Dr. Sarah Koenig, assistant professor of American studies, was recently awarded the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), a grant that will help grow Ramapo’s digital humanities program.
The grant is approximately $150,000, the largest awarded in the state of New Jersey. The money will be used to train and support faculty and students but also to help partner communities, like public schools and the Ramapough Munsee Lenape Nation, learn how to use digital tools and work on their own projects.
“I love teaching in the American Studies convening group because it lets me combine my interests in American history, American religion, and American culture,” said Koenig in an email with The Ramapo News.
Koenig’s research focuses on how Americans have narrated history, looking particularly at the American West, the taking of Native American lands and how religion has shaped encounters between Native Americans and European settlers.
These events are interesting to Koenig because, despite happening in the 19th and 20th centuries, the events she studies still affect Americans today.
“The way we narrate history tells us a lot about our hopes, fears, and values,” Koenig stated. “History can seem like a just series of facts, but it’s also about interpretation: we make decisions about what to emphasize, what to leave out, and how to depict different people and actions.”
In the past, Koenig has worked on three digital humanities projects at Ramapo. The first was “The Human Side of a Pandemic: A Ramapo College Digital Humanities Project,” which was a project where Ramapo students collected oral histories of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The second is titled “Mapping the Ramapough Munsee Lenape Nation,” which is an interactive map that features important Ramapough Munsee Lenape places and histories. The third project Koenig has worked on at Ramapo is called…
East Catholic’s Brayden Jones (34) gets an uncontested dunk against Newington in a boys CCC semi-final game at the University of Hartford, West Hartford, Feb. 27, 2024. East Catholic won, 67-49 to advance to the championship game. Photo by Cloe Poisson/Special to the Courant 
