Sara Rutkowski Awarded NEH Grant

Sara Rutkowski Awarded $200K NEH Grant to Develop Curricula Exploring America’s Story Through the Federal Writers’ Project

KCC Professor Receives $200K NEH Grant for Federal Writers’ Project Institute

Dr. Sara Rutkowski, professor of English at Kingsborough Community College, has been awarded a $200,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to co-direct a three-week national institute for college faculty focused on the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP).

“This grant offers us an invaluable opportunity to bring scholars together from across the country to study a major government program from the 1930s and a fascinating period in American history,” noted Rutkowski.

The program, titled “The Federal Writers’ Project: New Directions for Research, Teaching, and Public Engagement,” will bring together 25 faculty and graduate students from across the country in summer 2026.

“Between 1935 and 1943, the FWP put nearly 7,000 unemployed Americans to work during the Great Depression, documenting American life,” explained Rutkowski. “As part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, federal writers collected reams of oral histories, folklore, and former slave narratives, wrote descriptive essays, and produced hundreds of travel guides to states and regions across the country. It was an unprecedented undertaking, and one with extraordinary consequences for American culture that we are still experiencing today.” Participants will study the methods and materials of the FWP.

Rutkowski and LIU Professor Deborah Mutnick co-direct the institute, a joint project between Kingsborough and Long Island University. It builds on the success of a previous NEH-funded institute held in 2021, also led by the pair.

“In the 1930s, the FWP was asking the questions: Who are we? What does it mean to be American?—and in the 21st century, we’re asking the same questions,” observed Rutkowski. “Scholars across disciplines and journalists and writers are turning to the FWP and its infinitely rich, always surprising repository of material and techniques and practical and philosophical guidance.”

Two weeks of the institute will be held virtually, led by an interdisciplinary group of scholars, educators, and documentarians, including historians, literary scholars, folklorists, oral historians, and filmmakers. For the in-person portion, participants will travel to Washington, D.C., to conduct archival research in the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division, where tens of thousands of FWP materials remain undigitized.

“The purpose of this research is to consider the FWP not as a relic of the turbulent past, but as a program that continues to reverberate in American culture—in our literature, media, and public policy and even in the ways we listen to and have come to understand each other,” Rutkowski noted.

The 2021 institute posed broad questions about the FWP’s historical value and content, providing a foundation for understanding the FWP as its own unique area of historical and cultural study. In contrast, the 2026 institute is specifically oriented to the classroom and public sites of teaching and learning to help preserve and disseminate work done by the FWP and examine the ongoing impact of the project’s history, mission, and legacy. It will focus on developing curricula that engage students in a multidisciplinary study of the FWP, cultivating their research skills and digital and print literacies, and inspiring contemporary approaches to oral history and documentary fieldwork.

Rutkowski is also the editor of “Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project,” the first multidisciplinary volume focused on the FWP. She has been a leading voice in the growing field of FWP scholarship.

The NEH grant is one of 10 awarded to institutions in New York State this cycle.

For more information about the NEH and its funded projects, visit www.neh.gov.

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09/06/24

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