Holcomb Chosen for National Endowment for the Humanities Peer-Review Panel

Dr. Gary Holcomb, professor in African American Studies at Ohio University, was invited by the National Endowment for the Humanities to serve as a peer-review panelist for the Division of Education Programs’ 2021 Institutes competition.

Holcomb will participate in a series of video panels this spring to review institute applications submitted by faculty around the country.

He has been involved with NEH seminars and institutes, and the NEH indicated that his experience, especially as it pertains to participating in an NEH-funded summer program, is particularly valuable.

“In Summer 2016, I served as NEH resident scholar in the Ernest J. Gaines Center, University of Louisiana. Author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Lesson Before Dying, Gaines is a major African American writer who wrote mostly about his region of Lafayette Parish, Louisiana. The residence called for giving lectures on Gaines’s debt to the blues and the Black Arts Movement (the cultural arm of Black Power), along with his interest in James Baldwin and other Black authors. As well as giving lectures, my role was to act as a research source for the 50 scholars that the NEH selected for the six-week summer institute,” Holcomb says.