In May 2012, the Penn Museum will present the traveling exhibition, Lords of Time, the Maya and 2012 – an innovative exploration of the ancient and modern Maya and their conceptions of time. The exhibition will include over 75 archaeological artifacts and groups, stone sculpture, historical materials, modern reproductions, digital media components, and interactive displays to actively engage visitors in the discovery of an ancient culture, as well as its legacy to the modern world. Themes of the exhibition will span the fields of astronomy, history, archaeology, anthropology, and comparative culture studies. The exhibition is a formal collaboration between the Penn Museum, the Honduran government’s Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (IHAH), and Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (Peabody). After its debut at the Penn Museum, the core of the exhibition will travel to other US venues through 2014.
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia’s Broken Bodies, Suffering Spirits: Injury, Death, and Healing in Civil War Philadelphia will transcend the basic facts of war, offering visitors an intimate view of the experiences of real people augmented by anatomical specimens, instruments, manuscripts, images, and printed texts. The exhibit and web-based educational materials will explore two major themes: how the war forced soldiers, healers, and family members to manage injury, recovery, and death in dramatically new ways; and how the lasting effects of the devastating conflict forever changed soldiers’ relationships with their own bodies and minds. In a city with strong historical connections to Civil War medical history, the College’s unique institutional history and unparalleled Mütter Museum and Historical Medical Library collections ensure that the exhibit will offer a new view of the conflict, firmly grounded in the medical humanities, to a large, diverse audience.
The Kitchen Sisters will support the production of Hidden Kitchens World, a new multimedia series that explores life and culture through food across the globe. Inspired by the original NEH-funded NPR Hidden Kitchens series, this new on-air and online collaboration will feature stories exploring what people eat and grow, how food marks our sameness and differences, and how food culture adapts in the face of globalization, socioeconomic conditions and environmental changes. Each story will include perspectives from scholars, as well as video, music, photographs, curriculum and links to a curated library of resources relating to the themes raised within the stories. Funding from the NEH will help produce a multi-faced project featuring 8 stories on NPR, 1 hour-long radio specials distributed nationwide, 8 podcasts, research and development of a smart phone app, and a collaborative, humanities-rich website with audio, video, recipes, images and writings from around the world.