Associate Professor of Religious Studies Jennifer Barry
Associate Professor of Religious Studies Jennifer Barry received the 2024 Summer National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) Research Grant. Due to this highly competitive funding, she was able to develop materials to secure an advanced book contract for her third monograph, Scandalous Christian Histories, which will be published with the University of Edinburgh Press.
Barry was also recently quoted in the latest issue of Past Imperfect where she noted how much faculty, especially from teaching-focused institutions like Mary Washington, benefit from granting institutions like the NEH, which has been under increasing attack and many of its funding cut. There she noted that even smaller funds for the humanities allow faculty to use their summers to build research projects and how much the NEH has directly contributed to her productivity. Most importantly, this grant and other humanities focused funds help enrich the UMW classroom experience. To fund the humanities is to contribute to the core aims of a public liberal arts education.