We have been informally informed (the official letter will go to our Institution) that our proposal for a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for a Summer Institute on Tolkien for 2009 has been approved!

I've already set up the LiveJournal community!.

We're teaching a graduate seminar on Tolkien online for the first time (for our university) this fall, and our university IT department has been working on developing a university wiki, so I've been promised that we'll be able to have a dedicated wiki for the Institute (titled: J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: The Real and the Imagined Middle Ages.

So this opportunity brings together our scholarship (we have one collaborative article due to be published next spring, and are preparing another for submission to an anthology), our teaching, and our interests in teaching teachers. This NEH category of grant is dedicated to bringing the best humanities scholarship to teachers. We have an international group of fifteen Tolkien scholars, and the Institute will bring in 25 secondary teachers. Our interdisciplinary work is important here, so the scholars include not only literature/english and history people, but also astronomy, geography, philology, and archeology. We hope to have teachers in literature and history but also some in social studies, government, geography, math (last time we had one math teacher!), and the sciences!