of the NEH's most recent Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Program (174 applications had been received). Hayes is now able to direct a team that will build on the Level I NEH HCRR award the project received in 2019.

The NSP digitally registers, maps and analyzes the monuments erected during Sicily's Norman period (ca. 1061-1194), arguably the most auspicious years in its long history. In so doing, the project provides new interpretations of the complex society that produced them, understandings made possible by a collaboration between history and STEM and made broadly accessible by digital technologies.

With this grant, the team, which includes Casey Allen, Lecturer in Environmental and Earth Science at The University of The West Indies, Barbados, and Cultural Stone Stability Index Specialist for the Stone Heritage Research Alliance, Craig MacDonald, Associate Professor and Director of Pratt Institute's Center for Digital Experiences, Joseph Hayes, Senior Software Engineer in the private sector, and Deepak Bal, Associate Professor in MSU's Department of Mathematics, will be able to produce a fully functioning web app optimized for user experience and the public engagement of multiple audiences that clearly guides visitors while offering additional classes of monuments beyond the monasteries it currently contains (including stability triage for a subset of each), an integrated kinship network of associated people, and interpretation of the site's data. Flexible and adaptable, the NSP presents a new model for digital conservation of cultural heritage.

For more information about the History program at Montclair State University, visit montclair.edu/history.

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Building on a distinguished history dating back to 1908, Montclair State University has evolved from an institution that was a recognized leader in teacher education to an R2 research institution ranked as one of the 100 best public doctoral universities in the nation. The University serves 22,000 undergraduate and graduate students with more than 300 doctoral, master's and baccalaureate programs provided by 13 colleges and schools.

Situated on a beautiful 252-acre campus just 12 miles from New York City, Montclair delivers the instructional and research resources of a large public university while retaining the supportive and personalized academic environment that provides a feeling of community more typical of smaller institutions.

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