Heather Wright, a local teacher from Polk County Early College, has been selected as a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholar from a national applicant pool to attend one of 23 seminars and institutes supported by the NEH.  The endowment is a federal agency that, each summer, supports enrichment opportunities at colleges, universities and cultural institutions so that teachers can study with experts in humanities disciplines. 

Heather will participate in a seminar/institute entitled “Scholarship and Performance: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays” with the Theatre for a New Audience. The two-week program will be held at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Teachers selected to participate in the program each receive a stipend to cover their travel, study and living expenses. 

Topics for the 23 seminars and institutes offered for teachers this summer include American Women at War; America’s Reconstruction: The Untold Story; Existentialism; Foreign Exchanges: The U.S. and the Wider World in the Twentieth Century; From Harlem to Hip-hop: African-American History, Literature, and Song; From Mesa Verde to Santa Fe: Pueblo Identity in the Southwest; The Immigrant Experience in California through Literature and Theater; Johann Sebastian Bach and the Music of the Reformation Churches; Muslim American Identities, Past and Present; Philosophers of Education: Major Thinkers from the Enlightenment to the Present; Political and Constitutional Theory for Citizens; The Political Theory of Hannah Arendt: A Public Intellectual in the Public Square; Punishment, Politics, and Culture; Re-enchanting Nature: Humanities Perspectives; Religious Worlds of New York: Teaching the Everyday Life of American Religious Diversity; Rethinking the Gilded Age and Progressivisms: Race, Capitalism, and Democracy, 1877-1920; Scholarship and Performance: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays; Slavery in the Colonial North; Tales from the Chihuahuan Desert: Borderlands Narratives; Teaching Native American History; Teaching the “Long Hot Summer” of 1967 and Beyond; Voices from the Misty Mountains; What Did Independence Mean For Women, 1776-1876?

The approximately 512 NEH Summer Scholars who participate in these programs of study will teach almost 64,000 American students the following year.   

– article submitted by Mary Metcalf Greene