Funding the Public Humanities

Since 2017, Trinity University's Humanities Collective has advocated for the centrality of the humanities to intellectual and cultural life on campus and throughout the wider San Antonio community. The Collective serves as Trinity’s hub for the humanities on campus, supporting nine departments and humanities-related programs.

The Collective hosts events throughout the academic year to promote student success and strengthen the humanities community on campus while connecting it with local and worldwide publics. Through its efforts, students, faculty, staff, and the broader public understand that the humanities are at the heart of Trinity’s nationally recognized liberal arts education. 

To aid in their mission of promoting Trinity’s unique approach to the humanities beyond the campus community, the Collective and the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship have funded Public Humanities Faculty Fellows each academic year since 2019. The Public Humanities Fellowship program supports faculty in their efforts to communicate their scholarship in the humanities to a broad audience and engage local, national, and worldwide publics in the co-creation of humanistic knowledge. The Collective has funded 11 projects so far across various academic disciplines, resulting in many different forms of media, such as video essays, traveling exhibits, books, public talks, and more. 

Faculty Fellows often collaborate with their peers in academia, multiple generations of Trinity students, or Mellon Initiative Summer Undergraduate Research Fellows (SURFs) to conduct their research, and they often incorporate their research into their courses. Thus, through this fellowship, the Collective not only supports humanities faculty but also fosters a love for and understanding of the impact of humanities research on Trinity students, while giving them the opportunity to participate in that very research alongside their faculty mentors.

The Public Humanities Faculty Fellows for the 2022-23 academic year are history professor Sarah Luginbill ’14, Ph.D., and English professor Shaj Mathew, Ph.D. Both Luginbill and Mathew have spent their summers or plan to spend their fall semesters traveling to different sites across the country and across the world for their research projects. 

Read more about Luginbill and Mathew’s projects:

Sarah Luginbill ’14, Ph.D. | History

The Materiality of Catholic Devotion in the World Wars 

History professor and Trinity alumna Sarah Luginbill ’14, Ph.D., is investigating the mobilization of U.S. Catholics in World War I and II to supply Catholic chaplains with portable Mass kits. Her project consists of three parts: research in and around San Antonio, research on the East Coast, and the composition of two scholarly articles and creation of a traveling miniature exhibition on World War Catholicism and material culture. 

During World War I, U.S. Catholics launched an unprecedented initiative to supply portable Mass kits, including an altar stone, crucifix, chalice, and paten, to Catholic military chaplains serving in Europe. Led by the newly-formed National Catholic War Council and the Chaplains’ Aid Association, Catholic citizens combined patriotic sentiment with religious devotion to send physical items across the Atlantic in a unique, faith-based material war effort. This endeavor proved successful, so much so that individual U.S. parishes mobilized their members to purchase and create even more elaborate portable Mass kits for Catholic priests serving in World War II.

“Despite recent significant publications on U.S. religious identity during World War I and II, as well as new scholarship on military chaplaincy that encompasses multiple faiths, the National Catholic War Council and the Chaplains’ Aid Association remain largely absent from scholarly conversations about national religious mobilization in wartime,” Luginbill says. “Additionally, there is currently a lack of discussion on the material culture of Catholic military personnel.” 

Luginbill hopes her research project will help fill in these gaps in scholarship. Throughout the fall, Luginbill visited the Archives of the Archdiocese of San Antonio, UTSA Special Collections, St. Mary’s University Special Collections, the National Pacific War Museum (Fredericksburg, Texas), and the Ft. Sam Houston Museum and Archive to consult their materials this fall. 

In September, Luginbill examined a World War II portable Mass kit, used in the European theater of the war, at the Archdiocese of San Antonio.

“While I look for letters, papers, photographs, and items that explicitly relate to portable Mass kits,” Luginbill says, “I’m also casting a wide net to uncover more about San Antonio’s Catholic involvement in World War I and II. This research will form the majority of the mini-exhibition I will create for rotation in San Antonio next spring.”

In addition to contacting local archives, Luginbill has made appointments with the National Archives and the Catholic University of America Special Collections in Washington, D.C., for December. In both archives, she will sift through several boxes of documents related to the National Catholic War Council and the Chaplains’ Aid Association. Luginbill also plans to visit the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps Museum on Ft. Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina, where she will analyze the surviving portable altars, as well as photographs of chaplains with them. 

“Without the Humanities Collective to fund the travel to D.C. in December, I could not undertake this project,” Luginbill says. “I’m intrigued to see how the intersection of Mass publications, gender, and military faith continue in my study.”

In September, the staff at the Ft. Sam Houston Museum shared with Luginbill a 1970s portable chaplain’s kit, Army Catholic publications, and photos of field Masses.

Luginbill’s research and photographs will culminate in a miniature exhibition and lecture series on Catholic material devotion and the U.S. military. In designing her exhibit, Luginbill will consult with local curators, Catholic leadership, and translators to identify key places for the exhibition, coordinate a rotating exhibition schedule, and compose bilingual text to accompany the photographs and visual evidence. 

With the mini-exhibition’s launch, she will conduct a brief speaking tour around San Antonio in both academic and community spaces. Luginbill hopes to schedule this speaking tour in conjunction with Fiesta (April 2023) in order to highlight the importance of local history and religious devotion to the ongoing San Antonio communal identity.

Shaj Mathew, Ph.D. | English

Universal Museums in the Middle East

English professor Shaj Mathew, Ph.D., is researching the rise of universal museums in the Middle East. Specifically, he is examining the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Museum of the Future in the United Arab Emirates. 

Universal museums, sometimes referred to as encyclopedic museums, collect all cultures of the world, instead of just one culture. Mathew views the Louvre Abu Dhabi as a universal museum because it arrays European and non-European art together instead of being solely devoted to the art of one culture or nationality like, for example, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. 

“The Louvre Abu Dhabi professes to retell the ‘story of humanity’ via multiple Western and non-Western cultures,” Mathew says, “while the Museum of the Future suggests that the future can be imagined in an institution designed to study the past. Both museums invite a discussion of the history of history—and reveal how time takes on a certain shape in a given curator's mind.”

Thanks to his Public Humanities Fellowship, Mathew can contribute to this discussion of history. “I’m so glad that this program exists, and I’m very grateful to the Humanities Collective for funding my research to the United Arab Emirates,” Mathew says.

Five years ago, Mathew traveled to the United Arab Emirates to write about the opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi for The New Republic. Last summer, he returned to the museum to see how, if at all, it had changed since day one.

“The museum is a stunning work of architecture,” Mathew says. “But in the back of my mind, I’ve always wondered why the modernization of the Persian Gulf has corresponded to its museumification, for lack of a better word. In Dubai, the new Museum of the Future captures this paradox through its name alone: Why seek the future in an institution designed to study the past?” 

The Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by Jean Nouvel, opened in 2017 after a billion-dollar agreement was struck between the governments of France and the United Arab Emirates. The deal had implications both for the art world and for geopolitics.

Mathew traveled to Abu Dhabi and Dubai in June, and he is now at work on three projects related to his travels: a work of literary journalism, a public lecture, and a chapter for a scholarly book. Instead of translating existing scholarship for public consumption—the typical public humanities model—Mathew’s gambit is that these three different forms of media will tease out different dimensions of one topic: the rise of universal museums in the Persian Gulf. 

“I’m a comparatist at heart,” Mathew says, “and these museums open up a bigger question: How do different regions of the world come together? Interestingly, that’s a question of both geography and temporality. In the early-modern era, mapmakers tried to array all the world’s cultures in the same timeline; the Louvre Abu Dhabi replicates that same move—fascinatingly, and not always successfully.”

The Louvre Abu Dhabi takes a thematic approach to curating its expansive collection: objects from different cultures are not grouped by nationality, but often by form or similarity, allowing viewers to make unorthodox connections between artists from around the globe.

Mathew’s public humanities goals for his current research reflect the goals of his classes at Trinity. Mathew teaches literature and film from around the world, specifically the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. 

“On one hand, I hope that anyone who comes across my research is encouraged to learn more about cultures beyond their own. When you study different cultures, you start to see your own in a new light,” Mathew says. “On the other hand, my research focuses on a museum like the Louvre Abu Dhabi because it reminds us that our ‘own’ cultures aren’t completely our own. Global cultures don’t exist in isolation. Instead, they are fundamentally connected—the product of ceaseless exchanges across borders.”

Past Public Humanities Faculty Fellows