Professors Bijoyeta Das and Dr. Noam Scheindlin Receive NEH Cultural and Community Resilience Grant

LONG ISLAND CITY, NY (January 14, 2025) — The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced $22.6 million in grants for 219 humanities projects across the country.
The NEH has awarded a $150,000 Cultural and Community Resilience grant for “Transmission Regained: Recalling Traditional Lifeways through Intergenerational Oral History in the “World’s Borough”Queens,” a project led by Project Director Bijoyeta Das and Co-Director Dr. Noam Scheindlin, both from LaGuardia Community College/CUNY.
“It is my pleasure to announce NEH grant awards to support 219 exemplary projects that will foster discovery, education, and innovative research in the humanities,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo), in a press release from NEH. “This funding will strengthen our ability to preserve and share important stories from the past with future generations, and expand opportunities in communities, classrooms, and institutions to engage with the history, ideas, languages, and cultures that shape our world.”
Das says this project will create an intergenerational oral history collection of 42 interviews, which explores alienation from nature and traditional practices in the face of climate change in Queens, New York.
“We envision our project to be restorative and inclusive, and to bring hope,” says Das, who is an Associate Professor and Director of the Journalism program at LaGuardia. The year-long project will engage LaGuardia students as the primary oral history collectors, guided, and mentored by faculty. Students will interview their families and community members in Queens.
“We want to create a conversation between different generations. We understand that as migrant communities assimilate, these memories, rooted in unique cultural identities, may lose keepers, and find no new takers,” Das added.
The Endowment received 96 applications and 17 received funding. The LaGuardia project is funded in part by the agency’s special initiative, the American Tapestry: Weaving Together Past, Present, and Future.
“We are obsessed with progress,” says Dr. Scheindlin, Professor, Director of the Creative Writing major, and Honors Program co-Director at LaGuardia. “This project offers a look to the past to imagine a more resourceful future, in which humans are more aligned with natural processes. It’s a way of avoiding catastrophe.”
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LaGuardia Community College (LAGCC), a Hispanic-Serving Institution, located in Long Island City, Queens offers more than 50 associate degrees and academic certificates, and more than 65 continuing education programs to prepare New Yorkers for transfer to senior colleges and rewarding jobs and careers. An institution of the City University of New York (CUNY), the College reflects the legacy of our namesake, Fiorello H. LaGuardia, the former NYC mayor beloved for his advocacy of the underserved. Since 1971, LaGuardia’s academic programs and support services have advanced the socioeconomic mobility of students from Queens, NYC and beyond.
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